So it looks easy so far, why do i still have troubles ?
Now lets recap a bit. Until now we have taken the Skeleton structure as granted (well, this is dictated by the capabilities of the SL virtual world). We have not yet given much attention to the animations. We just created something like a basic walk cycle to test our mesh. We have taken the Mesh Topology as a given thing as well (at least for the most part of this tutorial). And all we have done by now is: We weighted the mesh until it works as expected without thinking much about why things are as they are.
So it is time to understand what we are doing here and why we do it.
The 4 aspects of animation
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The Skeleton structure (The hierarchical structure of the bones).
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The Skeleton Animation (How the Bones are moving).
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The Mesh topology (How the mesh is organized in faces).
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The Mesh weighting (How the mesh deforms with bone movement).
These aspects are interdependent, So you must account for all of them if you want the best results. But …
- As indicated above, the skeleton structure is fixed. We can not do anything here to optimise our attachments.
- The animations are often given as well (users typically buy their animations from various sources for various purposes). And the mesh attachment maker often has no idea what the users actually do with the weighted attachment.
So all we can do is to optimize the topology and optimize the weights. And here are a few tips how you can do this in a meaningful way:
Get the topology to work for you
TODO
Keep the weighting simple and clean
TODO
Use reasonable limits
TODO
Test with the SL default animations
TODO
Improve by experience
You have chosen a very demanding hobby. So keep patient and give yourself enough time to become moe experienced over time. And when you just can’t get it right, do not give up, but start over again or step back to a simpler project first. It is as simple as that: Don’t give up.
[PS-Youtube id=”tUcvD2_WVFY” w=”320″ h=”206″]