[opensource-dev] Looking for help for better animation tools

[Stickman]

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
.