[Opensim-users] looking for animal quadruped avatar for opensim

[Storm Singer]

There's a number of us who want this thing!

If I could figure out how to get a mesh to upload properly, I would
definitely try to figure this out. A decent-looking animated cat NPC is one
of the most important things on the list of things for my little world. But
there's stuff I don't understand like broken rotations and resizing
skeletons and mathematically determining the difference between the mesh's
default skeleton rotations and the default shape you're using in the sim...
I haven't even gotten the tutorials to work right, and I'm left wondering
if maybe I broke something in the .inis when I upgraded something else.
But, an improvement - Singularity doesn't totally fubar when trying to
upload meshes (this really is an improvement). This increases my tolerance
for the project by a logarithmic multiplier of about 500. I posted
something sometime earlier about my problems, but I haven't made it back
that far (eh, my school is really time-consuming, sorry).

I have a low-poly cat model I downloaded in obj, apparently I'll have to
rig it with a second-life skeleton. That really doesn't seem like the hard
part at this point. :(  After it's properly rigged in Blender I have to
(supposedly) calculate the differences between the altered skeleton and the
default skeleton - size, rotation, etc, then according to the tutorial I
have to reset the skeleton because the rotations are applied within the
mesh?? Then I have to get it into opensim without it going all twisty!
(although twisty is better than crashed viewer any day...) Well anyway,
one, two, skip a few, after I get a working quadrupedal mesh on my avatar
I'll just use bvh hacker to copy the rotations of the joints from videos of
cats (or other animals) in motion, since the bvh file doesn't store size of
the limbs, this should work perfectly on an accurately scaled model. Of
course, without an accurately sized model, I have no way to test if my
animation is a good one or not. We can get videos of animals in motion from
Youtube, copyright's not really an issue because of the "art" required to
convert the rotations. And because some artistry will really be necessary
to kern between the frames that we can see. But, that seems easy to me. I
rather like the bvh hacker program. Especially in opensim, where I can try
something out, update it, and try it out again for free.

For animating the quadraped, the thing that holds me back the most is the
length of the legs! I can't make the default avatar's legs to be the same
length as her arms. That's why I need a custom mesh. For the bvhhacker
workflow I outlined above, this is actually unnecessary, but I don't like
to claim a product as properly done if it's never been properly seen in
action.

Sorry if I'm rambling. It's almost 0130 here and I'm at about 84 of 113
emails I need to read tonight. From this mailing list. ^.^;;

~~~
Go around! Go around!
Go around the Windmill!
Sing us a song, of storms.


On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Mister Blue <misterblue at misterblue.com>wrote:

> If Minecraft can have wandering cows, OpenSim should have wandering hippos.
>  On May 1, 2013 9:38 AM, "Dr Ramesh Ramloll" <r.ramloll at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello there,
>> Does anyone know where I could find a quadruped animation for animal NPCs
>> I intend to unleash in an opensim environment?
>> Thanks
>> Ramesh
>>
>> --
>> 'Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin.'
>> *Rameshsharma Ramloll* PhD, CEO CTO DeepSemaphore LLC, Affiliate *Research
>> Associate Professor*, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209 Tel:
>> 208-240-0040
>> Blog <http://deepsemaphore.posterous.com/>, LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/rameshramloll>
>> , DeepSemaphore LLC <http://www.deepsemaphore.com>, Google+ profile<https://plus.google.com/103652369558830540272/about>
>>
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>
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