Add Flux items
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If you wish to add Flux Studio items to an Avatar Studio avatar, 1st read Loanwolffe's tutorial, and then look at the code for HatDude. I added a top-hat and cane to this "dandy". The code snippets you need to put into your file are well marked (usually a series of octothorpes, i.e. look for ###).

You make an item in Flux Studio or any other VRML97 editing tool, and then cut and paste it into the proper location in the file. You will probably have to iterate to get the scale and location proper. You also need to add code that marks or locates body parts in the 3D mesh (left_hand, left_lower_arm, vl5 { Lumbar Vertebrate #5; the lower back}). For a better understand of the humanoid animation standard body part and joint naming convention, please see this "map". You may also be interested in my H-anim page, it is related to but not quite the same as what Avatar Studio does.

The hard part of this technique is knowing where the added prop will go, so when you make their gestures it looks like they are holding a guitar and the guitar does not pass through the body when a gesture is performed. You make the gestures in AvS and add the foreign object afterwards. For me, this means making tha avatar, adding the item, testing how it works and noting which gestures have problems, and then going back to AvS and redoing the gestures and then going thorugh the steps of adding the item again. Yes, this is painful, but you will get more familiar with the process as you do it over and over again :-).

guitardude.wrl

My buddy Maket strumming a Stratocaster guitar. To capture it, right click on the link and select "save target as..." (in MSIE that is, there is a similar function in Netscape).

Another frequently asked question is: "How can I get an avatar studio avatar into Flux Studio?". It can be done, but may seem a little awkward at first.

You will need to modify the original avatar file to cause it to print out a series of points or coordinates when you touch on the avatar.

Here is an example of a file that has been modified to print the restored mesh to the VRML browser's console window. [If the console window is not open, right click in the 3D window and on the pop-up menu, select settings>console to open it.]

Then you will need to copy those points into a new file which will just have the geometry (avatar mesh). You can not import the animations from Avatar Studio into Flux Studio :-(

Here is an example of the mesh file that you will put the points obtained above into. You will also need to copy the texture coordinates and points from your original file into it.

When I did this, the example looked good in Contact, but had screwy points when I imported it into Flux Studio. I tried a number of methods to correct the wayward points, but the one that worked was to import it into CosmoWorlds. CosmoWorlds recognized and tossed out the bad points (automatically). Then I saved that and imported to Flux Studio and it looked perfect. You may be able to fix wayward points in the Flux Studio IFS editor also.

Flux Studio version2.4c will not animate a single mesh avatar, but Flux Studio v2.5 will. Flux Studio 2.5 was heavily modified in order to support features of Shout3D. Some of these features are not supported in VRML, other VRML features were removed (like the background node) where Shout3D did not support that. So, be careful if you download it not to overwrite your current version of Flux Studiov2.4c. (I have both on my machine with shortcuts to run either.)

Why am I mentioning this? Flux Studio v2.5 does support single mesh avatars which get bound to a Humanoid-Animation compliant "skeleton". The results can only be viewed in Shout3D. I have done a "proof of concept" of this process, and am working on moving an AvS mesh into Flux Studio and binding it to the skeleton. (stay tuned).

Ok, if you only have 2.4c, you may wonder why you would want to do any of this. Let's say you make a fine avatar in Flux Studio but find out that modeling a face is difficult. You could import an AvS mesh, and delete everything but the head with the IFS editor and use that head. I recently did the same thing with forearms lifted from AvS and placed in Flux Studio, it was real handy and fingers are difficult to model so it saved some time and made the arms look much better than my first several attempts at modeling hands.

Here is a head and left and right arms created after I deleted the rest of the mesh (that is all I needed for my model).

head.wrl

left_arm.wrl

right_arm.wrl

mr_mesh.spz A spz file with the whole avatar in it (168KB). You can download this and chop it into pieces with the IFS editor in Flux Studio and use the parts where you need them.

mrphillip.jpg I guess you'll be needing the texture file too.

I used the forearms in my wizard avatar.

More words about the topic: One more time now...

  1. You need a gesture that is not a gesture... a true pose where the avatar is just standing there (zero movement). This was one place I had difficulty with Patti's statue, the pose gesture had movement. What I had to do was go to the bottom of the file and find the parameters for Avatar Studio and create a SAV file for them (removing the damned # signs), and put that in the AvS Avatars folder. This allowed me to recreate the avatar so I could make a "just stand there" gesture. Usually just putting the WRL in the Avatars folder allows me to open them with Avatar Studio, but for some reason (probably the "add on geometry" code, it didn't work this time.
  2. You need to edit the Avatar WRL file and add lines in 3-4 places. The are marked in the mesh_out file I am attaching. Basically, on you set the touch sensor to trigger off the "just stand there" gesture and have a few write statements that write out the points to the bxx console when you touch it.
  3. You then copy & paste the point from the console into a new vrml file. Go back to the original and get the textureCoords and paste them below the points. So, you end up with a shape node that has just the points and coordinates in it.
  4. I find that I usually get one (or perhaps more) errant points. The easiest way to fix them is to load the avatar into CosmoWorlds, look at it and save it. CW throws out the bad point magically. You could also use the IFS editor in Flux Studio to delete the bad point and rebuild the face set (to fill the gap), but the CW method is less trouble for me.
  5. The deal is that Avatar Studio stores all the "parts" at the origin and restores them to humanoid position with the script. So you need to have the script restore the mesh before printing it out or you end up with the jumble that you showed in the image you sent.
  6. As you know, I am not brilliant, just a hacker. Panoramious turned me on to this technique and I know how to cut & paste from his example into the files I want to do. :-) He may even have a tutorial on the technique (I will make one out of the words in this note probably).
  7. With this particular model, it was slightly more complicated because of the Poser Hair. It is added on geometry so I had to cut & paste it from the original into the mesh only file. Then I had to translate and rotate it to get it back on the head properly. The point export did not capture the add-on stuff. I did the trans & rotate in CW while I was fixing up the bad point.

 

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