Feature requests for new animation editor

wow great work vince. This is something we have been in need of since well... SL!!! 1 step at a time but perhaps LL can add your program into SL when its done. Theres been promised applications like this before that never happened. I am totally suprised apreciative and greatfull. ^^

Thank you kindly Seagel!

I figured out the %in and %out in the upload window, I can now make poses of only 2 frames

All I need now is an undo button!

Big thanks again to Vince for his outstanding work.

-Roenik

I really really appreciate this tool, I hopee that once you are finished with this that you advertise it to the general public, I love building and design but am new to SL, After trying in vain to find a simple animation to just show off a ring on my Avi's hand I came across your post and have experimented for a few days.
The one thing I would love to see more than anything are a few simple animations that I can load into your tool and learn more about animations, for example what should the first frame look like?

anyway I cant wait until Sl is up and running, I have a Vince Avi to find and pay a donation to help reward someone who is trying to make SL better for all of us.

U are a STAR
Sara

Vince, You're GOD!

8 months after waiting for a patch that fixes Poser 5 on Mac OS X Tiger (it happens only to 5-10% of the installations; most people have no problems there, and e-Frontier doesn't care about a fix) and 6 months after waiting for the (free) DAZ|Studio to allow people to create a BVH export plug-in, I had given up on doing any more silly animations. After all, I do them for fun, not as a pro, and sincerely, I don't need a US$250 program that consumes more resources than SL just to do simple anims...

Well, you gave me hope again! I'm utterly impressed with the speed of your development; and I'll certainly be sending you a donation! Yes, I know that there is an alternative editor at this time which is open source; but alas, being a Mac user, I'll stick faithfully to your own solution

I'm almost afraid to post any "feature requests" here. It seems you've got them all covered. Well, I surely hope there is finally a boom of animations in SL; my personal goal is to have 22,000 animations for my avatar, like The Sims 2. Thanks to you, I can now imagine this might happen... oh... perhaps in about 3 months, at the rate you've been developing!

You should definitely post your program for 'sale' at Renderosity or similar, 3D-related forums. And if you prefer to sell it using L$ and not PayPal... well... check http://www.slboutique.com (sorry for the advertising), they now allow sales of non-SL related things (although this is definitely SL-related... just "external"...) for L$

Yay! Shareware for L$! The world is going crazy!

/me rushes off to try a few more anims

Just don't do anything to the first frame. Leave it completely alone, and start your animation on frame 2. SL syncs to the first frame, and then shears it off the animation, which means that all sorts of stuff breaks if the first frame is altered.

Thanks again for all of the wonderful support! I promise there will be a new version soon. Sorry to get your hopes up with this post.

Reitsuki, the reason i had vertex welding low on the priority list is because it's probably the hardest thing to do correctly. To understand what I mean by correct, think of the difference between a cardboard tube folded in half and a spring folded in half. I might do it the wrong way first just to have something done, and then try to do it the right way later. For small angle bends, the "wrong" way looks fine anyway.

Sara, hopefully Padraig answered your question.

Also, I'd like to thank the following people for their extremely generous (and unsolicited) donations:

DoctorMike Soothsayer
Aestival Cohen
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Lex Neva
Ack Mendicant

You guys are something special!

Just found this thread,looks like a awesome application, I'm having a problem though,there is no figure on the screen to work with,I unzipped the file in it's own folder and clicked on the exe,I can see the floor and can rotate it around.I have a feeling I'm missing something very basic here,any help is appreciated.

I am really looking forward to some of the upcoming features. . .any chance of a teaser for what has made it into the next version?

How about, if you can figure them out, showing the location and normal "in contact" range of all the attachment points on the model so you can use them for reference in arranging poses to avoid driving attachments through the body or into the face when you bend.

For example, the spine attachment point would be represented by a line with a "tick" mark on it showing the default location, that runs the length of the actual spine when the mannequin is standing, and shifts with the avatar's motions.

Thank you Vince! This is amazing work, you are incredibly talented!

So far I've been able to make
1. Gesture of poking index fingers together (too fast)
2. A sit pose that allows my head to move around (but I end up stuck sitting when I stand up)
3. A lie on tummy pose to replace sitting on the ground (this one I'm happy with!)

I still have lots of problems (as you can see), but I figure it's mostly to do with not really understanding all the details of properly setting up animations, setting priorities and thoose % things, and less with this program!

