Skeleton, bones, animation Q's

Ok so Ive been reading the board but I cant find anything on altering the positions of the bones on the avatar skeleton (besides the appearance sliders) Ive seen the skeleton in the debug menu settings but no way of changing them. The animation upload only seems to care about the bone rotation and nothing else. Has anyone come up with a script that will alter the position of the bones?

Unfortuately, there is no function to control them in LSL. If you dare to change them, you might be able to rewrite values on the bvh directly. I think, however, it causes initializing error when you upload it. This is a success example. Note that they are just joint posision's changes. It doesn't affect your avatar's shape, but attachments' positions.

Hmm that is helpfull info there. Ive been using the Maya animation exporter and tried moving the locations of the bones and then animating them but when its exported, SL reports it as bad. Not sure if its changing anything in the .BVH file at all, ill have to look.

So your saying it doesnt actually stretch the avatar with the bones? Its not visible in SL? Thats really strange.

So this last few weeks ive been playing with editing the .BVH files with no luck. It seems that all position xyz changes (initial bones and first frame positions) get reset to defaults after upload. Only rotation gets kept. Can anyone else confirm this? I would like to write a big long suggestion to Linden about these limitations to our creations. Anyone know which Linden to talk to?

BVH deals with changing motion data, not changing of constructions. I don't think it has any information to change the position of joints. It is just compatible with a certain measure of scale of figures.
You can create any figure which has any limbs on some 3D animation software, such as Maya. Then you can export its motion data as a BVH file. But nobody can use it uless he has the exact same constucted figure. Does it make sense?
As who should say, it is a limitaition of BVH.
To deal with it, Linden would have to develop an original format of animation.

hmm... I think it is Richard (source thread), but I'm not sure. Try to contact every programmer. Here is the information.

[My mistake removed]

What im trying to do is shorten the legs, lengthen the spine and arms, move the shouders back, make the head go forward instead of up. I can do quite a bit with rotations and the avatar adjustment sliders but not enough to make it work properly. I cant see the rotation points of the joints in SL to get things to align properly. Its also going to be a pain in the arse to animate because I have to animate the default skeleton but my skeleton in game has different sized legs and arms. Its very hard to preview until after uploading.

Ideally LL could allow us to reposition the existing bones. But they should also remove the appearance sliders that alter the skeleton. This would allow much more accurate animations. And then eventually allow us to recreate our own skeletons, polygon meshes with weight maps. Thats my wish list

Oh also they will have to allow us to replace the default animations easier

Please also refer to information here .

Hmm I see what you mean. The position is only available for the root and nothing else inside the bvh files. This is very troublesome... for us and for LL to upgrade. Well I might just have to give up on this stuff until some improvements are made. So much for creativity

Got a pretty interesting response to what could be improvements to the avatar/animation department. I cant even guess how flex prims would relate but ill wait patiently

/139/38/111258/1.html

Yeah, he suggested that a big change would come sometime. Flexiprims is a sample. And as he said, there are a lot of complaints and suggestions in various fields, such as building, scripting, and so on.

But currently, I'm standing up for a well known genius Starax Statosky's saying.

I ment to right a response to this thead yesterday.

It is technicaly possible to change the bone postitions, sizes & rotations but it is a very bad idea to do so and will not give the desired result (i'm refrering to changing how the applicable xml settings files).
1. Changing the settings files only effects how your client renders the world; nobody elses.

If you were thinking of adding new sliders...
1. Adding new sliders will result in incompatible between clients, resulting in avatars being rendered as default (Ruth, though Ruth will have the right textures & attachments) when the number of sliders doesn't match up.
2. Specificly color sliders cannot be added; the way colors are generated cannot be done, as the color name table is hard coded.

Adding new mesh...
1. The mapping between texture names and texture numbers is hard coded; this means there is no way to add textures to the client.
2. There is no way of adding texture selectors to the interface, there is no interface.

Besides the above mentioned issues there are no other reasons behind not changing the settings files; I have done so myself without issue. I have added bones, changed position, size & rotation of them and animated them. I have added new attachpoints too (evenything was going well except the final stages which involved stretching mesh over them).

The avatar backend is really well designed, it uses a handful of xml files to not only configure how to let the users modify the avatar in game & setting limits; but also dictating how it should be rendered at the same time. The problems mentioned above are not a problem with the desing but it's implementation; portions that should be dynamic are hard coded. It is my belief that LL wrote up this huge plan for how it should work and then ran out of time to finish implementing it; so it was just hacked together. LL has never gone back to fix this, as a result very little has changed with the avatar since it was first writen.

Awesome! I've never thought that. If you distributed your setting file, everybody could see your animations, couldn't he?

Yep.

If you just add new bones or attach points there won't be compatability issues with the different settings files (the new bones and attach points just won't render).