I'm looking for a programmer who can help me with some tools. I'm
willing to pay for the creation of these tools, and believe they
should be freely available.

My personal goal is to make some animations without a lot of the pain
and horrors I've gone through in the past.


The first tool is a pretty simple modification of the Second Life
client. When you upload a BVH animation, the Second Life client will
convert it to the internal Second Life animation format and then
upload it to the asset server.

This modification would simply allow you to save it to the local hard
drive, rather than having it be uploaded.

The final goal for this tool is the ability to combine deformations
that are created traditionally -- by uploading modified BVH files with
a different root bone. My current method of combining them uses a tool
that Zwagoth made called AnimMaker
http://code.google.com/p/par/downloads/detail?name=AnimMaker.zip&can=2
, which requires .anims in order to use.

Simply repairing this chain in the existing process is enough for me.
And exporting .anim files for local use has other purposes.


The second tool I would need is a modification of the Second Life
client. I want to be able to export from Second Life a skeleton that
includes both appearance/shape changes, and deformations. Exporting
them to a BVH file would probably be the easiest way, storing the
skeleton data in the hierarchy section.

For those that aren't aware, the internal animation format for Second
Life allows bones to be repositioned, as well as traditionally
rotated. A deformation is an animation that repositions the root end
of a bone, making the limb longer, shorter, or otherwise in a totally
new position. This allows for avatar shape settings that otherwise
wouldn't be possible.

An exported skeleton would allow me to create animations in an
external animation program, such as Blender, that look exactly as they
would look inside Second Life. With an inexact skeleton, the process
is to upload an animation, seeing if it looks like it did in the
external program, edit the animation to be wrong externally, then
upload again and see if it's right in Second Life. And repeat until
it's "close enough."

While this isn't as useful for a generic animation where the avatar
could have any shape settings, for a fixed format avatar (like the
ones I make) it's extremely useful. See also:
http://www.seawolf-monsters.com/images/wiki/dragongheader01.jpg and
http://www.seawolf-monsters.com/wiki/uploads/Gryphon/Gryphon/titlegryphon.jpg
.

>From the research I've done, exporting the skeleton with the
shape/appearance settings applied shouldn't be difficult. However, the
deformations are an animation which is applied every frame, and would
need to be treated differently. The deformation also applies
differently depending on the avatar's shape settings, and I do not
know the math involved in that. That is, applying the same deformation
to a leg with the shortest shape setting and a leg with the longest
shape setting appears to be a multiplicative difference.

In the past, I had a tool made by Zwagoth. The usage process involved
manually playing the deformations, and a T-pose, and even aligning the
avatar facing a certain axis. This was not a problem. And it almost
worked, even. But besides the tool being Emerald-based, and the source
code getting lost before it could be given to me, it still didn't work
completely correct and the skeleton resulted in guesswork a lot of the
time.


The third tool, which is less important but still very valuable, is a
Blender -> Second Life internal animation exporter. Most TPVs allow
for the uploading of .anim files through the bulk uploader, since the
client converts BVH files to the internal animation format before
uploading them anyway.

It would be Blender specific as I use Blender to make animations.
Since it would be Blender based, it would be written in Python.

The documentation for the internal animation format can be found here.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Animation_Format

To state an example of why this would be useful. I recently created an
animation in Blender that had roughly 80 "datapoints" or keyframes.
Judging from the internal animation format, the internal animation
data would be comparable to the keyframes I had in Blender. I exported
the animation as a BVH file -- which turned the data into over 1700
keyframes. In uploading the animation, my Second Life client parsed
the BVH file and tried to pick out which data it though was relevant.
I ended up with a horrible mess that removed anything subtle and
didn't look like what I had originally created, with feet floating off
the ground and some joints that should have been moving not doing
anything.


I'd appreciate any insight or help of any kind on any of these issues.

Thank you,

Stickman
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