No subject

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