Feature requests for new animation editor

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Original post:

Hi, I'm an SL noob, but I've already been pretty frustrated with creating SL animations in Poser. Poser is a great tool, but it has so many features that it can be an overkill for making simple poses and animations for SL (not to mention that it's really expensive too!). I've searched through the forums for alternate software, but realized that Poser is pretty much it when it comes to pose editing (besides general 3d editors like blender, maya, etc...)

So, I did some research on the BVH file format, brushed up on OpenGL, and started making my own editor. I've only been working on it a few days, so it has a LONG way to go, but there is enough there now to start making SL-uploadable animations. I've noticed other people in the past have tried making their own editors, but those threads seem to have died. If I'm wrong, please let me know so I don't end up duplicating their work. And, just so you know this is for real, I've attached a screenshot below.

Or even better, download the program and see what I've got so far (links at top of post).

Now that you're convinced this is for real, the real reason I started this thread is to get people to talk about what features they would really like to see in an animation editor. Keep in mind that my goal for this program is simplicity. I know a lot of the more advanced animators will keep using poser since they are comfortable with it and it has the advanced features they need, but I'm targeting this more to beginning and intermediate animators. So, try to keep your feature requests to basic functionality and simple things that you wish Poser did differently or that are missing altogether.

Latest screenshot:

Hi Vince,

Here's a few features.

1. joint rotation constraints are a must. Interface on/off)
2. Be able to have multiple av and export the bvh for each seperately or simultaneously.
3. Remove the strong highlight in the lighting.
4. The faces flicker a lot along the models. Looks like smoothing isn't set right
5. To be able to enter enter numeric values for rotations
6. I guess the simplest way to interactively rotate the parts is to have 3 tools (butons), one for each axis. To work wuickly you need each buttons to have keyboard shotcuts. Alternatively, You can have 1 tool and work on different axis by using modifier keys.
7. You could also have a little av drawing where you could click on a body part to work on it rather than the slow pull-down menu.

I would not need much more than that to find it usable for poses. Wouldn't being able to use the mouse wheel while on rool-over of a slider be nice

Considering the nature of most poseballs, you might want to add male genitalia at different state.

Advance features would be IK and skins of course. I guess these are harder to code. A real nice feature would be a tool that would export sets of bvh for AVs of different height.


For animation, you need a timeline.

1. Buttons to toggle between AVs
2. 1 row per joint (so alwys the same number of rows)/1 column per frame
3. Adjustable animation length
4. Playback buttons (start, play/pause, end)
5. Scrubable timeline
6. A way to scale all or part of the keyframes
7. A play/pause shortcut (normally spacebar or numpad Enter)
8. Auto keyframe on/off
9. Add keyframe(s) button/shortcut
9. Remoce keyframe(s) button/shortcut
10. Loop playback on/off
11. Variable playback speed in fps
12. To be able to drag select keyframes
13. To be able to add and substract keyframed from selection (i.e. shift-add)

Camera presets is a nice option

The timeline/exporter should automatically save the first zero frame in default pose.

And of course! Multiple undos... I hate Poser so much for omitting that.

Guess that's it. I look forward to using your tool.

Misacha
RL CG artist (3D, Video, SFX, photography)

While I use Poser myself, I'm glad to see someone going this route, and second the above suggestions. A simple, low-cost/free basic animator is sorely needed for SL!

This already kicks major ass. Awesome work so far.

My suggestions:

1. Make the box work when scaled.
   
2. Make the buttons work when the box has been moved from original position.
   

Beyond that, just add features like being able to tween from pose to pose...really, you could almost do it now. Have the user queue up a set of poses and then have them select the time and increments between each pose. A position offset, as well, for walking around or jumping etc. Then all you do is calculate the differences between each parameter and interpolate. That alone will handle 80% of SL animation needs, without IK or walk cycles or anything.

Again, fantastic work! I was thinking about trying to do this, but your current program is already months ahead of where I'd be.

Misacha, Keane, and Aliasi thanks for your excellent feedback!

Here is a list of the features/bug fixes you guys mentioned that are already on my TODO list (completed items are in green):

1. joint rotation constraints are a must.[i think i can find out what these ranges are from poser...or does anyone else already know?]
2. inverse kinematics. [already worked out the formulas for this. just have to code it up.
3. Remove the strong highlight in the lighting [that was annoying me too...lighting will be fixed]
4. The faces flicker a lot along the models. Looks like smoothing isn't set right [i haven't implemented vertex welding yet...will be fixed]
5. To be able to enter enter numeric values for rotations
6. You could also have a little av drawing where you could click on a body part to work on it rather than the slow pull-down menu. [already done: i changed it so you can select a part by directly clicking on it on the 3D mannequin...like poser]
7. Wouldn't being able to use the mouse wheel while on rool-over of a slider be nice [easy to do]
8. I guess the simplest way to interactively rotate the parts is to have 3 tools (butons), one for each axis. To work wuickly you need each buttons to have keyboard shotcuts. Alternatively, You can have 1 tool and work on different axis by using modifier keys. [how about: shift+drag=rotate-X, ctrl-drag=rotate-Y, and alt-drag=rotate-X. right-click-dragging will translate along these same axes]
9. A real nice feature would be a tool that would export sets of bvh for AVs of different height.
10. Multiple undos