Questions
1. What's the key button for? It seems to set a keyframe, but if I paste it also sets keyframes? I'm so dumb! (;_;)
2. Keyframes don't show up in the timeline yet right? Or am I missing something?
3. Is there anyway to clear a keyframe?
4. The program acts funny if I change the timeline after I start animating. It seems like keyframes are being created. Is this me or a bug?
5. Somebody mentioned Undo.. but I can't seem to do it. What's the way to Undo? I'm on a Mac.
6. If the first fram is always used by SL for setting up the animation, is there a reason it gets played when I try out my animation? Is there even a reason to show it for editing?

Thanks again! Gosh... this thingy is so exciting it lured me into actually posting on the forums again!

Rebbeca, I sent you a PM with details on what to do to help me debug this problem. Thanks.

Armandi, just inverse kinematics...sorry, nothing else yet.

Argent, not quite sure I understand what you are describing, but how about placing a red ball at the attachment points on the skeleton (when the skeleton mode is turned on)? I'm still not sure where exactly these attachments points are. I'm inclined to think they are actually the same as the joint locations. If this is the case, then the functionality is already there - just turn on skeleton mode and use the green ball locations as the attachpoint points. Let me know if I'm missing something (I probably am).

Aestival, thanks for your post. This is very useful feedback. I'll try to address most of your issues here.

Gesture of poking index fingers together (too fast)

By "too fast" do you mean that the FPS is too high, or do you mean there is some flickering going on due to incorrect looping? If its the former (FPS too high), the only way to get around it right now is to just add more frames. An option to set FPS is on the TODO list.

A sit pose that allows my head to move around (but I end up stuck sitting when I stand up)

Can a more experienced animator help answer this? If someone can tell me why this might be happening, I can figure out if its due to a bug in AvMotion or just the way that SL works (try lowering the priority value).

What's the key button for? It seems to set a keyframe, but if I paste it also sets

I've been trying to avoid talking about how keyframing works right now since it's not quite complete yet, and there are a couple of things that need to be changed. But, for those of you that are trying to use version 0.3, I'll try to explain as best I can. Basically, interpolating is done on a joint-by-joint basis. For example, if you move to frame 10 and rotate the right foot, the right foot rotation will be interpolating from frame 1 to 10. However, if you then move to frame 20 and rotate the left hand, the left hand will be smoothly interpolated all the way from frame 1 to frame 20.

rFoot A------->B
lHand A----------------->B

(NOTE: Letters represent a particular rotation of the joint. An arrow means the rotation is being interpolated)

Instead, if you rotated the right foot at frame 10, then hit the "key" button, it will start all subsequent interpolations for ALL joints from frame 10. So, now if you go to frame 20 and rotate the left hand, it will be interpolated only from 10 to 20. It will not move from 1 to 10.

rFoot A------->B
lHand A--------A-------->B

I know this description is probably a bit confusing, but for now think of each joint having its own set of keyframes. Whenever you move the frame slider to a new frame, any joint you move in that frame will be assigned its own new keyframe. All that the "key" button does is assign a new keyframe for ALL joints in that frame (even ones that you never moved). Confusing, I know. This is something that will have to be improved upon in later versions to make it easier to understand and use. A graphical keyframe editor would really help with that.

Keyframes don't show up in the timeline yet right? Or am I missing something?

Nope, they don't show up. Currently, there is absolutely no way to tell where existing keyframes are To make matters worse, after you close a BVH file, you will lose all keyframe information. I'm going to use some sort of project file in order to get around this.

Is there anyway to clear a keyframe?

Nope. As you can tell, keyframing is far from complete right now.

The program acts funny if I change the timeline after I start animating. It seems like keyframes are being created. Is this me or a bug?

Like i mentioned earlier, anytime you move a joint, a keyframe is automatically created for that joint at that frame.

Somebody mentioned Undo.. but I can't seem to do it. What's the way to Undo? I'm on a Mac.

No undo yet (see the TODO list I posted earlier).

If the first fram is always used by SL for setting up the animation, is there a reason it gets played when I try out my animation? Is there even a reason to show it for editing?

Those are all good questions. I was also thinking about not showing the first frame as well. I think if I allow the user to check which joints they want to move, I can autogenerate the first frame. Otherwise, I can just skip the first frame during looping as Seagel suggested.

Thanks again! Gosh... this thingy is so exciting it lured me into actually posting on the forums again!

That's great! I wish the program was a bit further along, but it will get there soon. Thanks again for your support.

Regarding framerate in bvh files. I don't know for sure but from my quick glance at a few in a text editor you should be able to open them up in say notepad and find a value between the joint heirchy structure and the frames list that represents how long each frame plays. Given a little math you can enter another value there thereby changing the frame rate. "I think".

