Galathir Darkstone

So I'm trying to wrap my head around everything you just said, and I think I get the gist of it... and I understand the disappointment with not being about to reposition the 'extra' bones. I suppose that I'm trying to picture here is that if we wanted to rig something to the volume deformation 'bones', we would be doing that -instead- of rigging to the regular bone... right? For example, on the rigged boots I'm working on, they would wind up rigged to the volumetric bones, not the hip and knee bones, correct?

Also, despite the SL Bug/Disappointment, is there any chance of seeing an armature for Avastar sometime soon to experiment with? *looks eager*

Finally, thanks for all the work on this already! I can't wait to see what comes out of it!

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Galathir Darkstone
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Magus Freston

All depends on what you want to do with dem bones ... if you are rigging a mesh character or non humanoid it means you have 77 bones to play with. All can be rigged and animated (subject to patching a viewer to upload attachment points with spaces in a name). Only the usual mXXX bones can be shifted via Collada so the rest you just have to make do with where they are until LL fix the code.

Interestingly some of the normal bones and all the volume bones will react to shape sliders so I guess if you're clever you could create characters that can be customized using the normal shape system.

If you are creating attachments or clothes then there will be 19 more bones that change size with the shape which should help a lot with fitting to different shapes. Not perfect, since there are shape morphs that don't affect a bone like breast size, but a lot more freedom than before RedPoly showed us this neat trick.

Yes Avastar will have all the volume bones able to be rigged, animated and tied in with the shape system. We added a bunch of features and it's taking a while to tidy things up for release.

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Avastar - Character animation and editing with Blender.

Adeon Writer

After talking about cBones with an unnamed avatar creator, we concluded that a multiple segmented, animatable, rigged tail is currently possible without an XML mod.

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Darien Caldwell

This, along with Magus' comments about moving bones, makes me wonder if doing so could lead to conflicts down the road.

I.e. What if someone wore a Jacket, and a Tail, the tail expecting the bones to control the movement and position of the tail, and the jacket expecting the same bones to define the avatar's size.

Would they co-exist in harmony, or would there be conflicts?

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[H]arsh Styles

Adeon Writer

There would absolutely be conflicts. The deform animation to snap together the tail would also deform the jacket if it were weighted to the same cBones.

Galathir Darkstone

This is one of the most frustrating things about the current implementation of Rigged Mesh. If We could be allowed to set up our own armatures and support them with animations for those specialized bones, that would unlock so much potential creativity without having to hack it in.

Galathir Darkstone

/me throws a party in anticipation.

Lord

Don't get all wet yet....if I am reading Nalates blog correctly, she thinks there was a consensus to go ahead with only the Qarl Deformer supported. The RedPoly Deformer and Geenz Morph Target Deformer would be developed/supported at some later time.

And you know LL's track record for carrying through with things like that.

http://blog.nalates.net/2012/07/10/the-consensus/

Magus Freston

Adeon - that's a great challenge

Thinking aloud ...

If you wanted a segmented tail that could we worn on a standard Av, I guess you'd want all the bones for the tail to hang off the same parent bone (ideally they would be parented off each other but I can't see how to do that without tinkering with the xml). That way the posture wouldn't affect the tail. Looking at the bones, the obvious ones to use are Stomach, Pelvis, and PELVIS which all hang from mPelvis.

You could reposition and animate them all via anim. The trick here is that any mesh weighted to the bone would get dragged along with the deforming animation, so you'd have to anticipate that deformation ... hmmm, might not be too hard to do actually .. Avastar's bake T-pose might help or using "apply Pose as rest pose".

Then if you really want to get fancy you could create three parented bones in your rig that function as a tail and use Copy Location and Copy Rotation to position and rotate the actual bones ... that way you'd get a rig that is nice to animate with full FK and targetless IK etc.

Looking forward to seeing the results!

Magus Freston

The collision volume bones are already there and can be used now.

Galathir Darkstone

As Magus already said, the collision volume bones I'm interested in are already in place. I just need an armature to work with... since I don't have the patience to try and tackle it blind. It would be nice to see the other bones discussed in this thread added, but there's a lot that could be done with what's in place already (as seen in the RP video of the OP).

Nalates

Lord is thinking the Lab is going to do the development of Collision Bones and Morph Targets. That is wrong. Most of that development will be by third parties.

Trying to do more than the Deformer now is not practical. No one wants to wait. The Content Improvement group is just getting a rough draft of the proposal ready for LL informal feedback.

Darien Caldwell

Luckily a "Content Improvement Group" has no real say what anyone in SL does. As I said before, we will do it with our without LL's help.

Penny Patton

I just wish it could be made a little more end-user friendly. Like, if you could somehow link an alpha texture to a mesh attachment so if you wore the attachment, the alpha would be added, too.

(Of course I'd want to leave the ability for the end user to un-link the alpha from the attachment if they liked.)

Of course, I've got a lot of ideas on how LL could drastically improve outfits and the appearance editor, but I'm sure we'll never see them approach those issues.

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Argent Stonecutter

They could extend the coalesced objects feature to do that.

First. Let you bundle folders into coalesced objects, and unpack them back into folders. This would also help people who've got coalesced objects that are too big to rez on any land they hold.

Second. Let you wear coalesced objects.

So you could coalesce the alpha and the attachment. Let them wear both at the same time, or break them up.

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Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

Adeon Writer

if you read JIRA history, that was actually the original LINDEN-CREATED proposal. We wanted it on a separate layer, and so they did.