Daikon Forge

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It’s all Ravish’s fault

I was talking with Ravish Tyne recently about the upcoming C:SI update, and what things I had planned for my own weapons specifically, and as often happens during such conversations, we talked about a lot of things that are peripherally related as well. 

One recurring theme was animations.  While we were discussing some ideas for a new weapon, I had started thinking again of how much I hate animating, and what a pain in the rear it can be.  While I do own Poser, the ‘recommended’ application for creating Second Life animations, I hate it.  Archanox uses Poser to fine effect, but I just can’t seem to get used to the damned thing, so up until now I’ve been using DAZ|Studio. 

DAZ is an interesting program, and the fact that it’s free and you can easily extend it with Javascript plugins was a huge benefit for me, as I was able to quickly and relatively easily create a Second Life .bvh export plugin.  Still, it’s pretty clear that animation is not DAZ|Studio’s focus, and although it can be used for that purpose it’s obvious that the program’s developers have another target audience in mind.

What I really wanted to use is 3DS Max, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find any good information on exporting .bvh files from Max.  I mean, surely I’m not the first person in the world to want to be able to export custom .bvh files, right?  Google reveals plenty of cases of people asking how to do it, but very little in the way of actually accomplishing the goal.

After much searching, I eventually found my answer on the official Second Life forums, of all places.  The SL forums are mostly a place for people to whine about bots or express their frustration with Linden Lab, but every once in a while there’s some pretty good info to be found there.  Google can’t index the SL forums, so given my attitude about those forums and how infrequently I visit there nowadays as a result, it was pretty much just chance that I happened to see the thread at all.  In this forum thread Abu Nasu revealed his maxscript plugin and associated poseable model for exporting Second Life-compatible .bvh files!

As if that wasn’t cool enough already, Pygora Acronym provided a fully-rigged version of Abu’s poseable model complete with IK/FK blending, foot roll, and other such goodies.  He also provided a Biped version, though I was never able to make that work.

Needless to say, I was intrigued and excited, so I downloaded the files and started tinkering.  By using the provided rigs and script as a reference and seemingly being unable to leave well enough alone, I had to go and change everything to suit me personally, but at the end of the process I ended up with a very easy and quite capable environment for creating new animations for Second Life.  I’m actually excited about creating new animations for a change.

Of course it’s no magic bullet, and I’m still not as skilled an animator as I’d like to be, but at the very least I’ll be actively working on animations for my new weapon now instead of procrastinating