Feature requests for new animation editor

In the editor, if you double click the angle and type in a new one (to make it more specific), it won't accept negative numbers. So if I want to align a part to -90º then it won't do it, I have to use the wheel to do it by hand.

I tried entering in 270º instead, but it just goes to 180º instead.

Also, if this is to be an SL specific editor (or even if not), it would be really useful if it asked you what pose you were designing your animation for and automatically set-up the first frame for you, then didn't show you it (so you can't break it by accident).
Either that or have an option "Insert SL start frame" that lets you pick and adds a new frame in at the beginning of your choice.

This bug is already logged on the app's forums--btw you can get a negative value if you type your new number, use the left arrow key to go to the front, and then type "-".

I was trying to suggest (I can't remember if I actually did or was just thinking about it) "hiding" the first frame or adding it transparently by default, but the way you explain it is much better.

Okay, see if these two files upload to SL in a way that makes sense to you:

Protest activity for inconvenience of the animation forum.
/53/6c/90155/1.html#post908176/53/6c/90155/1.html#post908176

I actually made a second one too, with the arms almost perfectly straight down, and to my confusion it actually looks possibly correct from the sides now, I think...???

EXCEPT that now the second one (standing2) still looks screwy from the front, the arms seem bent a little in the SL preview.

I'm not sure what's going on here, maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Haravikk, both of those issues (negative numbers and atuo-start frame generation/hiding) will be addressed in 0.5.

Garoad, i'll take a look at those files as soon as i get back to my development machine.

Thanks. It's probably just something I'm doing, or not doing.

BTW, I enabled attachments on the Avimator forum so you can post files directly there now.

Didn't notice you had forums, I'll sign up with any future issues/ideas. For now I'd just like to report one little thing:

Two smallish things:
Copy/Paste doesn't work quite right, it's no biggy for me right now, basically I copied one of the latter frames from the avatar_sitfemale.bvh animation, and tried to paste it into a new animation file (as a starting point), but it didn't paste properly. My thoughts are that it's copying an offset rather than the exact rotations of the model?

Loading animations sometimes has odd results, sometimes requiring several attempts, or for the program to be closed and re-opened. It's like some data isn't being cleared out when loading or something. I'll experiment a little more and see if I can narrow it down any.

These are both on OS X, v0.4

Just began using the app to do an actual animation, loving it so far! I got a good approximation of the sitting start-point and have made a few basic poses. Some are a little off still but it's the first I've done with animating in SL anyway, due to the crappiness of Poser for Mac

Okay, I was able to get to the bottom of what was going on. It is actually just as Seagel suspected with non-moving joints being overriden by default values in the previewer. So Garoad, you're not doing anything wrong, it's my fault for using a different default pose than avatar_stand.bvh.

I posted a full explanation with pictures here:

http://avimator.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19


Haravikk, thanks for reporting those bugs! You can also just post future bugs directly to the avimator forum.

Vince, I don't think you should.

1. As I menthioned at #163, avatar_stand.bvh animation doesn't always override our avatar in world. So it is different from in-world posture at the biginning. No biggie.
2. I can tell the part which I didn't set keyframes by the state of the first-frame posture different before uploading.
3. We don't create animations for avatar_stand.bvh. We need to begin to create from the neutral position. The figure's posture on the uploading window is just one of the result of being overridden. All parts of avatar_stand are distorting. It is pain to start from it.

So the default T-Pose is recommended.

I have yet to really dig into the meat of Vince's Avimator, but gosh, so many good things around--this thread is simply bristling with good vibes!

I was in Midnight City the other day... a friend, Dave Zeeman, was playing around with it. In minutes he had the FUNNIEST head-twitchin' anim uploaded... and then he did an impersonation of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill (which both of us have heard of but never played).

And I think that's the power. Poser's proved too complex for many Resis, and if you can just sit down with Avimator, craft an anim in a moment, and get it uploaded to a party inworld, that's priceless. Heck, could have "speed-animating" contests if this keeps up. They may not be classy walks for high heels, but they're got a character all unto their own.

Lovely how much easier this makes things--and I gotta give kudos to Vince for the laffs... and answering all the questions here. =^_^=

This is totally awesome!!!

Yes, it's a fantastic tool (and also responsible for my not going to bed until 2.30am this morning - I shall make a "shaking fist angrily" animation and play it). I love adding tiny details to designs, which doesn't fit with the use of standard animations, and this has always irked me, yet I have no need of the full Poser application and its $180 price tag. Now I can have people holding items in ways that actually look appropriate, no generic "sword_strike_r" for my swordstick.

This is mostly a "terrific program!" post as I've not noticed any serious issues, but I did notice that, when uploading, the animation always appears in my inventory with an unconnected filename, "Uploading...", "no name)", random characters and so on.

It might also be nice to be able to attach simple objects to parts of the av in the program itself - just blocks would be fine, but if a pose is for use with an object (which mine are) it's useful to be able to see something like it before uploading.

Oh, and does it have a logo yet?

Perhaps something like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man but with a plywood block for a head....

I'm a complete novice to animations, I've never used Poser at all, so this may be a dumb question... I've been having a lot of fun playing with this, it's very easy to move the mannequin into the pose I want-- but every time I try to save the pose, the program crashes. I click 'save as,' type in a name and click OK, and I get a message that the program has encountered an error and needs to close. Am I doing something wrong, or could it be something to do with my system? Thanks a bunch!

