Animated Meshes

[Gusher Castaignede]

Does Kitely run on YEngine? I hear it sopports animated mesh,
but my question is what type of animated mesh?
- vertex animated?
- skin bone animated?
-

Thanks

[Gusher Castaignede]

Hi Gusher,

Kitely uses Xengine, not Yengine, due to various compatibility issues that exist between these two different scripting engines.

Animesh support isn't defined by the scripting engine. Kitely supports the same animated meshes that are supported by the latest Firestorm viewer.

[Gusher Castaignede]

I made this animated banner, bone rigged skin, will work on kitely or
are you referring to a different kind of animated mesh, characters..

[Gusher Castaignede]

Both. See: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Animesh_User_Guide

[Salie Davis]

Though I don't know much about mesh and am learning, I learn by experimenting and breaking things, so far I have gone animesh mad and though prim based objects go funky with animations many animesh works great in Kitely. I am going to read what IIan posted now before I really break something.

[Gusher Castaignede]

According to somebody I know in SL with extensive animation experience in SL he
says Animesh uses the same rig as the avatar. You can't use your own. So, basically
every avatar could be an animesh, and every animesh could be an avatar...

THAT'S A BIG PROBLEM, IT BLOCKS CREATIVITY.....
I wonder if same rule applies to opensim?
Will have to make a few tests to find out...


Contradicting info at SL forums, somebody says
any rigged mesh can be animated. all you need is
a rigged mesh, animation and script... will
investigate later....

[Ada Radius]

Ya, though the original idea of having Appearance sliders to manipulate bones inworld, was brilliant, it's gotten creaky, and LL viewer devs just added bones aka "Bento", without fixing the issues in the original set. Same in OpenSim as LL, more or less, until enough TPV viewer devs decide to fork from LL viewer dev. If you want to dig into it (I have, a long term and continuing project) this information is in the xml files in the viewer Character folder. Yes it's nuts, 159 bones and still missing some of the useful ones that nearly all other armatures include, based on a version of Maya that no longer exists. I have stashed some Blender conversions at GitHub/RuthAndRoth/Reference/Ada Radius if this is something you're interested in.

Yes, any rigged mesh can be converted to animesh, with one or more animations and an animesh script. NPC's are another option - get a set of the NPC scripts and tools, (not sure where those are found now, but I'll put what I can out as freebies at my shop in Wellspring sometime this week if I have time), and, with animation files, the NPC will copy your avatar information into a notecard that can be used in a variety of ways to rez copies out into any sim where you have admin or ownership rights.

[Gusher Castaignede]

I did a quick test trying to upload my animated rigged banner and to my findings
you cannot upload custom rigged props at all, the animation uploader only
allow uploading avatar animations... I resarched further to study other creators
animesh props to my surprise find the messy avatar rig in them...



it is possible to rearrange the Skeleton in any way we want. There are only 3 basic rules:

We can only use the existing set of Joints (bones).
We can not add new joints to the Skeleton.
We must keep the hierarchical Joint structure as it is.
We can not rearrange the joint hierarchy of the Skeleton.
We are free to move the existing Joints wherever we want.


THIS IS NOT THE WAY ANIMATORS WORK PROFESSIONALLY, IT'S NOT INDUSTRY STANDARD...
However, there's possibility to just rename bones and try to match hierarchy of default
avatar rig.... more details at: https://avastar.machinimatrix.org/279/k ... -skeleton/

[Snoots Dwagon]

I know nothing about animesh or rigging, but I do know this after years of experience (and I'm not being anti-LL here, I'm just being realistic):

If there is an easy, shortcut, sloppy way to fix something... and a more difficult right way to fix something... LL has a habit of choosing the easy / sloppy way every time. This usually (and predictably) brings repercussions and consequences down the line.

I wrote an article here on these forums (based on adequate testing) about NPCs, Animesh and "lag" and found there to be no perceivable lag caused by either. But as far as how they operate and what's possible, I dunno. But if one is wondering about the SL way of doing things vs the Opensim way of doing things vs the sensible way of doing things.... bwahahahahahahaa.

Opensim tends to do things according to LL guidance... and LL tends to do things wrong. So I always keep that in mind when trying to figure out "why" LL did something the way they did it. The answer: Because they're LL and they always put the profit line first. Good, quality, optimized, efficient and adequate coding is not usually part of the picture. As a scripter, I've hit enough deep-core script snags to not be surprised that there may be major mesh snags as well.

[Ada Radius]

Yup you've got it. One other thing we're testing - Kayaker Magic on flags and sails and me on avatars, and that's the Connected settings for bones, which are defined along with bone hierarchy in the viewer. So maybe we can separate bones into entirely nonstandard configurations. It doesn't always work, or at least I haven't figured out what the criteria are.

I do rename the volume bones while I'm rigging and skinning, to comply with Blender bone naming conventions, because that makes Blender vertex weighting work a whole lot better - the default is to assume symmetry along the X axis. Then I rotate toward +X and swap in a SL/OS armature for exporting from Blender and into the viewer. That's a workflow only needed if you're working on mesh that you'll want working with the Appearance sliders, aka "fitted mesh."

If we want industry standard armatures, (YES I DO) we'll need a team of programmers willing to dive into the viewer code, much of which is over a decade old and was never well documented. Variously described as 'voodoo" and "spaghetti". I'm willing to make avatars if we can have some changes to the mesh morphs, Kayaker has already decoded the llm files. There would be a lot of pushback re backwards compatibility and old assets that would not work with a new system. Unless a genius figures out how to have both.


Ada

I did a quick test trying to upload my animated rigged banner and to my findings
you cannot upload custom rigged props at all, the animation uploader only
allow uploading avatar animations... I resarched further to study other creators
animesh props to my surprise find the messy avatar rig in them...



it is possible to rearrange the Skeleton in any way we want. There are only 3 basic rules:

We can only use the existing set of Joints (bones).
We can not add new joints to the Skeleton.
We must keep the hierarchical Joint structure as it is.
We can not rearrange the joint hierarchy of the Skeleton.
We are free to move the existing Joints wherever we want.


THIS IS NOT THE WAY ANIMATORS WORK PROFESSIONALLY, IT'S NOT INDUSTRY STANDARD...
However, there's possibility to just rename bones and try to match hierarchy of default
avatar rig.... more details at: https://avastar.machinimatrix.org/279/k ... -skeleton/