Feature requests for new animation editor

This is the issue that there is the difference in scale between AvMator (the name was changed?)'s figure and your avatar in world. To adjust between them automatically, it woul be necessary that you could download your avatar's information from world first, such as each part's length, thickness, and so on which are out of BVH's handling.

Marvelous!!

I know about that, but I was complaining for something better. Like maybe a few buttons to advance/backup a frame, or ten frames, etc. Or making arrow keys change the current frame. I love a clean interface, but there is just a TON of space available to add convenience features. I wish it was open source so others could add stuff like that if they wanted.

But what I REALLY think this needs, correct me if this sounds wrong, is some way to easily identify which frames are key frames! Given that, maybe something to make it sync with SL a little better, and the new version currently being worked on, I think all these overkill animator programs can be deleted like the bloated poop they are! (as far as SL is concerned anyways)

(Only called the app AvMo because someone else did earlier.)

But actually I don't think that's the problem I'm seeing (besides, that problem would exist in all the other animators too right?) I'll have to post a screenshot I guess.

Yes, Vince named this Avimotion at #15 of this thread. But it seems to be changed again. See his site. It is now called Avimator.
OK, I'm waiting for seeing that. But the figure on the uploading window is Luth. The arrangement of the bones between male and female have some gap. You'll see the difference of their feet positions between them when you set all value at zero.

What's this coded in? It would be neat if it could be converted to be a native OS X app, only a minor gripe though.
I know some Java and have a basic understanding of C and interface building in OS X, your program works fine as it is, but I always find it confusing to have menus that aren't where they should be =)

This thing looks awesome, you should make it donationware as I'd much rather give money to this app than to Poser! Excellent work, and it might mean I can finally get started on making animations on my Mac!

According to the very first post in this thread, it's written using OpenGL, thus porting it to various plataforms is rather facilitated (like SL itself ).

And while Vince hasn't absolutely decided upon the licensing model yet the truth is that you're more than welcome to encourage further development with nice L$ donations, like a few of us already have done

I have a screenshot, but I'm too lazy to upload it onto my webspace.

Is there a good free website that I can throw an image up on? Since attachments here are disabled...

What about posting onto the Gallery fourm with some proper title?

This is way overdue but 0.4 is finally out.

There is only one new feature (IK) in this release, but I will be putting out another release very quickly that will address a lot of the bugs and small feature requests posted so far in this thread and in the avimator forum. Also, in this version, the joint rotation axes now move correctly with the parts as you rotate them.

Okay, so to use IK, it's really easy:

Double click the limb that you want to activate IK on. It will turn blue to let you know that IK is active. Then just move around the hip or rotate other body parts and the end of the limb will stay fixed at the position it was in when you first turned on IK. Double-click it again to turn it off. It will automatically turn off when you change frames (IK interpolation is not done yet).

Since mirroring used to be activated by a double-click in previous version, you must now hold down SHIFT before you double-click to turn on mirroring.

Know issues with IK:

It's still not that smooth and it goes crazy in some positions. I think it's because I still have some Euler rotations in there. I'm going to try going to a full Quaternion only implementation to try to smooth out some of the artifacts.

EDIT: one other thing... joint constraints are implemented in this version. turn them on and off via the options menu.

I will try to respond soon to everyone's posts above, but now I have to run...

Ok, see if this looks odd to you:

/53/6c/90155/1.html#post908176

In Avimator the right arm is just slightly in front of the avatar. The left arm is just slightly angled behind the avatar. So it should look like that in SL, right?

Now look at the upload to SL-- the arms seem to be much more "straight" down to me where they shouldn't be, right?

If you setup the Avimator model so the arms go straight down, I believe that in SL it won't look exactly like that. Is this a result of some known issue? Or am I imagining that it's not entirely in sync?

Or...other option-- is the preview mode misleading me in some way? (I have yet to actually upload fully into SL to see how accurate the preview mode is, so...)

Thank you, Vince. Your IK feature is so nice. Quick report.
Major: It doesn't work with the hip rotating.
Minor: Bottoms of its feet should try to contact on the floor.
1. Standing by bending the knees, when you move its hip up, its heels should move up after extending the knees straight.
2. When you move its hip side, the foot should roate alogn z-axis (reverse rotattion?) and try to keep still.

Garoad, I believe indeed that seeing is knowing what someone said.
The Luth's pose in the uploading window is exactly "avatar_stand.bvh" of the built-in animations. It just tells you that unless you gave the priorty, that is, moved those parts, the built-in animations would override your animation.
And there are still four standing poses and they will change and ovrride in a few seconds.
So I can't say that it should look like that in SL.

