From Blender to BVH via Antonelli
by Tateru Nino 
May 20th 2008 at 12:00AM
Filed under: News items, Second Life
One of the more sophisticated animation tools out there is Blender, a cross-platform, free suite of 3D creation tools. Blender allows a lot of animation tricks that are normally only found in packages costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The eclectic, artistic, and highly-animated Jacek Antonelli has released a script, scene and animation skeleton that allows users to create and export high-quality animations from Blender into the BVH format used by Second Life.
'The biggest advantage of Blender (over, say, Qavimator),' says Antonelli, 'is that I can tweak the animation curves, and make them nice and smooth.'
'Blender also has a powerful system for creating rigs, different ways of setting up the skeleton to make certain types of motion easier. For example, the rig in the blend file can rotate its hips without moving the whole body.'
Antonelli isn't providing technical support for this release, but is just making her own tools available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
If you're already familiar with Blender, or you want to get into more advanced animation tools for Second Life animations, you should give this a whirl.
(A new version of Blender was just released, so they're experiencing crippling traffic loads at their website right now)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
BETLOG Hax said on 6:40AM 5-20-2008
Awesome. I asked you about this on your blog some time ago iirc. ..and have been seeking a blender solution for a while.
Being able to use a real 3d app to animate with has totally made my month. Now i just need to tinker a bit.
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dandellion Kimban said on 8:45AM 5-20-2008
/me is jumping around in happiness and bliss: I was waiting for this. Thanks!
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Nightbird Glineux said on 6:28PM 5-24-2008
Yay Jacek! Great work.
And silly pic girl. :)
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