February 21, 2015

So after trying many things, I attempted to un-rig the brow from the aSkull attachment… and instead, rigged it to the HEAD volume bone.

Works fine, no skewing. BUT. When I make an animation for it, it does not play until I STOP the animation. So, I have to tell it to play, then tell it to stop, and it runs. Weird. Maybe something’s going on with the Beta Grid.

Anyway, I’m going to run with this because the volume bones are basically useless with a non-human form. I’ll just have to be sure to make a list of things one should not change with dials or attach to in the owner documents.

 

February 19, 2015

I didn’t work on the avatar for about two weeks for various reasons (mostly having to do with needing to do taxes, birthdays, other jobs, etc.) But I’m back on the case. Right now I’m dealing with a bit of an inexplicable issue.

Remember the brow that went all wonky early on, then fixed itself for no reason? It’s wonky again. For no reason that I can determine. Now, I know that the lovely folks that make Avastar will always inform us that if we try weighting the attachment points, all bets are off and it can break things. However, without weighting attachment points, I really can’t make the avatar expressive so I have to take the risk. The problem is that the brow is weighted to the aSkull attachment point, and when I wear it, the eyebrows are yanked to the left by about a foot.

It’s really similar to how weighted attachments points always start by being weirdly skewed, but the moment you animate them, they snap to normal. Only in this case, animations don’t cure it. That’s the weird part. I mean, the mouth and lips that I weighted look just as wonky before I apply an animation, but then voila, they are fixed when they animate. Why not this one?

I’m currently doing really, really boring things that involve going down a problem-solving flow chart to try to figure out this problem. Technically, I could just plow past this by taking the brow functioning away and not allowing some of the really cool facial expressions I had made.

I don’t want to do that, but it is an option. If I can’t figure this out by Monday, that is the option I’m going to take, because you all have been waiting long enough and getting a mostly functional thing out is better than no thing at all. And, I can work on the issue again later after release.

But, I know that expressiveness is key to an avatar so I’ll do my best to figure it out by Monday. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

 

January, Saturday 31

I’ve been plugging along and forgetting to blog about it.

Anyway, eyes are reshaped and textured and work pretty well. Not perfectly – when they move, they don’t always sit in the eye socket the way they should, but that has a lot to do with the trickiness of Second Life. I can get them to look fine in say, 3DS Max. I don’t think I care though – they’re good 98% of the time in and SL you often have to shoot for that general impression of correctness.

The mane crest was redone also, looking good. I suggest to anyone making a mane for this avatar with flexies, to attach the middle parts to the crest and then wear the crest on the neck; wear the front parts and forelock on the head, and the back parts on the chest. They should overlap well when the neck moves. Just fiddle with the parts so they don’t stick out too badly most of the time.

Back to doing animations again. I had a little sort of flicker-glitch that happened with my recent animations, and I came to realize it was some kind of error with the IK’s, for those of you who run into this. There’s probably a way to flat out fix it, but I just did a quick workaround where I just export the animations directly from the blue SL bones instead of from the green pose bones. I’ll care more about getting to the bottom of it another time.

So, now I just need to do all the animations, and then I’ll work more on the AO.

 

January 14, 2015

While messing with some of the more extreme animations like rearing, I decided I really wasn’t satisfied with a couple of the setups. I altered the mesh form slightly around the neck, reducing the thickness of the bottom of the crest a bit and lengthening the back, and redid the weight paint on the neck. While the model now doesn’t have QUITE the extreme massive baroque look it did before on the neck (and believe me, this is a subtle change), he now looks right in the extreme poses and a rider won’t look like they’re being pushed back onto the croup.

While I was fiddling with the mesh, I went ahead and built the mare version for later. She will need slightly different props and animations but I had to build her anyway, so it was a good time to do it and set it aside. She looks elegant but still like a baroque Friesian.

This does of course mean that I am redoing the walking animation and some of the others. Bummer, but that’s part of the process. Each time I do it, it goes faster anyway because I remember what I ended up doing the last time. I also have to rebuild the mane crest to fit the new neck. That’s fine, I was going to adjust it anyway. I’ll probably do that today.