These features are not on my current TODO list, but they are still useful and will make it into a later release:

1. Be able to have multiple av and export the bvh for each seperately or simultaneously.
2. Skins
3. Considering the nature of most poseballs, you might want to add male genitalia at different state. [LOL. what have i gotten myself into?]

I'll tackle animation editing after i've released a version that has all the pose editing features done first. tweening using keyframes and various interpolating functions will definitely happen. (misacha, thanks for your detailed list)

EDIT: I just thought of one other feature that I think would be cool. How about auto-generating LSL script for a poseball that plays your animation? That way, you can just create a new object and drop in the auto-generated script without writing one line of LSL code. This would be useful for generating AOs i think, but i'm not an expert on this so not too sure...

I've been digging around looking for an editor that can export to SL-friendly filenesness... I cant wait till this is done. Keep going you're onto something good!

It would be trivial to include a pose-ball script with the tool; there are a few freely available once that just grab the first animation in the prim and use that.

And I wish you all the best with tool, because requiring poser really cripples the animation market.

I think I can see a needed feature; the ability to position joints, not just rotating them. As I understand things hips have to be repositioned to manage sinking into floor/floating in air problems with some animations. Someone who has actually made animations that work should be able to step in and let you know if this is needed, or if I just misunderstand things.



And considering the nature of many of the "women" in SL you might want to add a male genitalia option to the female model also.

Nepenthes, you're right about having to deal with the sinking/floating problem. #9 on the feature list should help with that. This will output multiple bvh files for various avatar heights, repositioning the hip each time. The hip is the only joint that can be repositioned, so if you want to reposition other joints, you will have to enable the "inverse kinematics" feature that will adjust the rotations of the other joints to accommodate the new position of the part you moved. All of these technical details should (hopefully) be pretty transparent to the user to keep things simple.

for a few days work, this program is very impressive. i've been working on a similar project for a few *months*, and can appreciate the work you've put into this. my problem is that everytime i think mine is ready to release, i think of some great new feature that it just has to have...


anyway, up above someone mentioned constraints, which i have yet to incorporate into my attempt, but i noticed that the cr2 file has something that might turn out to be constraints. for example, in the sl_female.cr2 file, if you go to the actor abdomen:2 section, and scroll down a ways you see this:

rotateY yrot
{
name twist left - right
initValue -0.576172
hidden 0
forceLimits 0
min -35
max 35
trackingScale 1
keys
{
static 0
k 0 -0.576172
}
interpStyleLocked 0
}

i haven't tried them yet, but it's possible that the min and max values could be the constraints that SL uses.

one other thing, about your highlights and flickering. i never got the normals from the .obj file to work. the few that i inspected looked way wrong, which probably means that i just don't understand what's going on there, so i calculated my own and the surfaces cleaned up immensely.

rod

Great work, Vince.

I think if you added just one feature your program could already be used to create simple animations; Some way to stop on a particular frame, like a slider to scrub the current frame back and forth, or even just a field to enter the frame # you want to edit.

Add a few more editable fields like total animation length, FPS, and the ability to cut and paste keyframes and you'd have a very usable BVH editor.

Combine those with pose to pose interpolation and I'd think you'd be giving Poser a serious run for its money, at least in terms of usefulness with SL.

-Xenon

I'm unsure how bvh keyframes are interpolated on the SL side, but I would like to see an editor that does a bit smoother movement between keyframes than poser does. even leaving the spline intact, after editing a body part the movement will seem to defy physics at the keyframe when the part changes direction.

Also, what is this auto scaling all about? is the avatar we use in poser not scaled to the same units as the avatars in sl? and can you include the ability to change the avatar used in your program to match your avatars dimensions in SL? preferably with close to matching slider values in yours ?

Hi Vince,

EXCELLENT work, I've been looking for something like this forever. Here is my feedback:

- As others have said, the lighting needs to be toned done. If you can do even JUST this, please rebuild and post the new version here, as it's very usable!

- You're 80% of the way there with animations. I can load an animation, play it to a certain point, edit that point, and save. When I load it in SL, the animation eases into the changed pose I made in the middle of the animation. So all you really need to add is a) a slider and b) the ability to specify how long the animation should be. That's it!

Great job, I'll be watching this thread daily.

