sl-service-account
commented
8 years ago Teager commented at 2015-12-18T02:14:01Z
Fully support and agree. Points:
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The addition of these facial bones is absolutely pointless without bone translations. The only facial animation you can make well without translations is opening the jaw, which we could already do.
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The joint positions set in the mesh uploader do not load reliably and never have. Setting deform animations inside a mesh fixes issues like these - https://gyazo.com/3b06ca6a0ac4ad4cf539e988931ad313
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Moving a bone is just a natural part of animating. Shifting hips or shoulders, creating lift and weight - these are normal and necessary for creating animations that don't look like stiff barbie dolls.
With the addition of so many new face bones, it's unfourtinate to hear that we will only be able to rotate these bones, rather than translate them with animations. This disregardes basic facial animation pracices, where the movement of facial features (eyebrows, smiles) is necessary to properly create expressions. To give so many new bones but deny a way to animate them properly seems like a huge oversight. Proper facial expressions simply cannot be accomplished with bone rotations alone.
With their permission, I've included a conversation with a creator of fully custom mesh avatars:
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Related
Original Jira Fields
| Field | Value | | ------------- | ------------- | | Issue | BUG-10990 | | Summary | [Bento] A formal method of bone-translating animations is vital for the creation of proper facial expressions. | | Type | Bug | | Priority | Unset | | Status | Accepted | | Resolution | Accepted | | Reporter | Adeon Writer (adeon.writer) | | Created at | 2015-12-18T01:26:31Z | | Updated at | 2016-11-01T11:56:31Z | ``` { 'Business Unit': ['Platform'], 'Date of First Response': '2015-12-17T20:14:01.153-0600', 'ReOpened Count': 0.0, 'Severity': 'Unset', 'System': 'SL Viewer', 'Target Viewer Version': 'viewer-development', 'What just happened?': "With the addition of so many new face bones, it's unfourtinate to hear that we will only be able to rotate these bones, rather than translate them with animations. This disregardes basic facial animation pracices, where the movement of facial features (eyebrows, smiles) is necessary to properly create expressions. To give so many new bones but deny a way to animate them properly seems like a huge oversight. Proper facial expressions simply _cannot_ be accomplished with bone rotations alone.\r\n\r\nWith their permission, I've included a conversation with a creator of fully custom mesh avatars:\r\n\r\n{quote}[04:28:52 PM] EpicGordon Broome: I don't like getting involved in development, JIRA's or forums or whatever. But disallowing bone translation in animations is ignoring some very basic fundamentals of animation theory, dating back decades. I've scrapped multiple projects because of the lack of squash/stretch in walk cycles (Toony characters). This update is also going to break features in an upcoming avatar of mine, regarding facial animation. Which is funny, because they give us so many new facial bones - that we just can't use properly. Raise eyebrows, pull up mouthcorners for a smile, extend a tongue, using only rotations? I cannot for the life of me see a GOOD REASON for this limitation.\r\n\r\nI have this feature - http://imgs.moyloon.com/i/05d71e3d26.png - almost done for a new avatar of mine, a pose-able tongue. The new rig has two bones for this explicit purpose. But they are useless, as I cannot pull the tongue out of the mouth in any good fashion. I cannot pull the mouth corners around without arbitrarily locking them to rotating around a bone.\r\n\r\nNot to mention non-humanoid avatars. We're getting so many new bones - and yet we'll be limiting the design freedom so much, since anything non-humanoid will be unable to avoid issues caused by inheriting rotations, since locations cannot be transformed.\r\n\r\nAllowing animations to do this is a trivial change, as I'm fairly certain that limitations were put in place to prohibit this (Hence why .anim's were able to do things .bvh cannot), rather than requiring lots of labor on the engine.\r\n\r\nIt doesn't affect me personally, too much. If this is the way it ends up being, I'll just hog more resources by alpha swapping meshes, and using more animations for each of these different states. However, it's unnecessarily clunky, and will ruin a lot of content creator's livelihoods in its current implementation.\r\n\r\nI dunno, I guess I could provide more concrete examples, and would love to chat about pros and cons of different implementations. I think there's a better solution altogether for giving creators more bones to play with - but I guess it's way too late to change the basic fundamentals of this update at this point.{quote}", 'What were you doing when it happened?': '_', 'What were you expecting to happen instead?': '_', } ```