Step II: Prepare your environment

We will switch to Blender’s default Animation screen now. You do this from the Top menu Bar:

Of course you can switch to whichever screen you prefer instead. But note that you will want access to the Timeline, the 3D View, the Dope Sheet and the Properties Editor. Here is an overview of Blender’s default animation screen:

In the Dope Sheet switch the Mode from “Dope Sheet” to “Action Editor” with the popout menu in the header.In Action Editor mode you can create new Actions. You find the corresponding popup menu in the Dope sheet menu bar:Press the white plus sign to get a new action and name it “FirstAnimation”.

Hint: you can edit the action name right inside the popup menu.

Step III: Adjust the timeline

On the Timeline click on the first frame of your animation, for this animation set it to zero. You can do that either by dragging the green progress indicator until the position indicator displays “0″, or by immediately typing “0″ into the position indicator as marked on the image below.

Use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom the timeline in and out and the middle mouse button (or hold down Alt) to pan.

Step IV: Create the Start frame

1.) I assume that you are still in Object mode now. In the 3D View ensure that the armature is selected by right-click on one of the rings surrounding the avatar. The rings should now appear in bright orange.

2.) Then switch to “Pose mode”:

3.) The easiest way to pose the avatar is to use the rotation manipulator controls. For your first steps you may want to select the curve segment in the 3D manipulator widget so Blender will show the rotation manipulators when you select a bone:

You may want to use the Rotation mode “Gimbal”. I found this the most convenient mode when working with the mouse.

As you get experienced with Blender you will use keyboard shortcuts more and more.

4.) You also have noticed that right now a lot of control elements are shown simultaneously (Remind, we are in Pose mode now).Please open the Properties panel of the 3D view. If is not yet open, you will find a small plus sign at the top right corner of the 3D view:Click on it to open the properties panel, or press “n” on the keyboard.It also makes sense to close all tabs in the properties panel. Otherwise the panels will jump around a lot while we enable/disable functionality. You will now see a list of tabs like shown on the image above.Please open the “Rig Display” tab.

 5.) The Rig Display gives you a set of controls for showing or hiding various elements of your rig:

• Control Style:
  You can switch between the Avastar custom controls (seen right now) and the classic stick controls (as you maybe have been used from other packages or old blender versions) It is mostly a matter of taste which display variant you prefer.
• Bones Control:
  Sometimes you do not want to see all bones at once to reduce clutter on your screen. Here you can control exactly which bones you want to see.
  Hint: The IK Arms and IK Legs are very powerfull motion controllers. HOwever they are disabled by default. We will get back to IK Controlls later (in the reference guide)
• Mesh controlls:
  Similar to the Bones controls you can display/hide parts of your mesh as needed.

Remind: The Rig Display is only visible when you are in Pose Mode.

Now pose the avatar bones for frame zero of the animation (where you want the bones for the start pose) using the green circles and controls.

Hint: All dark green elements are the SL bones and act as FK (forward-kinematic) controls. They have just been given funny shapes so they lie outside the avatar and are less visually distracting. When an element is shown in light green then it is currently selected and will react on your move, scale and rotate commands. You can select single bones by right click, or add bones to the selection by SHIFT right click.

Important: For now please only use Rotation. Bones can be moved but this will have an impact on the Animation (It will not work for every shape equally well). Bones can be scaled, but this works only for mesh.

Can bone length be animated for mesh objects?

The movements of each bone has been restricted to reasonable angles by default. You can enable or disable these restriction for each bone separately as follows:

• Select the bone (or a collection of bones)
• then either “Set” or “Unset” the Rotation limits in the “Rig Properties” tab (You find it below the Rig Display Tab):

Note: the image above shows the cojntrol panel when no bone is selected. Depending on the bone more elements show up. You may need to play with the settings until you understand how they affect the bone movements.
Hint: There are 2 extra elements in the Rig:

Step V: Store the intro Pose

Once you are happy with your first frame posture press the a key twice in the 3D View to select all bones (it toggles the selection so the first time it will deselect everything if you had a bone selected). The Rig should now look similar to what you see on the image to the right.

Now press i to insert a new key frame. From the appearing popup menu select Rotation.

Almost always you will set just rotation key frames. The exception is if you are moving the COG or IK control bones, in which case you should set the location too with Location or LocRot for both.

Note: In the current beta version, bone translations other than the ones affecting the pelvis will be ignored in the exported animation.

Hint: If you have used other animation software before note that you do not need to create a starting T-pose. The anim format doesn’t require it and Avastar can automatically insert the required reference frame for the BVH format.

Note:We have simply selected all bones for our pose. This poses a potential problem:Assume that you wanted the current animation to play “on top of” your default stand pose. In the Stand pose the avatar head can be moved freely. But when you add this animation, the head will move according to this animation and “override” the default head movements.

If you do not want to override the head animations, then you have to remove the head data. The easiest way to do that is by left click on the corresponding Bone name in the Action Editor(“Head” in our example) and then delete the entire bone from the animation (press “x” on the keyboard).

You can also “mute” the bone by clicking on the little speaker icon next to the bone name. If a bone is not listed in the action or is muted it will not be controlled by the animation.

In more advanced work you can play with creating sets of animations which control only a few bones each, and which you can mix and match in-world. For this introduction, we will control the entire avatar.

Step VI: Add the ending pose

1. Let’s imagine the animation will run at the equivalent of 25fps. Click on the timeline on frame 25 which is one second later.
2. Repose the avatar how you want it to appear one second later and again select all the bones and insert a rotation key frame (a to select all and i to insert key frame). Do something simple like a bow or a hand wave for your first animation.
3. Click on the timeline at 50 (two seconds into your animation), then pose and key frame the bone rotations for the final frame.

Step VII: Prepare the Export

Now in the Tool Shelf Panel find the Animation Export pane. (remind: press t in the 3D view if the properties panel is currently hidden):

• Make sure the mode is set to BVH
• set the FPS to 25
• Set the Start frame to 0
• Set the End frame to 50.
• Make sure Prepend reference is checked.

Hint: You can export to .anim format. But then you will need a patched SL Viewer. We have verified that Phoenix and Firestorm can import anim files.

Note: For anim Imports you will need to use Bulk Upload and NOT the Animation upload! A detailed description of this will follow in the reference guide.In the Timelineuse the play buttons to preview your animation:Hint:You also can scroll through your animation by grabbing the green time locator and drag it from left to right and back.

When you want to set intermediate key frames, then just move the time locator to where you want to add a key frame, then adjust your pose and finally press a twice ( to select al bones) and then i(and select rotation)

Hint:You can delete a keyframe with ALT+i  but take care here: This will only work when you have selected the bones which you want to remove from the time line.You can always first select all bones, then ALT+i to ensure you remove the entire key frame.

This tutorial has only scratched the surface of what is possible. Things you will want to explore next are using the IK controls, looping part of the animation, animating only certain bones, using the Graph Editor …Feel free to download my own firstAnimationwith Avastar.

Have fun!

Gaia, Magus, Domino