Feature requests for new animation editor

i just found this but OMG ive wanted a Mac-friendly poser for so long. Bless you for this. I will defintiely beta test this. I already have a lot of ideas i want to try out.

Thanks so much~!


edit: I'm having trouble uploading the finished saved files into SL, I had to add a .bvh suffix manually. I tried saving it with the 'key' button depressed and as a simple posed avatar - no animation. No go. Saving the file is no problem, and AvMo picks it right back up where it left off, but SL claims it cannot load the animation.

Exile, only the hip can be repositioned using the position wheels. Are you sure that you have the hip selected?

Moss, can you please email the BVH file that is giving you problems to [email]support(at)avimator(dot)com[/email]? This is the first time someone has seen this problem. BTW, you have to manually specify the .bvh extension when you save the file. I'll add that to the bug list so that the extension will be automatically added. Thanks!

EDIT: FYI, Moss's problem was due to the fact that every frame in the BVH file was the same as frame 1. This is a problem with SL. Remember, start your animation from frame 2. Leave frame 1 as the default T-Pose.

Oh... I had the hip selected when I tried it on the windows operating system. I see. So the hip is movable, but only the hip; and it does work on mac. Thanks so much, I can't wait to see what's coming up next.

Grab it from http://www.avimator.com.

Please be sure to report any bugs you find to the "Bugs" forum of the avimator website. Thanks!

you are the man. here i was, thinking, yeah, i'm gonna do the linux thing soon as i find some time, meaning weeks if not more, and you knock it out in your spare time while you put the finishing touches on your IK. i'm seriously impressed.

keep up the good work.

rod

OK, guys. I booted up my old Pnather (MacOS 10.3.9) and made sure there was no difference from Tiger. It worked well on Panther,too. Use the wheel to move the hip.
Vince, when you implemented the no-showing first frame feature, what would you do the loading point? Does it always load at the 2nd frame? If not, we can't edit the 1st frame at least in the easy mode, so that it would not be easy for beginners. And if you'd do, I want to have a function to delete frames because mostly we would load the file for SL that is created the 1st frame as the default T-Pose. But whenever you load files, you have to delete the 2nd frame that would show us as the first one on AVMotion. It annoys us.
Even though you gave up having it have the feature, I'd like to select the loading point. For example, I select the 2nd frame as the current one and load the file. The 1st frame left old one, and from the 2nd frame it would be overridden by the new one.
But this would complicate the feature, "Load/edit Multiple BVH Files at once (for partner animations)".

to the 1st frame problem actually there is a simple solution ..

Vince can add a check on BVH load if the first frame is the Zero Pose and then skip that one ( maybe check for position transposing, i heard its posible to change avatar animation position with the first frame, not sure ), shouldnt be to hard.
Ok thats my 2 cents as a Programmer and yes i have no bigger knowlegde bout animations as i never liked Poser but Vinces animator makes it look so simple *wheee*

I think this program will do some of what I want.

I am a nubie to second life and have this wish....

I want to buy in second life a manequin.

It would work as follows:

It's size would default to my Avatars, ( manual over ride ).

it would move to a sit position.

it could be rotated on the sit position.

I would click on a joint to give me an adjustment slider..
( some joints two sliders ; wrist rotate, wrist bend ) and hand grip.

when I had got the manikin positioned correctly I would hit a " save " button to write a pose file, with an " animate " button to interpolate a number of poses.


Having such a manikin would alow me to work in SL with no programing knoledge at all, and would alow me to make pose files easily and quickly.

There must be many other players ( as opposed to serius developers ) who would like such a tool, and I am surprised it is not available... I think I would be willing to pay as much as I pay for a play station game for such a maniquin, but have never noticed any object in SL selling for L$ 10.000
so I would hope to buy it at a bargain price.

Right now I'm going to get a copy of this program and see what it can do... many thanks to the auther for releasing it.

Edit... having played with this program I think it's truly great... it does almost everything I want from a RL poser, I have not figured out how to type in numbers, but I think it will take keyed numbers.
My only problem is having to imagine the SL funiture that will be sat on while I set the manequin.
HUGE thanks to the auther.



Regards Jonathan

i don't know if this is valid or even possible (i have no experience in bvh files whatsoever, but then that also means i am not hindered by previous expectations!).

Would it be possible to set a few keyframes with poses and have the program extrapolate the movements between those frames? Flash does something similar to this with 'tweening'. It would certainly make things quite a bit more fluid and efficient.

I'm also seeing a huge discrepancy between an animation i make and what SL reads. I have been playing with the standard animations and noticed that the changes i make in AvMo don't read very well when uploaded. This has been mentioned before, but the difference is rather large.
For example: if i were to modify a running animation so that the arms stuck staright out rather than swung to the side, the upload preview would show the arms barely raised.

Although it has not allow you to shift the scene, you can double click on the numbers and type in almost value fields.

