Can't afford Poser?? Want custom animations? Not a problem any more!!

http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=342586834

Daz 3d now supports BVH export/import. Which means you can make your own animations without spending the $300+ for pozer.

Daz Studio is free. Its an excelent modeling / rendering package... which now supports the Maniquin from SL and BVH (animations) import and export.

http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=342586834

FINALLY! THE DAY OF EXPENSIVE ANIMATIONS HAS ENDED! MAKE YOUR OWN!

YAY! Saw thie yesterday and downloaded it. Now to learn how to use their animation tools...

Well it's about time.

Thanks for the heads up, Dolph. Downloading now. I had been monitoring Daz Studio's updates pretty regularly since beta up until maybe 5 months ago or so, and then I sort of forgot about it. It's good to see they've finally added something really useful to it. This was a long time coming.

This is just great. I've had a tough time getting started with Avimation, and what I really want to do are anims for multiple characters, so (hopefully) DAZ will help with that.

One thing, Dolph. I won't have a chance to download DAZ until tonight, but I've been trying to research the feature set to see how and what is available. But so far, I can't find any reference to BVH format, either from the daz3d.com or the Daz manual PDF.

Can you post where you got the information on DAZ's BVH support? Thanks!

I just downloaded it and using it now. It shows support for both import and export of BVH (BioVision) and OBJ (Wavefront).

But are the resultant exported .bvh's SL friendly? This is not always the case.

I am wondering the same thing and I am trying to figure out how to set it up in DAZ.

I found this little tid bit of info on the BVH import/export for DAZ. Seems BVH import/export is now owned by DAZ Productions, not GMCC Software. Not sure what that "exactly" means but sounds pretty obvious to me.

http://www.gmccsoft.com/bvhimport.htm

Alright. I got it setup. Here's how I did it so far.

1. Import the SL_Female.cr2 or SL_Male.cr2 file that is provided in this Second Life Mannequin pack.

2. It will complain about a missing file when importing. Click the "Locate" button and select the SL_Female.obj or SL_Male.obj. This will get the mannequin into DAZ.

3. Import premade avatar_dance1.bvh from the BVH animations pack. I used default options. This imports the skeletal pose for you.

4. Check View->Tabs->Timeline to show the animation bar.

5. Do what you like and export.

Couple of things to note here.

- I imported the premade avatar_dance1.bvh provided by Linden Labs. I then re-exported it and tried it in SL. It animates but it seems to be missing the hip movement or the root movement of the avatar. Everything but the middle of the avatar animates.

- In Poser 6, if I did the same thing with the avatar_dance1.bvh file it works out fine.

- I haven't found any real-time animation scrubbing/previewing capabilities with DAZ, yet. Just clicking play doesn't cut it. I have to manually click on the next keyframe button to animate back and forth to see the mannequin animation.

In time perhaps it will get better. Heck, it is a free product. ;P

The BVH import/export needs some work still, I think. For giggles I created a T-pose in Avimator, saved it, imported it into Studio using the SL_Female avatar from the SL website, then exported the result.

It crashed Avimator when I tried to load it. SL wasn't crazy about it either. I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of BVH to know if it was something I did or something Studio did. Just glancing at the raw BVH data, though, it looks like Studio writes the file in a way different from what either Avimator or SL expects.

Powerpose is very cool, though. With a little work I was able to make some nice poses. I'm really hoping DAZ irons out the bugs.

Create "C:\Program Files\DAZ\Studio\content\Runtime\libraries\character" if it doesn't exist. Drop the "SL Avatar" and "SL Clothing" folders from the avatar mannequin zip file into that folder. The meshes and other goodies will show up under the Content tab in Studio, and that error message will go away.

The red inverted triangle in the timeline window works as the scrubber. The black inverted triangles in the upper part of the timeline let you set the playback range.

I also found another bug in the BVH export. If you set the timeline to n frames, the exported BVH will contain n-1 frames. If the timeline has only one frame, the BVH has none. Oops.

Right, but what I am referring to is the ability to see the animation happen real-time AS you scrub or if you click play button.

EDIT: Weird. Seeing it animate in real-time works now. That was odd.

I will need to mess around with it some more afterwards. Trying to figure out why certain parts are not animating when brought into SL. I even setup the default T-pose on the first frame and that didn't work. Probably import options or something I need to mess with.

This is what is causing my problem with my animation. Some of those joint names (or whatever they are called. eg. hip, neck, etc.) are capitalized (first letter in name) when imported into DAZ and saved out that way. With the exception of the ones with "l" and "r" to represent the left and right joints. When I manually edited the DAZ BVH export it animated everything like it was supposed to then. The animation was not perfect though.

So have we decided if DAZ exports will work with SL yet? I would really like to play but I'm at work

I personally wouldn't waste time on it just yet. It's a bit quirky. It's not too bad considering it is free but as far as SL animations go I wouldn't mess with it yet. Needs to mature a little more and get its BVH system ironed out.

One word to the optimistic Verizon customers out there:

Daz requires that you register before you can download, and all it really wants is an e-mail address, and a confirmation. That's fine, but apparently their domain is blocked by my ISP, Verizon, or just can't get past the spam-blocker. I tried my three Verizon addresses, but never got any confirmation replies in 24 hours. Then, I used my Yahoo address, and I got the confirmation e-mail in about ten seconds.