Poses and Animations using Boris' Pose Editor

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Poses and Animations using Boris' Pose Editor

I wrote a couple of tutorials in a group I'm in about creating poses and animations using BorisTheEngineer's Pose Editor and I thought I'd share them in here. Maybe they will be useful for someone Smile

Pose Making!

BorisTheEngineer has created a pose editing program - no fancy 3D software needed!
Pose Editor site
Forum thread about the program

The program gives you the avi's skeleton and allows you to manipulate the bones, then you can export it as an .xaf file to use in the previewer. You can add poses to furniture or create triggered poses.

Use the up/down arrow keys to select the bone you want to move. Bones are moved using six key pairs - Q and A, W and S, E and D, R and F, T and G, Y and H. The different keys rotate the bone on a different axis. Use left/right arrow keys to rotate the skeleton. To export the pose just hit enter. This will create a file called test.xaf in the folder where you have the program saved. Note that each time you hit enter it will create a new file called test.xaf, so to prevent a pose being overwritten simply rename the "test" file before exporting a new one.

There is no "undo" or "reset" function in the program, to start from scratch again you need to close and reopen the program.

So far I've just been playing with triggered poses. To create a triggered pose, derive from a product such as this one, which is all ready for adding poses. Go to the Actions tab in the previewer. Note that there are two boxes under this panel, blue and red. To add a new pose, click add on the left side of the blue box. Now, to put your pose file in, click browse under Skeletal animation in the red box, find your .xaf file and click ok. You'll need to enter a trigger word - this is what you type in the client to make the pose work. Type your trigger in under Action parameters in the blue box, where it says Trigger.

Now, your pose file that is created in the program only lasts for about a second. So to make it last longer you'll need to loop it. Add a value under Frame controls in the Skeletal animation section of the red box, where it says # loops. To stop your pose from moving with the avis idle movements, select Replace from the Composition dropdown menu. To make the avi morph smoothly to the pose rather than just jumping to it, you'll need to add blend in and out values too.

If you want to add more poses, click Add in the blue box and add another pose in the same way as above.

Once you get the hang of manipulating the bones the Pose Editor is quite easy to work with. You can instantly export your poses to the previewer to see how they look, so you can easily check every change you make. Oh, and one more hint....the fingers are very tricky to work with because you cannot currently "zoom in" so it's very hard to see what you are doing. It's easy to end up with fingers that look broken lol, so I tend to just leave the fingers as they are.

Hope that all makes sense Wink

For your reference, here is a screenie of what the previewer looks like for one of the pose packs I've created:

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Basic avatar animation

I'm not sure if there is another way to do it, but what I've done is basically just morphing between poses. You basically work in the same way as if making a pose, but you add multiple poses, or ensembles to one action.

So far I've only made one very simple (and fairly crap) animation - this. You can use Try It if you'd like to see how it looks. But like I said, it's my first animation and not very good Razz

First, derive from a pose-ready product such as this one. Then go to the Actions tab. Add your action and give it a trigger word. From the drop down menu in the blue box where it says After Playing, choose Cycle through Ensembles. This makes the animation cycle through each "pose" in the set.

Next, working in the red box, you add ensembles for each pose in the animation. Put your .xaf files in under each ensemble, where it says Skeletal Animation. For the animation to morph smoothly between poses, the composition must be set to Average. The problem with this though, is that the pose will change a bit depending on the avi's idle movements, but I couldn't find a way of getting around it. You can adjust the speed of the animation by putting a value into Playback Speed (low value for slow, higher value for faster). Humm and actually I'm not sure what Blend Weight does or why I have a value there in my example lol.

Make sure you set your composition and speed for all ensembles. The speed doesn't have to be the same for all ensembles - you may want your avi to pause for a little longer in a particular pose.

To adjust the length of your animation, put a value in where it says # ensembles played (in the blue box). This value is for the total number of ensembles you want to be played - for example, my animation has 2 ensembles and I set that value to 30. This means that the animation plays through my ensembles 30 times in total (not 30 times for each ensemble), ie, my animation has 30 movements.

Here is a screenie of what my previewer looks like for the animation linked to above:

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I've never done any 3D work before, sorta just figured this out on my own, so if anyone has better or easier ways of doing things, any hints or tips or ideas , please post them Very Happy