Avastar First Steps

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.

Hint: 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

IV.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.

IV.2) Then switch to “Pose mode”:

Now all Skeleton handles appear in a green color. You can select any of these handles and move them and rotate them as you like. However you will note that we have placed a few constraints to the various parts of the skeleton. We did this mainly to keep you from ripping the character into pieces by dragging the bones to unrealistic positions.

IV.3) Note on rotation: The easiest way to rotate the bones 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.

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

Hint: You have full can control over which parts of the Rig get displayed at a given time. The “Rig Display” control panel is located in the “Object Data” section of the Properties panel:

The Rig Display Panel

The Rig Display panel is subdivided into three major parts:

Remind: The “Rig Display” control panel is located in the “Object Data” section of the Properties panel (see above)

Control Style:
You can switch between the Avastar Custom Shapes (seen right now) and the classic Stick Shapes (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.

Show Bones:
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)

Note: Selected elements are shown!

Hide Mesh:
Similar to the Bones controls you can display/hide parts of your mesh as needed.

Note: Selected elements are hidden! This may be a bit confusing first. But it makes a lot of sense after a while (which means: you will get used to it, sorry for that.)

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.

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.

Hint: 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 with the Gesture editor in Seocnd Life.

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 (see image below)
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.

Hint: In the Timeline use 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.

Step VII: Prepare the Export

You find the “Animation Export” panel in the Render Properties section of the Properties window:

• 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 also 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.

Hint: If you don’t see the animation play out, you may need to switch off your AO. This happens if the animations in your AO have been badly designed and are running at the highest priority).