Importing H-Anim Avatars into Seamless3d 2.151

[thyme]

Seamless3d could import H-Anim a good many months ago but for lack of time in testing, this is the first formal announcement. Also improvements have been made over time including this last week.

Seamless3d is the only modeller I am aware of that can use H-Anim as an interchange format for both exporting and importing avatars. Thanks to the way Seamless3d natively indexes vertices for part ownership, there is no need to re-rig the model for further modelling. With Seamless3d, animated H-Anim avatars can be imported and exported repeatedly without accumulating file bloat.
Single meshed H-Anim models that use either an IndexedFaceSet or an IndexedTriangleSet node can be imported.

To show how to import hanim I have written a tutorial that has evolved from Nontiti's tutorial he wrote in Japanese.

Nontiti has tested this feature on an avatar he made using Vivaty Studio and was able to use this avatar in Seamless chat and be able to export to use the setByVertexTransform so that it can play efficiently in Cortona. I have tested the import feature on Lucy exported a number of different ways and even got Seamless to import Joe D William's avatar he made using only a text editor.
Being able to import this range of avatars without needing to hand edit the file suggests some robustness has been attained.

For 2.151 I have added a new export option outScriptAsRoutes. This feature causes simple lines of script that have a ROUTE equivalent to be exported as ROUTEs instead of script. ROUTEs allow for animations to be played by a greater range of VRML/X3D browsers, however this export setting will prevent more advanced scripting features such as "if statements" and math functions from being used for animation so don't use it for any scripts more complex than nodeB.field = nodeA.field

What can be done after importing?

Any of the Immediate Commands can be used to change the shape, color, vertex ownership etc.

View the pivot point locations graphically and/or modify their locations and/or add new animations. See the beeline to animation tutorial/demo and the nurbs lathe tutorial/demo for starters. Although these tutorials are aimed at using white parts they should be easy to follow and the animation is essentially the same for blue parts.

Import animations from smls and motion capture bvh files. See importing gestures and Importing BVH files.

Because Seamless3d has a wide range of export options for VRML/X3D, it probably can export single mesh animated models to more X3D/VRML browsers than any other modeller, see browser avatar compatibility test page updated for 2.151

Open Source Seamless3d 2.151 can be downloaded from:

seamless3d.com/download

best wishes

thyme

[Steve]

Very awesome information Thyme, thank you! I have been meaning to try out seamless one of these days for just this purpose. The old avatar studio avs are getting kind of old and they have always been a pain in the rear as far flexibility with other programs. Would be nice to be able to use other solid mesh type humanoids and be able to import them for animation. I look forward to testing this out when i have a bit more time to play with it.

Great tutorial and Great application! :)

[thyme]

Thanks much for your reply Steve :)

Please don't hesitate to ask any questions that may arise, I be only to happy to help.

[fabricator]

I had a reasonable amount of luck with getting my own custom H-Anim avatar imported into seamless3d. It doesn't like my use of multiple Shape nodes (one per texture), and chooses to only display one shape at a time.

For reasons I don't fully understand, I had to open the scene tree panel before moving the view, otherwise seamless3d would crash. Odd, not really sure of the exact cause either.

Still it means finally I can import the avatar into a program to create animations for it.

[thyme]

Thanks for the feedback Fab :)

I have been playing about getting Seamless3d to import the web3d boxman example which has multiple IndexedFaceSet nodes.
I found if I concatenate the coordIndex fields using a text editor and delete all but the first IFS I can then import all the polygons into seamless.
So I will make the next version of Seamless3d import all the polygons automatically when the H-Anim Avatar has multiple meshes.
Seamless can export multiple IFSs by plugging TextureEffect/ColorEffect nodes into part nodes.
All descendants of the part that has an Effect node and all parts that reference the Effect node will be exported sharing the same independent IFS when output.
You wont currently see multiple textures or material settings displayed inside Seamless3d but it can be very useful for exporting.
Barphe used this feature to make it easy to hand edit the output file to add Contact's chrome to specific parts.

thyme
seamless3d.com