Animation

Second Life – Blender Animation Problem

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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.

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New Blender 2.71 Weight Painting Video

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Medhue, of Medhue Animations, has a tutorial video up on weight painting for Second Life using Blender 2.71. The information in general works for any modeling system. But, is specifically for Second Life and Blender w/AvaStar users. While the ideas are transferable to any system, the button presses are specific to AvaStar users. He does … Read more

The Ditko University in Second Life

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Update: Ditko University’s in-world location closed May 28, 2014.

Somewhere in the information flowing past me I came across The Ditko University and the classes they teach. Their class schedule is here: Ditko Class Schedule. This item caught my eye: Blender Avastar Animations 101 by Haven Ditko.

I’ve done animations, but my animations (about 6) were done before I got Avastar. While I did a lot of work figuring out animation retargeting last year, I was having a tough time of it. Blender had problems at the time and I am a novice when it comes to animating. So, I wanted to check out this class and make sure I have a good understanding of the basics. 

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The Drax Files – World Makers: Episode 6 – Abramelin Wolfe

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This episode is about Abramelin Wolfe one of the people behind Abranimations. His wife helps him. If you have ever searched for a hard to find animation in Second Life™ you have probably come across Abranimations.

[youtube 3nSJpzzN4Ug]

Check out Abranimations web site. If you like Jo Yardly’s 1920’s Berlin, then you must have Abranimations’ 1920’s Flapper Dances… or so I think. Abranimations also has a collection of Vintage Dances. They should work too.

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Animation Overrider Scripting Information

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Kelly Linden gave us some more information about the new animation functions added to the scripting language.

Kelly said, “The server has supported overriding animations for over a year. The missing piece was the LSL calls and a couple bug fixes. It is expected that once overridden they would continue to be overridden on older servers.”

This means this was something started some time ago. Those old changes have been in place for some time. So, if one overrides an animation in one of the Release Candidate channels, the override should work across ALL servers. It is only the script that has to have the new server code to work. This is the behavior Amber Murfin discovered and commented about.

Kelly also told us the new override functions do not allow setting by UUID. They must be set by a string constant, read that to mean an animation file’s name. The reason for this reveals some possible future plans of the Lab. Kelly says he originally planned to use integer ID’s to handle the state names. But, others in the Lab wanted a more flexible system that would allow additions or changes and possibly and update of the state machine.

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