Second Life – Blender Animation Problem

I need to create some poses and short animations for use with an sofa I am making. I’ve been using Blender 2.71a and AvaStar RC3 to make models. So, of course I thought I would use that setup to make my poses and animation. It didn’t work. So, a couple days later I’ve figured it out.

Planned Pose

Planned Pose

Animations exported from 2.70, 2.71, and 2.71a using any version of AvaStar don’t work… mostly. To explain mostly… I want a pose of an avatar laying on the sofa. In this pose the avatar is reclining and I want the hands on the tummy. Everything worked except the hands. See the image. It shows the hands where I want them.

I rotate the hands about 40-45 degrees in the pose. So, the movement should show up. But, it doesn’t whether I use anim or bvh file types. The hands show in SL with no change from the forearm to hand T-pose positioning.

I started checking the bvh files in BVHacker, a now open source program. They were a mess and doing strange things. That pretty much eliminated the SL import as the problem.

I have made animations and poses that work in the past. So, after watch Gaia’s tutorials again and painstakingly repeating them to exactly follow the same steps, I started trying older version of Blender and AvaStar. When I got to Blender 2.69-e7f3424 (64 bit) my animations started working in BVHacker. The import as bvh to SL worked. The anim file type still does not work when imported to SL.

But, I can get by with the bvh file. Hopefully this information can save others some head scratching.

Blender Installs

I use the archive install of Blender. If you are not framiliar with this type of install, you may want to check it out. It made my working back through versions easy to do.

The Blender program is installed, in this style of installation, from a zip file. It expands into a folder with a name like: blender-2.71-RC2-windows64. Blender is run from this folder to run this version with its setup. When a new version comes out it gets a new folder. So, selecting a specific version to run is just a matter of opening the appropriate folder and starting Blender.  I keep a shortcut to the main versions I use in my task bar.

This install style made it much easier to test whether this was a version issue. And it means I can easily use the newest Blender for modeling and easily revert to the 2.69 version to export animations.

3 thoughts on “Second Life – Blender Animation Problem

  1. Would you mind to create a support ticket on the Machinimatrix Blog and add an example file for inspection? That would help us to figure out what is going wrong. The ticket system is here:

    http://blog.machinimatrix.org/tickets

    thanks,
    cheers,
    Gaia

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