For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using 3DS MAX.
Let’s face it, morph animation is not easy. However, they add a wonderful sense of life to your products and aide in product sales.
Note: This tutorial is about building MORPH animations for Room or Furniture products. That means it is about making changes to the shape of a mesh over time. If you want to learn more about Room or Furniture skeletal animations, ie – how to make the bones move, please go to the Animating Rooms and Furniture Tutorial.
Teched and Ready
In order to create a morph animation, you need to start with a file that is properly set to allow you to animate it. This means that the parent mesh has a morpher modifier applied to it and that morph target channels live within that modifier. To see if your file is properly teched for morph animation, click on the mesh and look for the morpher modifier underneath the weighting modifier. If you don’t see it – the file is not prepared for morph animation.
To learn how to properly prepare a file for morph animation, please go to the Morph Target Tutorial.
If you do see the morpher modifier as well as morph targets in the Channel List, then you’re ready to go.
Basic Animation
I always make a quick animation to verify that the mesh and morphs animate nicely together. If they do, then I can go ahead with my animation. If they don’t, then there is no doubt a glitch in MAX. So, I restart and try again. This usually resolves the issue.
To learn more about how to make a simple animation, please go to the Animate In Max Tutorial.
To make a quick morph animation, follow these steps:
- Click the mesh
- Click on the Morpher modifier in the stack – make sure that the Channel List is visible
- Enter Animation Mode by clicking the ‘Auto Key’ button on the bottom
- Drag the animation slider to the middle of the time bar
- Drag the morph target slider to 100%
- Drag the animation slider to the end of the time bar
- Drag the morph target slider to 0%
- Exit Animation Mode by de-pressing the ‘Auto Key’ button
- Click the ‘Play’ button and watch how the morph behaves
Auto Key is IMPORTANT
Please remember to only make changes to your morph channel percentages while in Animation Mode. If you are not in Auto Key mode and you make a change, that change will not be recorded at a point along the time slider. Rather, your change will be applied to the entire animation.
While this can be useful for making Vogues (referred to below), it is easy to forget whether you are in Animation Mode or not. Don’t worry, though. You’ll learn either way. hahahaha.
Action Types
There are three types of avatar Actions:
- Idle Actions – these Actions play animations continuously. They are meant to be interrupted by the other types of animations.
- Stance Actions – these are animations triggered by the joining of a seat. They are closely related to Idles in that they play continuously once the seat has been joined.
- Triggered animations – these animations are played when activated by a trigger word like ‘wave’. They usually replace the morph channels being used in the Idle animation.
Knowing how an animation is going to be used in IMVU *before* you build it helps you build the right kind of animation and helps reduce iteration time.
Morph Naming Convention
The morph targets have a naming convention that dictates what kind of morph they are. This naming convention must be used or your morphs will not play back in IMVU. An example of a properly named morph target is leftBlink.Clamped where the .Clamped suffix is the morph type. The prefix of the name can be anything you like. Here is a breakdown of what the four morph types are and what they mean:
- .Clamped – allows multiple morph animations to affect the channel but clamps the sum of their effects to 100%
- .Averaged – allows mutlipe morph animations to affect the channel, averages the result.
- .Exclusive – allows only one morph animations (the most recent one applied) to affect the channel, no cap on value (i.e. allows values greater than 100%)
- .Additive – allows multiple animations to affect the channel, values are added together.
Blend In / Blend Out
Although this section focuses on a feature found in the Previewer, it is important to keep in mind while building your animation.
As discussed below, the frame controls in the Previewer allow you to loop your animations. However, they also allow you to blend whatever animation is playing into your animation. This is very handy for morph animations as a non-blended jump from one morph animation to another can leave unpleasant artifacts for a few frames.
Vogue Animations
Vogues are single frame or low frame animations that have very small file sizes. These animations rely on the blend in/out functionality of the Previewer to work properly in IMVU. Now, by no means are Vogues required to be simple expressions – but, regardless of the expression you are making, it is still just an expression. Think of it as a snapshot of an avatar statue’s face….or an avatar stuck in an icy, frozen tundra surrounded by once fresh dreams that are only now beginning to thaw.
By exporting this simple morph animation, you pretty much guarantee that your animation file size will be quite small. Small file size is really, really good. You should want your file sizes to be as small as possible. Once you’ve gotten your animation exported, simply play with the blend in/out and loop duration functionalities in the Previewer to get your Action product just right.
You can loop a 2 frame animation for 30 frames and (at 30 frames per second) end up with a 2 second animation of your avatar’s facial animation. Very cool and very cheap to download. Cheap download = wonderful customer experience.
The only drawback to using Vogues is the aesthetically unappealing look of linear translation. However, this is more of a skeletal animation issue. Using Vogues for Morph animations is always OK.
File Size Budget
The win for doing vogues is keeping your overall animation size down. Please keep in mind that the more morph targets you animate and longer the duration of your animation, the larger your Action product is going to be.
The larger your file, the longer it is going to take to load during a conversation. Please be as discerning as you can about where you spend your animation budget. We want you to be successful and it will be hard to be successful if your products take too long to download.
Catalog Snapshot
If you are creating an animation as a final product, please remember to take a 100×80 pixel Catalog snapshot. To learn more about catalog snapshots, please go to the catalog snapshot tutorial.
Export
Once you have built your animation, you must export it as an .XPF file. .XPF is a Cal3D file format that is installed in MAX when you install the Previewer. .XPF files are what the IMVU Previewer recognizes as morph animation files.
In order to export your Morph Animation file, select the Parent head mesh. In the case of the Female04_Anime01_IdleStandingPoseMASTER.max, the head mesh is called ‘female01.Anime01.Head’.
In the case of Male03_Anime01_IdleStandingPoseMASTER.max, the head mesh is called ‘AnimeHead.Male01’. With the head mesh selected, choose Export in the file menu. Scroll to the .xpf file format, name your file (remembering to manually type in the .xpf at the end of the name) and click Save.
In the Cal3D window that appears, verify the actual time values of the animation. Although they are almost always exactly the numbers they need to be, you should still check that the start and end frame numbers match what you intended to export, and make sure the frames per second is set to 30. Click finish.
Animation file: EXPORTED!
What’s Next?
Now you’re ready to bring your xpf into the Previewer to make an Action. To learn how, go to the Previewer – Actions Tab Tutorial.