I thought it might be something to do with that, but I'm still not sure what's going on there. I looked at what the "while standing" pose looks like when the animation isn't playing, and it is just slightly different from my screenshot (notice it's playing in the screenshot). When I click 'play' to start and loop the animation the arms straighten out slightly, and without the animation playing of course they look like that standard "standing" pose.

What seems wrong to me is this--when I make the Avimator model's arms hang straight down--it doesn''t appear like that in the SL preview, even while the animation is playing. The right arm, for example, is pulled way too far back, and the left arm is slightly too far ahead. Actually I think it's the exact opposite of what the Avimator model looks like in the screenshot. I think it's almost like the "standing" animation and the uploaded one are combining in the preview mode, or something. (Too tired to think straight now.) Which would be really stupid, but....

Thanks, Vince! This is amazing! I've had fun playing with IK.

I'm still somewhat confused about what should be in the first frame for uploading to SL. The second life animation guide says that it should be the "default pose," which they define as the "T-Pose." It looks like in version 0.3 your default pose (that dispayed for a new file) was indeed this T-Pose. However, in version 0.4 your default pose seems to be "Relaxed.bvh" from your data subdirectory.

Does this change imply anything for upload to SL? Should the first frame contain the T-Pose or the "relaxed" pose? Or does it matter?

Thanks again!

Garoad, I'm afraid that I sitll misunderstanding you, but plz see this. They have the exact same values, such as the left forearm's zRotate -75 and the right one 75. I think Avimator's figures have closer postures with SL uploding one than Poser's SL figures. I'm using ver0.4 though.

BTW, you're animation has 120 frames, doesn't it? Which parts did you move? If you moved just forearms at the latter second frame, note that the built-in standing animation's Abdomen, Chest, and Collars value would affect your figure even on the uploading window.

Joe, hello. The auther of the guide didn't know the fact following.
It is just the hip position and rotateion to use as the reference. But when you create multiple frames animation, it is true that the first frame doesn't appear in world. The point is the priority. Unless you changed the part's position or rotation at the latter second frame from the first frame's ones, they wouldn't be given priority at all. So it is recommended that the first frame is the default T-Pose not to forget where you moved, but it is trifles.
The guide will be rewritten.

Joe, it actually doesn't matter what pose you have in frame 1. All that matters is that for any part that you want to actually see move in SL, you have to make sure you change that part from frame 1. The frame 1 pose doesn't have to be a T-Pose.

For example, if all you want to move is the right arm, then leave frame 1 as is (the relaxed pose or T-pose, doesn't matter), move to frame 2, and move the right arm to how you want it to look in SL. As long as the arm is a few degrees different from frame 1, it will get picked up by SL.

Hope this helps.

For those of you that wanted previous/next frame buttons, Exile discovered an easy work-around that you can use in the meantime (until i add the actual buttons in 0.5)



Just click on the slider and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move between frames.
This works great for me on windows and I believe it should work on the Mac and in Linux as well.

That's great. Yeah, I made sure it worked fine. Thank you.

I think you have to view from the side to really see what I'm talking about, so I'm not surprised it looks like that in your screenshots.

I think I moved a little more than just one part on both arms, BUT you might be on to something there. Maybe the other changes I'm making are being "optimized out" or something... I need to test some more I think.

BTW, just a simple question (and probably very dumb), but theres a maximum of 30 frames to create animations in, right?

no, you can change the # of frames by double clicking the max frame number and typing in a new value. you can change it to more than 30 if you want.

I'm sorry, I'm so dense... I wish someone else helped us...
OK, It is a moving animation and I don't think I understand it until I actually see it. Can you upload your bvh file to the exact same article that you posted in the Callery forum by editting? Editting doesn't move up the thread and won't annoy ppl in the forum.
Don't forget to change the extention from bvh to txt before uploading.

Garoad and Seagel,

I've been following your dialog and I'm also curious about what's going on... Once the BVH is uploaded I'll take a look at it too and try to figure out why there is a discrepency. My guess would be that some of the parts that affect the orientation of the arm have not changed from their default position in frame 1 and therefore are being overriden by the SL defaults.

Have you tried opening avatar_stand.bvh, moving the arm to the position you want it in, and then uploading the modified version? Since avatar_stand.bvh is the same as the pose in the SL upload window, the other body part position should be the same as in the uploader. I should have made avatar_stand.bvh the default pose in avimator instead of Relaxed.bvh (which I made myself by hand). I didn't realize that it was the pose used in the uploader until Seagel pointed it out.