[x3d-public] X3D HAnim - save your work

[Joe D Williams]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDLZRRGxvAs
blender tutorial,easy rigging with rigify add-on


Just an example of several out there, including the very top of the 
line solutions.
Anazing how this does this almost as good as kieth's last viz.

Anyway, the point is with X3D HAnim, if you go to all that trouble to 
rigify your toyvatar, don't you think it would be reasonable to be 
able to export the results of your work in a transportable form? 
Collada, for sure, but also into a well-structured human-readable 
archive form?

For instance, in this example, you as the author, should be able to 
easily get the skeleton dimensions, hierachy, and initial 
transformations. You ought to be able to walk away with your skin 
mesh. You must certainly be entitled to the skin-skeleton bindings and 
weights for deformable skin animations. The tool should ask you is you 
wish to 'zero' all in a reasonable human-scale default pose.

This was the message then, and it is the message now. For common, 
basic humaniod modeling and animation, the basic data numbers be all 
the same everywhere. Only the internal user code exposed to the expert 
author or troubleshooter is different between tools. So there is no 
reason that this 'standard' stuff no matter how wonderful and special 
it seems, should not be easily transported between any character 
authoring system you can name. That was the h-anim mission many years 
ago with support of toolmakers then, and it remains a main mission of 
X3D HAnim now. It just happens that x3d hanim supports a realtime 
runtime so that your animation work, which is also basically the same 
everywhere, can also be preserved in a form that, by the way just 
happens to include a realtime runtime that uses the same data in about 
the same way as any character authoring system you can name.

So the next time any character modeling tool says the can't export to 
X3D HAnim, just ask: Why? It is simple stuff.
If they say only collada, then that is ok, it is fun to get the hanim 
'standard' stuff to X3D from there. But, why not X3D? X3D is certainly 
represented in the UI you expose to your users, so why not?

Thanks and Best,
Joe