Guild of Writers

Aloys,

Yes, it's extremely useful.
Character animation is typically performed by animating an underlying skeleton not the mesh.
While I haven't yet tried, it may also be possible to skin the skeleton and hack together new clothing items.

Thanks; looks like it's all good then.
I was under the impression that the Max biped skeleton was a standard thing in Max. (I really ought to start teaching myself animation basics one of these days)
And since the first Ki file that was released that day had a couple issues I feared this one might have its problems too. Glad it's not the case.
That means that with this skeleton we may not only create new emotes but also new animations for puzzles and all kinds of interactions, which is s a great news.

Looks like the skeletons are fairly detailed.

Being a Blender faithful, /me can not use the .max file, but I decided to peek into Dr.Watson's .prp, using prpshop and I notice that all fingers are fully articulated in three segments each and facial animation bones are: medial and lateral for each brow, upper and lower eyelid, cheek, yaw and no less than six bones for the mouth. No ear-wigglers though.

I must say that I have never noticed there is facial animation in the game, other than holo-Yeesha's speech - my loss for being mostly a solo player. :D

I just realized that the rigging/weighting infos must be part of the avatar meshes in the prps and they are not needed to export the animations... Silly me.
(Still it would have been nice to have them directly in the Max files to properly preview the animations given that we can't import those meshes from the PRPs. ha well, let's not ask too much)

Just a small note on the emote animation - just had time to take a look at it and as expected it is the MOUL version of the avie which mean it is of no use to us as the bone structure differs from the CC version - even if we converted it correctly it woulnd't work properly (like the Male dance from Moul)

Aww, that's a bad news. That means no CC custom animations then. And that also means that we currently have no way to test them off-line at all.. :/

Agenotfound wrote:Just a small note on the emote animation - just had time to take a look at it and as expected it is the MOUL version of the avie which mean it is of no use to us as the bone structure differs from the CC version - even if we converted it correctly it woulnd't work properly (like the Male dance from Moul)

Doesn't the female version work just fine though. That it's only the male version that seems to have issues.

GPNMilano wrote:

Agenotfound wrote:Just a small note on the emote animation - just had time to take a look at it and as expected it is the MOUL version of the avie which mean it is of no use to us as the bone structure differs from the CC version - even if we converted it correctly it woulnd't work properly (like the Male dance from Moul)

Doesn't the female version work just fine though. That it's only the male version that seems to have issues.

True, I forgot about that. - maybe we can even alter the male version we have to make it CC compatible. I don't remember what was different in the MOUL version of the Male avatar but I think it was just a different rigging which is easy to fix.

Hang on, I wrote down the differences for the male avatar between POTS and MOUL. It was Marten who figured this out. Here you go.

Changes from POTS to MOUL:
- Bone_LPinky1 through LPinky3, removed
- Bone_RPinky1 through RPinky3, removed
- Bone_LUpperArm replaced with Bone_LUpperArm1 and Bone_LUpperArm2
- Bone_RUpperArm replaced with Bone_RUpperArm1 and Bone_RUpperArm2

Hmm, so one finger less... What does the extra upper arm bone do, given that clavicles were there all along? Something to do with clothing items?

Any reason why the male wave emote .max file is twice the size of the female one, by the way, any one of you who has the software to open them? :7

Oh, and does any of them contain sets of phoneme presets and stuff like that? Maybe Plasma's even some sort of lip-sync sequence playback system built-in? Hardly likely, I suppose... :7