Thanks for the reply Vince!

My problems with too fast and getting stuck were all on my end.. learning to animate and import. Gosh I really wish i coulds mod that stuff *after* I imported.

Keyframs make sense.. though i can see how in the long run we'd want more.... really only the lack of saving them is a problem right now?

I am having one proeblem... but I dunno if it's the program or SL with the weird hip things going on.

I can make a crouch animation that lowers the hips and bends the knees.

But when i make the same animation and move the hips on the first frame (to make a hovering crouch animation - it's for a friend's hover boots) the legs dont move at all.. and all I get is a hover. Is this something that everybody knows about?

Thanks again!

---Sorry, deleted here, it was my bad.---
Is the problem that she keeps playing sitting animation even though she stands up? I must know how she plays her sitting animation, such as using AO or something.

Sometimes I move its hip in a complex way. After that, I realized that I should have them put heigher posistion through the whole frames. Should I change values of all keyframes? No. It is just alright that I move it down on the first frame. But I think autogenerating the first frame is great so that everybody won't be stuck at that part.

See #75 article of this thread. You might better change Ease-in value for too fast issue. And make sure how much you prepare the whole frames are. For example, your animation should have ended 30 frames, but you prepared 60 frames, so the rest 30 frames are played stuck. I'm not sure though.
Did you touch the first frame, the reference frame?

Creating complex animations is rather hard if you accidently close the file. creating complex animations is possible ive made some 3 and even 4 person animations. Glad to see your working on it Looking forward to inverse kenetics.

Rickard, you're absolutely right. Until the FPS adjusment is build into AvMotion, you can just manually edit the frame rate:

1. open the BVH file you created in any text editor.
2. find the line that says "MOTION"
3. a couple of lines below that you will see "Frame Time:". change that value (0.033333) to 1/FPS. this is the same thing as (length of animation in seconds)/(# of frames). So if you want your animation to be 5 seconds long and you have 30 frames, "Frame Time:" should be set to 0.166667.

Aestival, I hope Seagel answered your questions. Regarding the first frame issue, Seagel has a good point there about being able to easily adjust offsets for the entire animation by adjusting just the 1st frame. With poser this would be easy since you could just highlight all the frames and change the offset at one time. However, without a keyframe editor like that, it would be a real pain in the a**. I'll think about a good way to deal with this so that its still easy for beginners, but the option is still there to adjust the first frame for advanced users.

Henry, you're a talented man! I'm amazed to see you've been successful in making multi-person animations despite not being able to save keyframes. This feature needs to high on the TODO list (above multiple BVH files and undos). I'll do this after IK (I apologize to those of you waiting for undos and multiple BVH files, but the ability to save keyframes is critical).

Hi again,

Well, after getting a simple animation with AvAnimator done in about 1/3 of the time that I would usually take for doing it under Poser, I must say, I get impressed more and more

So, Vince, when will you set up an "official" site for AvAnimator? A Wiki or something like that work much better than posting things on the forums, to make sure everybody gets the same information easily and quickly.

I'm sure that a simple post requesting for some "free" Web space will get you about a hundred willing volunteers (but if none show up, I think I'll be able to arrange something for you ).

Gwyneth,

Actually, it turns out I already have a secret website up. I was going to wait until the next release to announce it, but you can get to it here:

http://www.avimator.com

As you can see, the name has been changed (yet again) since avmotion.com was already taken. The site is really simple... just a blog, a few links, and a discussion forum.

Feel free to sign up on the forum (use your SL name if you can).

Wow, you're fantastic, Vince!

Thank's Vince. I have registered on the Forum but it says I might need activating. Can you do the honours .

I'm the one that Aestival was designing that hovering animation for. I tried messing around with things myself a bit, and I found out that the problem is that any thigh X rotation under 7 movements seems to be ignored entirely by SL, although you can see it in AvMotion. Same applies for the abdomen joint just above the hips. Is this an SL bug or an AvMotion bug?

Also, loading BVH files doesn't load any keyframes at all. I understand this is intentional (or at least known)... but it basically makes BVH files completely uneditable, because as soon as you change anything (or even _select_ a joint) it sets a keyframe for that joint right there in that frame, and blows away any further BVH-loaded data on that joint. I'm not sure how to fix this, but maybe some limited useful functionality for editing BVH files could be achieved by treating _every_ frame as a keyframe?

Also, one feature I would like would be more resolution in the numbers... like the ability to enter fractional values. All in all, better support for entering numbers by hand (rather than using the sliders, which seem to move in increments of 3) would be nice.