Cinemassively: Avatar Puppeteering possibly coming to Second Life in 2008

by Moo Money Mar 28th 2008 at 12:30PM

Filed under: Video, Previews, Second Life, Cinemassively, Machinima

When this blogger first came back to Second Life in 2006, Linden Lab was organizing their first SL Views group. When they flew the focus group to San Francisco, that session was about avatar puppeteering. Residents have not heard much about it since then.

However, Jeff Ventrella, who was brought on to LL for this ~~sole purpose~~ (He also invented flexi-prims!), released a quick simulation video on YouTube today, complete with a website link for more information about it. For those unaware, avatar puppeteering involves natural joint movement and ragdoll-physics. Could this mean that it will be introduced in 2008? We can only hope!

Tags: avatar-puppeteering, cinemassively, jeff-ventrella, jeffrey-ventrella, jj-ventrella, linden-lab, ll, machinima, preview, ragdoll-physics, second-life, sl

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 7:03PM 3-28-2008

so, now not only they forgot about non human skeletons, but they also intentionally made it so you can only have human joints? that sucks big time :/

I mean, the bhv file format already allows custom skeletons, and they seems to be smart enough to make the ability to define custom skeleton at least be a feature (buggy or otherwise)

I want tails, I want wings, I want tentacles, I want extra legs and arms, I want moving ear, I want....you get the point

Nacon said on 7:19PM 3-28-2008

I understand your pain for non-human movement but... we might able to make an suggestion about applying same feature to flexi prim since it's only one point on each ends.

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 7:44PM 3-28-2008

mmm...right, sorry about my pissyness

KirbyMeister said on 7:53PM 3-28-2008

Hey... are those shadows?!

Also... how does this not break tinyAVs? Or will we have the ability to script-lock joints, like llLockJoint() or something

Simil Miles said on 5:13AM 3-29-2008

This is great not only for puppeteering but especially for physics. Imagine the added realism of bullet impacts, car accidents, falls, fights, bumps...
Yesterday Quarl Linden mentioned a new amorphous Ruth, could it be related ? http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mono/2008-03-28

Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 9:18AM 3-29-2008

This looks surprisingly like what Ventrella showed the people at the SL Views internal & secret meeting in... June 2006.

Well, after 4 years, nobody expected Havok to ever be upgraded to version 4, and here we are, with almost 600 sims running it on the main grid :)

Moo, I only wonder how Ventrella will excuse himself to Philip (or the next CEO) when Philip clearly stated "no new features in 2008". WindLight is, as Tateru Nino once reported, a bug fix — the old renderer was impossible to continue to maintain, and changing it further to correct annoying bugs was a pain, so the move to a new renderer was needed. The move from Havok 1 to Havok 4 is indeed done because of the same argument. Ditto for Mono vs. the old LSL virtual machine. All these things that sound like "new features" to us are just replacing dated technology, impossible to miantain, by more modern things.

Still, I can't explain why HTML-on-a-prim was introduced (definitely a feature, and one with a HUGE impact), but much less Avatar Puppeteering, which is completely new (no more need of using Poser for anims, yay!). A new UI can also be explained as "making SL more easy to use" (and thus less bugs in the confusing current UI). But what about this project to incorporate facial expressions from your webcam on SL avatars? It's definitely a new feature, not a bug fix.

So mmh. What does that mean? Are they regretting their announcement that "2008 will be only about bug fixes" and going back to their usual routine of splitting their development time with bug fixes, scalability and back-end reliability, and new features?

Mind you, I'm definitely all in favour of avatar puppeteering... with more skeletons if possible... and — who knows? — new avatar meshes (yay!). Ventrella is definitely the person with the know-how to do those — the presentation made in June 2006 was pretty functional, so say the reports, only 3 months after Ventrella joined Linden Lab. Since then he had well over a year to polish his code — so is should be perfect. Let's just hope that Linden Lab is not following too strictly their commitment to "only fix bugs in 2008" and throws in one or two features as well.

Flexisculpties, anyone? :)

Elle Pollack said on 5:05PM 3-29-2008

I would be extremely pessimistic about this comming out anytime soon, based on a breif conversation I've had with one of the devs. However it's pretty odd they're releasing the videos and writeup now, when they could have been floating around for the last two years and they've been witheld from the general masses.

antont said on 5:57AM 3-31-2008

seems certainly fun enough,

and even if it is not released this year, i think it's nice to see work in progress stuff too. also helps us to coordinate our own work, maybe in collaboration with Linden, but also just when considering things that will be e.g. made late this year for publishing next year, is good to know that such features may be there then coming.

havok certainly can be exciting, and so much fun stuff have been done with many physics &/ ragdoll things already .. beginning from Porrasturvat i guess :p

~Toni, Playsign
(antont from #opensim, #realxtend and #blendercoders)