Got a bit of a bug report for the IK stuff. If you rotate the entire figure, say, 90 degrees about Y, then glue down the right foot and move in the Z axis, it doesn't seem to take the entire av's rotaiton into consideration. The foot sticks out forward and back as if the avatar was moving in its RELATIVE z.

While I'm on this subject, can anyone explain to me how IK can be used effectively? I'm new to animation. I can see that gluing down a limb might be useful in certain circumstances, but I would think it'd be a lot more useful to be able to take the foot and move it, and have the rest of the joints up to the hip rotate to compensate.

Never mind, I figured out how to save it without crashing.... but, are there simple tutorials available for people like me who have never made anims and don't have Poser? That is, how to make and save the pose so it looks right after uploading?

Thanks so much for making this available, Vince-- it's great fun, and amazingly simple to use. SL needs more tools like this!

Hurray, really glad I found this thread. Major Kudos to Vince.

Its always really bothered me that in SL, the one field I havent done any work in yet is Animations since the programs needed were beyond my means in a couple of ways. It was doubly annoying since I always hate to use content created by other people when not absolutely necessary.

But thanks to a friend linking me to your site, I downloaded vs. .3 and by the next day was uploading animations into SL for some casualy gestures I wanted. I already plan to start making custom animations to fill out my AO now

There is 1 little feature I would like to see (forgive me if this has been mentioend, I havent yet taken teh time to read all 13 pages of this thread XO) but I want to be able to click on a body part, and have little tags show up on the frame slider on teh bottom showing all the key points where that part is set, from which the animations are tweened between.

Other then that, every other problem Ive had I was able to figure out on my own. I plan to be participating in this thread from now on to get tips and suggestions. Thanks again

The traffic in this thread has gone up a lot lately so its getting harder to answer everyone's questions. If you posted a question/comment and I didn't respond, I apologize in advance (I promise I'm not ignoring you on purpose!) As an alternative, I suggest posting directly on the Avimator forum since it has a whole forum devoted to this app. There's a better chance of me seeing your post there.


Torley,you have me really curious about those new animations you made (i saw the pic on your blog)... I'll be finding you as soon as I'm online again.

Ordinal, that is a strange bug you are seeing with the animation name getting screwed up. My guess would be that it's a bug with SL and not Avimator because the BVH file doesn't contain any info about the name of the animation. SL just picks it up from the name of the file. Are you having this problem when you try uploading one of the builtin SL animations? Is anyone else seeing this issue? Oh, and nice idea for the logo there... lol

Ilianexsi, I sent you a PM asking for more details of the crash. About the tutorial, I'm going to start a wiki soon on the avimator forum for tutorials and general usage tips.

Lex, yup that's a bug that Seagel discovered as well. Rotating the hip is currently not affecting IK, but it should. Also, being able to move the foot itself and having the rest of the leg adjust automatically is definitely something that you should be able to do. In fact, that is already possible with the current IK model I built. The only problem is that I haven't yet figured out a good solution for how to move the hands and feet using the UI. I was thinking of maybe using CAPS LOCK to toggle between sliding parts around or rotating them. Then you can just click on the foot and drag it along any of the axes using the SHIFT/CTRL/ALT keys and IK will do the rest. As to how to use IK most effectively, you're asking the wrong guy. Seagel or one of the other advanced animators could probably tell you.

Badinage, that's a really good suggestion and we've started to work out how best to handle jumping between keyframes on the avimator forum. See this post.

Also, thanks for all the supportive comments from everyone... I'm really psyched that residents are finding Avimator to be a useful tool!

It really exists just for certain circumstances.
Generally speaking, the avatar is standing on the ground. So the feet are expected to be on that. When you move its hip up and down, the feet wll come apart and pierce the ground. So you have to adjust the feet whenever you move it. You might have to pay attention to not only keyframes, but also in between interpolated frames. It is just annoying.
And about hands, I think there is another advantage of using IK feature in them. If you pull its hand, the arm extends straight, the collar, breast and even abdomen rotates accordingly. Those are natural movements and it's a real hassle to have to move each parts to show natural manually.

I did use IK some in a crouching pose I did recently. The thing is, it seemed that the knees were prone to locking when I glued them down and moved the hip down. I had to get around that by bending them a little to start with so they bent the right way.



Vince said that there's a way to move the hand or foot with IK, but he didn't say how to do that with the current interface. What keystrokes to I use?

Sorry Lex, right now you can't even do it with keystrokes. I'll make sure this is fixed in 0.5.

Vince is doing his best. But I guess it is so hard to do perfect. I told you about just a general usage of IK. If you have some ideas, share with us what you're expecting. That must help him so much to develop.
The problem is that there is no way to move position of hands and feet in the current version. But in my opinion, it is not so expected to pull about its hands and legs. It is more important to straighten and bend the limbs properly while keeping to glue hands and feet. Keep watching this in hope.

This is an excellent little program! I'm having a lot of fun making poses. My only feature request is for a way to set default preferences, so I'm not always having to change the figure to female every time I open the program.

I'm having some trouble with saved files, however. I'm probably just screwing them up somehow, but I've had a few files where the pose ended up getting mostly lost after I'd saved it and opened it again. (I'm sure I did something in the meantime to mess things up, but I don't know what.) Maybe a tilt of the head or an arm would be preserved, but otherwise the figure would revert back to the default standing position in all the frames.

It's only the opening that's at fault there Miriel, if you quit avimator entirely then open, it should be fine again. I've had it happen a few times where opening files isn't 100%