I have a first draft of the HUD appearance done. Leaving that alone for now. I have a functional HUD that I’m testing inworld but it looks really cheap because I don’t care about applying its appearance yet.

So, currently I am building and rebuilding animations, redoing the mesh for the crest and eyeballs (and redoing the UV maps and textures for the eyeballs), and re-coding the eyelids to sit in their new positions a little better.

After that stuff is all done, I’ll make the HUD pretty and functional, and then I’ll run some alpha testing through my helper Aladar. After that, I’ll sell a few models to some selected testers in my group, people who don’t mind beta testing for me and reporting issues without getting freaked out by errors and stuff that is going to be replaced by prettier stuff (like improving the mane.)

Hopefully not too much longer…. 🙂

 

January 4, 2015

Crunching out animations and working on the AO, including the design of the HUD. I won’t know for sure what will be included in the final HUD until I’m finished. For now, it looks like a ton of stuff. I’m trying to avoid nested menus because the whole point of a HUD is to have everything in front of your eyes for instant use, so I think anything that doesn’t fit as a button on the HUD or would be part of the maintenance menu (restart, etc.) just won’t be on the HUD at all. It should not take a tutorial to learn how to use this HUD – it should be obvious and fast.

Fixed a glitch in the AO’s handling of the animations. Happy with that, no need for details really, it’s just nice to see things working more smoothly.

I still need to remodel the eyes and the mane crest at some point but that will be a simple thing. I’ll just get around to it when I am sick of animating and need a change of process.

One problem I will need to solve is about the rear leg feathers. They normally would be attached to the lower leg, but since I had to move what that is for a horse (it looks more like the thigh), the feathers attach where they should but follow the animations of the upper thigh instead of the ankle. If I attach it to the foot, I have the problems of losing an attachment point for horseshoes, and it wants to follow the sole of the foot which is not accurate either (imagine a fully flexed ankle, and the feathers tilting forward from the ankle to match the angle of the sole of the foot.)

The solutions I have in mind are the following: 1) find out if there is something I don’t know about adjusting attachment points in Blender that will reassign the rigged bone (I kind of doubt it)  2) make the feathering part of the horse model which would mean it doesn’t flex or change. 3) Figure something else out.

Really doubt #1, hate #2, and hope for #3.

 

December 29, 2014

The brow weighting worked fine this time, no particular reason why. I’ll just chalk it up to the vagaries of importing and exporting from Blender to Second Life.

I had changed the hip structure for the animations, and it worked very well. Not perfect of course – it’s tough working with a skeleton that is designed to represent a human, but it’s satisfactory given the limits. I completed a very nice new walk animation that I’m happy with.

However, I noticed something that has occasionally caused me problems during the entire length of this project. The avatar doesn’t look quite right and doesn’t match the mesh in Blender. It looked right when I went to the Frisland gathering so here are some possibilities:

1) Adding the browbone weighting did something (after all it’s not a supported thing to weight to an attachment point. Weirdness may ensue. However, doing so to the nose and mouth had no effect previously.)

2) Changing the hip structure did something (I find this unlikely as changing the structure is designed not to affect the mesh itself in Avastar. It’s pretty good that way.)

3) There is a step I am missing in Avastar that fixes this. (Quite possible, I am not a Blender or Avastar expert.)

4) This has to do with the worn shapes in SL – the dials and/or the gender. (Possible. This definitely changes the avatar when you fiddle with it. Unfortunately I have, through my own fiddling, not found a setting that looks original.)

Working on that today. I will probably also rebuild the eyes into a more spherical shape. In extreme movement in SL, you can see the edges of the half spheres. I did it to save polycount, but it will need adjusting.

I will also alter the fitted mesh mane crest to be longer down the neck to hide gaps with the flexi prims.

