Toolkit – Male Animation/Pose Setup

Description

In IMVU, because both male and female avatars using the exact same underlying skeleton the Animation Tool defaults to displaying meshes associated with the female avatar. As there are obvious and some subtle difference between the two set of meshes, the female avatar isn’t always useful to create poses and avatar animations. To work around this, meshes from the male avatar can be loaded in and set up to correct for the difference.

Duration: total c. 10 mins (00:10:00).
Info: 1080p.
Suitability: Beginner+.
Source: n/a.
Product ID: n/a.

Design note: some additional considerations to keep in mind using this approach to create male specific animation and poses using the Toolkit;

Important: although the male head can be loaded in and linked to the underlying control rig, the shape key control panel (‘morph controls’) don’t work with it. Instead the female head, named “Morph” in the Outliner (DO NOT CHANGE THIS), has to be used. This will give an approximation of a facial expression, pose or animation that will work with the male head.

New File

To get this technique to work properly, each toolkit tool needs to be loaded into a clean or new Blender project or file. In other words, first create a new file – File » New » General, and then load in the appropriate tool, i.e. Clothing Tool first to copy the avatars mesh parts, then create a new file and load in the Animation Tool to paste the body parts.

Weight Painting

So long as meshes are copied verbatim and not edited or altered they should link to the animation control rig without issue. However, a difference between male and female meshes means the hands are not fully weighted and will need to be corrected before they articulate fully. When doing this only lfHand and rtHand vertex groups [1] need to be selected (Object Data Properties » Vertex Groups) and painted [2] for each respective hand;

– left hand mesh = lfHand
– right hand mesh = rtHand

When correcting the error in the hands, make sure the correct Vertex group [1] is selected for the corresponding hand [2] to avoid weight and/or articulation issues.

Template

Each time the Animation Tool is used it’s necessary to reset the open Blender file, which means losing any set-up modifications made to the avatar. Instead of, or to avoid having to constantly do this; once the ‘male animation avatar‘ is set up, save it as a generic template file, i.e. “TEMPLATE – male animations.blend“, that can be re-opened and saved as a different file for each new animation or pose project.

Timestamps

Times are approximate;
– n/a