This is a big deal. I’ll get into what it means and what some of the possibilities are.
For years Second Life™ users have been asking for more bones. That would let users make avatars with tails that are easily animated. Or with more than 4 arm-leg appendages. We will be able to have a centaur with 4 legs, two arms, and a tail, something that is way complicated now and pretty lame. Or a spider with 8 legs. Continue reading
Today we have a post from the Lab about changes to the SL Avatar. See: Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton.
What are the changes?
Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.
On my long ago first day in Second Life™ I was trying to figure out why I waddled and other females swayed when walking. It didn’t take long for me to learn about Animation Overriders, AO’s. I used ZHOA and then ZHOA II during most of my time in SL. But, there have been advances in AO tech since the ZHAO units were developed. Now we have another advance. I’ll take a look at it and whether it is worth the effort to change to a newer AKEYO NITRO AO. My review follows.
The NEW AKEYO NITRO AO
I don’t know when ZHAO first appeared. I found it 2008 when I first went looking for an AO. AO’s improved as the Linden Scripting Language improved. The Mono scripts reduced the memory load, but did little else to change how AO’s worked or their features. Continue reading
I think most Second LifeTM modelers are looking for ways to reduce polygon count and still have good deformation for animations. his tip should help.
At the Second Life™ Developers’ meeting a question came up about whether it would be possible to sell experiences, the kind made with the new Advanced Experience Tools. There was discussion about the idea at the TPD meeting.
The Well
The answer is: it has been discussed within the Lab, they would like for that to be possible, it is a complex add, and currently no one is working on it. So, a ‘NO’, but with hope. I would say, very very little hope. It is high hanging fruit.
What about grid wide experiences? The Lab is waiting to see how the land-based experiences go. There are several hundred experiences in the system. Not all of them are in use or that have scripts associated with them. So, it is a bit early to decide how well Experiences is going to be adopted by users.
As the Lab learns more about the feature’s popularity and how people use it, at some point they’ll decide if adding grid-wide experiences is worth the effort.
Gaia Clary is asking what they concentrate their efforts on in regard to the AvaStar program. See: Decide about the Future of Avastar and vote for your choice.
Voting Results so far…
nPose is an open source tool for placing and controlling animations in furniture, or other prims which avatars can sit on. The tool has been around since at least 2010. (reference) I need such a tool for a sofa I am making. In my search I found nPose and thought it might be the answer. This tutorial is the outcome of my research. I am writing it in the early stages of my use of nPose, so expect this tutorial to get updates as I learn more. But, it should get you started.
Initial Note Card
The older nPose v0.028, also labeled as version 1.27, can be found here: User:Nandana Singh/nPose. nPose has had considerable work done on it since then. So, I do not recommend using this version, but it works.
A newer version is discussed here: User:Rev Eponym/nPose. The page does not include a download link. You can get the latest version of nPose at Builder’s Brewery. This SURL should pop you right in front of the vendor for nPose (free), at least as of October 2014.
The in world SL Group for nPose is named: nPose. There seem to be more people online in the SL morning than afternoon. I had better luck getting answers in the morning than afternoon. But, I haven’t been in the group long, so that may not be accurate.
Several people have been involved in advancing nPose. The latest work I found was done in June 2014. So, this is a script I consider under active development. Continue reading
I ran into this problem a few weeks ago. I even went through a trouble ticket with Gaia Clary, of AvaStar fame 🙂 trying to find what I was doing wrong. Today I filed a JIRA Bug Report: BUG-7185 – Animation Import Failing in ADITI.
I finally imported the problem animation to the main grid and found out it works as intended there. The problem was only on ADITI. The video shows the problem in action.
[youtube 36uJZXq0q2M]