I’m also working on the look and content of the AO. It works perfectly, but I need to build animations of course, and put expression and movement buttons onto the AO for particular things like indicating mood, rearing up, sleeping, lying down, etc. Shouldn’t be any problem to do any of those things but they just take time.

 

December 27, 2014

So back a few days ago, I visited the Frisland region and got to meet and remeet some very nice Lindens and other folks who showed up.

I wore the avatar, even though I didn’t have a lot of animations ready for it since the re-skinning. But, the eyelids and ears worked fine, the mane and tail were good enough for the time being, and it was fun just checking out the beautiful location.

Here’s a picture I took, with Vitae posing on my back:

Now of course, Holidays are easing up a bit and I can get back to work.

While working on the new walk animation, I found I really did not like the current setup for the hip bones, so I am redoing them. These little tweaks are inevitable as you work on all the ways you will want to pose the avatar, and find some areas that really fail. We can’t have them all be perfect, but I can find the best balance and compromise.

I’ll also be working on the brow weighting again, which I removed for my public outing due to the warping it does when the attachment bone (aSkull) is activated for deformation. If I can get it to work, it will add a lot to the expressions. If not, oh well. Everything else is looking great.

 

December 19, 2014

The eyes work, which is nice. I thought I might have more trouble with them than I did, but they follow the eyebones the way they should. It might not be obvious to observers at first because I am using horse-realistic eyeballs; the iris takes up most of the space, so the glances are more subtle than they would be with a smaller iris and large amounts of white showing. I’m happy with it. The eyelids and eyelashes are textured and I think they’re all right for now but I’ll probably tweak them later.

I grabbed a mane and tail that my assistant Aladar made a while back with some of my textures,  and threw it on for work purposes. With some tweaking they might end up being on the final product. For now it helps me understand how I’m going to have the mane follow the rigged neck, and it just keeps the horse looking right.

The thing about the neck is thus:

It is flexible and rigged, and is allowed to move freely as the avatar looks around. The flexy part of the mane is not rigged, but just attached to the center point of the neck. This means that when the neck really arches around, the ends poke through as they stay in a straight line along the crest.

The crest (the top part of the mane) is rigged to follow the neck, just like mesh clothing works. It helps fix the gaps between the flexies and the neck, but it’s not perfect yet. It’s good though, so I think I can improve it to the point where the little glitches just aren’t a big deal.

I’m building the feathers for the fetlocks today. Bummer I can’t transfer the nice ones I made in the test grid, but that’s how it works. Double work sometimes. I’m also working on more of the basic animations since none of my old animations work with the new rig now.

I’ll probably drop in to Frisland today at the SL gathering, even though the avatar isn’t complete, so if you want to come by and see how it’s going and ask some questions, feel free!

 

December 18, 2014

The eyelids blink and ears move just the way I want. I textured the eyes and ears, and for now I removed the weighting of the skull bone (which was to animate the brows) but I’ll put that back in later. It was just too hard to place the eyelids accurately when the brow was deformed.

Working now on making a mane attachment and some basic animations, as I’ll have to redo all my animations. I think that will be for the best; I’d learned a lot about priorities in the last batch and it would actually have been easier to redo them than to try to sort them all out to work together.

 

December 17, 2014

So far everything’s working well except for the brows, which I had rigged to the skull attachment bone for expressions. They look great in Blender, but in-world the brows are skewed to the left. The rest of the face is working seamlessly; jaw, lips, smile/frown. I haven’t bothered with making sure the eyes work yet. Currently, I’m building the ear and eyelid attachments and seeing how well they animate.

If all goes well, this should be a pretty expressive avatar, while still looking horsey. There are no humanoid eyebrows to make expressions simple to see, the features are all shaped accurately to a realistic horse. This should really be what a horse would look like if they were using human expressions, which is my aim. That also means some crossover in the other direction; horses have very expressive lips and there will be quite a bit of equine behavior there.

Fingers crossed; it should be pretty cool.

When I make the riding version, naturally these things will not be so important, and I’ll probably leave a lot of these attachment points for attaching gear rather than animating human-like expressions.