- Roentgen Revere

rod, you might be on to something here. i'll try out those constraints and see if they're realistic. also, even those constraints i'll have to do some collision checking since body parts are bound to run into each other.



the normals from the .obj file worked fine for me, and i already fixed all the lighting problems i was having. the flickering is due to the fact that i haven't welded the vertices together yet. the .obj file splits the parts into groups that are unconnected. you will have to join them together to get rid of the gaps leading to the flickering. btw, we should see if we can work together somehow instead of repeating each other's work. otherwise, no worries, some friendly competition might be a good thing for the community .

Xenon, your previous posts have been extremely helpful for helping me understand how the SL animation importer works. Also, thank you for your encouraging feedback! The additional animation controls and keyframing are next on the list after I finish with the basic pose editing. I'm hoping to release a simple pose editor first, followed by another release with animation support.

Rickard, can you post a poser file that demonstrated the keyframe interpolation problem you were seeing? Are you saying you'd like to use some other function besides the linear or Hermite (cubic) interpolation? or that Poser was just using those functions incorrectly?

Roentgen, thanks! I know the animation was almost there, but I want to take a step back and make sure the pose editing is correctly done before finishing off the animation editing. I already fixed the lighting problems, so I'll post that version later tonight (but it has no animation editing).

Thanks to everyone for their feedback, and stay tuned!

The latest version is posted above in the first post.

There isn't much new functionality yet. I just made some cosmetic changes and fixed the lighting problems and some other bugs. Also, I though the name was too generic so I changed it to "AvMotion" (Avatar Motion).

Enjoy!

Looking even better, Vince, you are truly a god among SL men!

Now, ONE little bug that you should be able to fix in 10 seconds: The dropdown list says Foot instead of rFoot, therefore it is impossible to adjust that foot. ;p

If you want to start an email list of enthusiastic beta-testers for this, let me know! Would faster and easier to track than this forum IMHO.

WOW this is awsum!
thx keep up the good work
-LW

Keane and Lightwave, thanks for the encouragement. The rFoot bug is fixed. And Keane, the mailing list idea is good. I'll try to set one up when I get some time.

But the big news is that I was able to build the source in OS X with no real problems, so that means there is now a Mac OS X version of AvMotion as well!

I updated the first post in this thread with links to the latest version of both the Windows and Mac OSX versions of AvMotion. If you are an OS X user, I really need your feedback on this since I barely tested it on my friend's Mac. Thanks.

For now, ignore my earlier post about interpolation between keyframes .

Very well done so far.

Feature Requests:
-The ability to enter joint rotations in a text boxes rather than only sliders.
-The ability to set the animation length.
-The ability to offset the hip position.
-The ability to zoom in and out and change the camera center
-The ability to tilt the camera on a different axis depending on my current rotation around the vertical axis. moving the mouse up and down currently tilts the avatar forward and backward relative to itself not toward and away from the camera like I would expect. Essentially I'd like it to work like the sl camera .
-Along with the previous, a restore camera to zero button and sliders for adjusting camera position in one world axis at a time.

Bug Report:
-The rendered field does not render on my second monitor. Works fine on monitor 1.

Vince, you Rock! I'll test this much and report it. I wanna go home early.

Whoa. Talk about rising tide, I can just feel the enthusiasm here. That's some serious initiative, Vince--I haven't used AvMotion yet but I like the simple approach you're taking. Animations have long been one of the trickier kinds of things for the uninitiated to create in SL, and yet, there's a lot of Resis who I know who'd want to give it a shot--if only it were easier.

Looks like a void-filler. I'll be following this thoughtline... keep it up!

Hello Vince,

This is a Mac OS X feedback.

I downloaded your AviMotion and was out to use it, but I couldn't see any figure on the screen.
But is the figure object needed to load? I guess it should have been on screen because there is Options menu which can be selected Male or Female and that loader seems to allow us to load only bvh. It was just a black screen and a checker floor that I could see.
I tried to load every bvh which was contained but I felt to need the figure first. Am I missing something? Can I supply any info for that? Plz tell me what you need to help me.

Rickard, almost done implementing most of those features and will post a new version soon. Thanks! (BTW, you can already directly edit rotation angles by double-clicking on the number above the slider.)

Torley, I'm glad you see the value in filling in this niche. Hopefully, when this is finished, a lot of newbies (like me) can jump into making animations. I'm more of a programmer than a designer, but I'd love to make my avatar do cool things in SL. (I was just watching a mudwrestling event over at Odds & Ends run by Tashie Oddfellow and those animations were hilarious. It gave me some inspiration )

Seagel, unfortunately I didn't have time to resolve a bug related to relative paths on OS X. So, for now you have to unzip the AvMotion folder directly into /Applications. Did you try that?

It was totally my bad. Very sorry. I rushed to use it too much. Just unzipped and used it on my desktop! Thank you very much.

Neat feature but how do you start recrding the animations? I can see how you can twist and tilt every body part there is though lol.