Feature requests for new animation editor

O.O

Wow.. well okay I can make that anim for you now I guess! ^^;;

Actually, I've got a pretty good one worked up... check your inv, I dropped it on you.

I believe this is a limitation with SL. I think they do this in order to compress animation data to save on storage and bandwidth. Can anyone else confirm this?



Lex, you're right on the money with regards to this problem. This is a problem with the BVH format since it does not allow for the encoding of keyframes. Poser deals with this by treating every frame as a keyframe, just as you suggested. The downside to that is that if you edit a single frame, no interpolation can be done and resulting motion is jerky. Of course, if you did interpolate, you lose all of the existing motion data. Either way, you're screwed. The way around this is to use a separate project file that saves the extra keyframe information so you can edit it later on. It would be great if you could just load and save using Poser's project format, but their files are pretty complicated and it would take a while to decipher them. For now, I'll just use a simple format that is only usable with Avimator.



You can already edit the numbers by hand by just double-clicking on the number. To make them support fractional values is as simple as setting a flag, so I'll make sure that's in the next release.

Are you talking about optimization?

When I double-click a number, it seems to only accept a single keystroke of input. If I double-click and type "-8", I get 8. (winxp)

It was mentioned earlier that you cannot enter a - as the first character at the moment. So enter 8 then backspace and change to a - followed by the 8.

ah darts! you are going to put me out of business. Been working on in inworld poser for a couple months now. Seeing that yours works much better than my SL version, I might as well quite now. Two thumbs up for you.

Gearsawe, I don't think you should stop working on it...there are a lot of advantages to an in-world version. Let me know if I can help out in any way, but don't quit on account of my out-of-world version. Message me in world. I'd like to see what you have so far, if you're willing.

Hey Vince ....
Love your program ... makes it simple for even a newbie ...

I have made a few animations in it and they look pretty good when viewed in your app... but when I bring them into SL ... they just jurk around a bit ... nothing like what I see in your app ...

Could you give us beginers some instructions on using it ? ..

Thanks
HD

I was wondering,
when rotating the 'hip' section, it seems to rotate the whole body. I just wanted to change the hips alone, but i cant seem to find a way around it.

Any chance this will be updated, or is there a current way to do it? Thanks. And your program is extremely useful

Hip is the top of the hirarchy of the avatar. So it cannot help but rotate the whole body. If Inversekinematics would be implemented, you would be able to rotate Hip easily. You need to these steps for now.
1. Rotate the whole body.
2. Rotate back the other parts.

Hi i've been using it for a few days now, love it to bits. however i'm getting very strange are movements when i upload to sl, has anybody else seen this?

i created an animation as if someone is reading a newspaper, so the arms are wide about waist hight, when its uploaded into sl the hands are lower and i cant get them any higher.

Any ideas at all people?

Thanks

Alex.

P.S. this man is a god among free software makers, lol.

That depends on your avatar's shape. Your avatar's arm length in SL seems to be different from the figure's in AVMotion. I know that annoys you much but it cannot help. Remenber how much heigher it needs in world, and then you have to move its arms up to the height that you estimated, such as to belly or even breast in AVMotion.

Thanks i tried that one,

the thing is, that when in the editor the arms are at the same level, but in sl they are in diffrent positions, 1 high and 1 low?

lol,

the only time they are in the correct position is if i only have a total of 1 frame so the pose is static, as soon as i put in say 60 frames but leave the man in place with no movement in sl his arms have moved to the hi low position.

its all very strange.

Darkhorse.

Most important thing is that the first frame of the animation is used as the every part's reference between AVMotion and SL. So you have to set zero on every part's value at the first frame. The second frame is the start point. I guess you moved arms at the first frame and the reference turned to be incorrect.

i dont get it . but great anim program its awesome tho i never played hard one so i dont know

sorry i dont know how to wright posts on sertent thread sorry im new not to sl but to forums

So, Vince, any fantastic news you'd wish to share with us on the latest Avimator developments?

I've been "spreading the news" as best as I could... the more people use it, the better... also, I'd like to have an overall idea on how much you're going to "charge" for future versions of it, and if you're willing to use a business model that involves paying in L$

OMG I have to try this when I get home!

Paging Linden Lab: Do whatever it takes and immediately hire Vince Plunkett! Talk about a problem solver.

Great work!

Regards,

-Flip

Hear, hear... and perhaps get rod Martin on the team as well Perhaps with Xenon overseeing the team, we'll have Poser 5 figures by summer, with 7 different texture layers, meshes for capes and other things, hair with independent growth groups that can be styled, hands and feet that look human on human avatars, a way to create shoes without invisiprims, unlimited types of skeletons, and, of course, in-world animation creation (should be a breeze, since you're already doing everything with OpenGL as well).

Ah well. I can only dream

Still, thanks for your tool — I'm eagerly awaiting 0.4, with a way to move the hip (at least vertically) for doing proper sitting/lying down animations

Doesn't that work by the dials on the right hand side?

HD, I know there aren't any tutorial or docs right now, but after the official release, these will be available. For now, if you have any specific questions, please post them here or on the avimator.com site.

Darkhorse, if Seagel's suggestion doesn't work, let me know. I'd like to thank Seagel again for all of his help with answering SL-quirks related questions. He obviously has a lot more experience with SL animation editing than I do, so he's more qualified than me anyway to answer these questions.

Pearlie, Kronok, Red and Flipper, thanks for the support!

Gwyneth, IK is mostly working...just a few more bugs to iron out. For a teaser, see the screenshot below I just took of IK in action (with IK on feet only...still having a strange problem with the arms). This stuff is a lot harder to do correctly than I thought.

I really appreciate everyone's patience with this release! I wish I could tell you I've been working hard on it, but recently I've been spending more of my spare time exploring SL and making some really great friends along the way. After all, that's why we're all here right (besides making a few lindens here and there)? But don't worry, 0.4 is almost there...

Here's the screenshot of feet IK: http://avimator.com/ik.png
It was made by turning on IK for the left and right feet and moving the hip down.

I haven't read this whole thread, but I noticed that the mac version doesn't have a positioning wheel, but the windows version does. Do you plan to fix this in future versions, as I use a mac, and it would be SO convienient for this to be done. Thanks for your wonderful job at creating this program so far, and good luck for the rest.

That's weird. I'm a Mac user and I'm not sure what Win shows like, but I didn't notice any lack of controlling that. It might be deffernt to show between OS versions. I use Tiger. What about you?