The same thing happened to me; the frames aren't emphasized as much as they are in the editor as they are in game.

First of all, Linden's BVH files for the built-in animations are sucks. They started to posture from the first frame that should be set as the reference frame, that is, all values should be set at 0. It is not AvMotion's fault because you'll find odd when you upload them without modification.
The current AvMotion, however, doesn't allow to copy multiple frames at once. And if it would be implemented the selectable frame to start loading other BVH, you would be able to set the standard T-Pose at the first frame and load the built-in animation latter 2nd frame on AvMotion's scene. That was my suggestion on #130 article.

AUSOME....

this is a truly great pice of work. as a compleate nubie I was producing animations in seconds....
I think the program will take keyboard input ( handy if you want a small adjustment and the mouse skips two numbers at a time ), I just have not seen how to work it..

Intigrating with the SL environment is a problem....

If I built a second life object of a spere cut to a point, linked to two hemispheres set to the ofset and radius of the manikins bum cheeks I could use it to " fit" sit positions to objects.

Can someone give me an ofset and radius for the manequins ass ?

If I had the sit position I could then work out ( or find in SL with a cut sphere pointer ) the relative position of SL objects to the sit point.

If the program would let me place marker balls in a frame so I could use them as targets for the manequins movements this would be a huge help to me....
An enhansment of this feature would be an ability to scale the manequin to match an Avetars size setting.


Also on my wish list, would a hand grip setting be possible ?

I am finding the sliders a little fidley, could they be made a little bigger ?

Thanks again for releasing this marvelouse program.

Regards Jonathan....

P.S. If I get the dimentions and build a "sit pointer " would anyone want a copy ?

EDIT... O.K. I have made a pair of " sit pointers " the Mk 1 has not had it's pointer position fine tuned, and the Mk 2 uses the bum position of the standard sit pose...
It's work in progress, but if anyone wants to play with one they can buy one for a dollar ( so I can see if people are taking them ) They are in my workspace, the Mk 1 is at Bora, 100,100,48.

I like the idea of bigger sliders!

Hand grip is a fine tuning handled on upload. Facial expression is also handled at that time ~ a nice way to round out a new animation.

You are a saint. Thank you for making this.

EDIT: When I attempt to upload my animation it says "Failed to initiate animation" where I should be seeing the preview, and the upload button is unpressable.

What am I doing wrong?

Are you sure you are leaving the first keyframe in the default position? If you start from frame 2, everything should be okay.

I'm really impressed by this. How about:

(To prevent the possible problem referred to in the post above)
--Hide or disable editing of the first frame, I don't think there's ever a situation where we'd want to change that, right?

oh

--Sourceforge project upload?

Anytime i have a stationary pose, i set it up in the first (and only) frame. Whn i go to upload it, i set it for loop and run with it.

In this instance i have never had the T-pose in the first frame, as the first frame is the pose.

It's probably also worth mentioning that i've read the 'ease in' and 'ease out' settings need to be rather high: .5 or higher (not the .1 or ,3 they use for default).[/i]

Hmm, when I leave the first frame in it's default pose and make a stationary pose (by using the 2nd frame) it seems to work fine though. You're saying that you're able to use the first frame in this program and it still works ok? I'm not really sure what's going on then. I was under the impression that the first frame always had to be left alone.

Has anyone noticed that the model is slightly out of sync with the SL preview model btw? It seems like the arms are just a few degrees off from how they look in the modeler.

Yes, and yes.

I have never had a problem uploading one frame AvMo poses, as long as they're set to loop on the uppload.

I have to upload my model two or three times to get him just right (mostly), but then i'm also trying to set a pose against objects like staves and swords, so the hands are almost always in need of a tweak.

Yeah, I'm able to adjust as needed after a few tries too, but I'm also just doing an immobile pose, so I don't know if this would be a major pain making an animation. I could post a screenshot if needed (grr why did they disable attachments anyway?), but it's pretty easily reproducable I think if you just do a totally standard "standing" type pose.

Even with the slight adjustments needed it's still "ludicrously" easier to use than one of those commercial overkill animators. I do wish it was made open source so others could contribute but it's really damn impressive still.

Okay, I just noticed that the slight out-of-sync with SL issue is already being discussed. But even if it's not AvMo's fault, maybe it could still do something to correct the problem by automatically doing some adjustments before saving? I guess the main problem is figuring out what those adjustments should be.

Edit: And actually, forget the other suggestion I mentioned (I'll delete it), just a better way to interact with individual frames would be great. i.e. buttons to move forward or backward by one frame instead of trying to use precise mouse movements with the slider.

Also a basic "preview" that demonstrates the speed it'd run in SL would be cool.

You can click the frame number and key in the frame you want.

Thank You

The wohle frame creating works but the shifting frame doesn't work. I sent the bug report on his forum. And I think it is easer to shift frame to frame by clicking to make sure each frame's state.