Can you have a mixed mode mesh avatar?

[bodzette Coignet]

I realize that if you use a mesh which is different from the standard SL avatar mesh then although you will be able to use SL animations, you lose the ability to emote the face of the new mesh.

So a question occurred to me:

If you use a new mesh for the body and cut and splice the SL avatar head on and then add the SL armature to it, would the emote animations still work given that you're using the SL avatar head mesh?

[Cerise Sorbet]

Hi, people are doing about the same thing for clothing items, they are attached to the skeleton and move with the avatar, but they do not replace the whole body. The seam around the neck or head could be a challenge, but maybe even a fun challenge, if you like that kind of thing.

[Siddean Munro]

The answer to your question is no, there are still no bones in the face to animate the mesh, it makes no difference what mesh you use. What you could to is create a replacement headless body that uses an alpha layer to just leave the actual avatar head in world exposed. Then you have the fun logistics of hiding seams and matching skin tones, but you could also continue to animate the face using an emoter HUD or whatever.

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, what you can do is make a mesh with no head, then make an alpha mask layer that covers everything but the head. So, basically, a mesh body and a default SL head.

[Feynt Mistral]

Yes, this would work.  However as was mentioned getting the body and the head to line up properly without obvious seams would be a challenge.  The moving mouth isn't worth the trouble in my opinion, and with bone offsets you could already do mouth movements with spare bones like your eye and head bones.  Your head can move believably with just the neck bone, leaving you with (possibly) three bones to use for facial animation.  Likely just the eyes could be used for this though.

 

Addendum:
While a few people will look at me funny or make comments about how using the eyes for a mouth would look odd, most people don't care about the eye movement and can't even see it outside of an extreme close up.  With an appropriate animation overriding the default "track the mouse" behavior you can use the bones to animate the face as necessary.

[Tapple Gao]

qavimator at least doesn't support animating the eye or toe bones; I therefore assume that the bvh importer doesn't support making animations that move those bones. How do you animate the eyes?

[bodzette Coignet]

OK so we have two versions: one is it won't work unless you use an alpha and wear the mesh on top of your default avatar body. The other is yes it will work.

Here's a question: how do animations of the face e.g. the mouth work right now if there are no bones in the face?

My assumption was the SL default armature includes bones for the face. If not, how do the emote animations work then?

 

[Medhue Simoni]

I really have no idea, but my guess would be that the facial animations are morphs.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

They are morphs. And, LL has stated several times that they won't put morph support in the mesh implementation. So, you'll have to wait until they but in support for custom bones or use Feynt's workaround.

[bodzette Coignet]

OK That makes sense. Morphs. 

@Feynt,

Would you need to weight the mouth mesh of whatever mesh you were using with the eye bones in order to use them?

(Not a huge rigging expert)