Blender animated poses in IMVU

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/#virtualdevelopers - Another first, animated poses for IMVU made entirely using Blender 3D. Although this vid clip shows a relatively simple animation it belies the fact that there's nearly 2 years of work behind the scenes trying to get this to work; as there are no template files or otherwise available from IMVU for other 3D apps everything has to be built from the ground up and worked out from scratch. The downside to this is that the source files are a mess - relative to how you would normally rig up a 'game' character - because of the way the avatars are rigged in order to compensate for and match up to the default bone structure that's created by IMVU through their use 3DS Max; this is what makes other 3D apps incompatible, working this stuff out is painstakingly slow and frustrating but worth the end results.

More details
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http://www.katsbits.com
http://avatars.imvu.com/jazzKat

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• blender
• imvu
• 3d
• poses
• animation

[Desity3]

u know how there are poses that like automaticaly switch? I want that. How can i get it? o_o''

[Quake3Bits]

@Desity3 you put those together in the Creator Tool (either the Previewer or the new Create Mode). You load in a number of files and then set options so they auto change, it's not an actual animation but a collection of them.

[felderup]

there's a free poser available, but it's massively unfriendly. there's much work done on a sketchup exporter, 3rd party, it's on the way to doing everything that 3ds can do... except per vertex mesh weighting, since sketchup don't do that.

[Quake3Bits]

@felderup POSER is a good tool generally but it's not really appropriate for IMVU because the models are far too highpoly and require a lot of reduction. SketchUp is fine but it's never really going to match Max simply because of the way the application works in relation to the CAL3D format (which stinks btw).

[felderup]

@Quake3Bits with imvu, the skeletons are separate, so it doesn't matter if the mesh is exported or not, everything's preweighted, all that needs to be done is aim the bones. and... i was talking about a poser tool specifically for imvu skeletons, done by a guy called boris. and... cal3d is being phased out for chkn files. i know what you mean about sketchup being bleh, but the third party exporter works. POSER might be fine.

[Quake3Bits]

@felderup yeah I know... I was the one that worked out all that info and gave it to the IMVU community to build on ;o)

[Quake3Bits]

@Quake3Bits with regards to Blender I should add.

[felderup]

@Quake3Bits *jumps on you, give big hug* oops, sorry, gotta be embarrassing to have a naked fat man jump on you...

[Quake3Bits]

You can't, even if you had access to the CFL file.. you need the original working file, and as that's likely to have been put together in 3DS Max, you're not going to be able to work with that without Max or converting it for use (even then you have issues exporting it back out for use).

[Quake3Bits]

That has been one of my biggest bugbears with IMVU since they began... why create a product build around community content and require that be done using a professional application like Max.. it just promotes pirating *rolleyes @ IMVU*