I uploaded a better trailer to YouTube here!

The ZMan:

codetale:

where to get the AvatarAssetsPack ?
is the AvatarAssetsPack contain the model that use in NXE?

Its part of the XDK which only licensed developers get and shouldn't be being discussed in here

Actually it's a file that is readily available on the Update CD/DVD you can order from Xbox.com, not a file specific to the XDK at all but Xbox System Update.
Publically available for everyone, but not sure what use it is without the runtimes to use it.

The ZMan:

Leyvin:

I've got Maya 8.x and 2009 plus Softimage ModTool 7.5 plus the Avatar SDK (actually I have the entire AvatarAssetsPack too) so yeah if you need any help I'd be happy to lend a hand.

You might want to read the T&C of your XDK agreement... many things are not supposed to be talked about in public and it might not be a good thing for you or your employer to do so.

The T&C and the NDA are two seperate things that cover different aspects of the XDK, the NDA I have signed covers discussing non-publically announced features or aspects.
As the XNA Team have mentioned the Avatar SDK, this brings it to a public knowledge level no longer making it covered by the NDA.
The Terms and Conditions more effectly cover what I am and am not allowed to do with the XDK.

For example while I can make use of the Live Vision Camera API for my personal development (including for XNA), I may not make it publically available with it being Certificated and Licensed for Middleware purposes.
True that mentioning it probably would've been better done via a private e-mail, technically speaking I haven't actually broken any of the agreements I have with Microsoft here. Hope that clears it up.

Mind it is also possible to request the Avatar SDK from Rare, just a good thing to note for anyone who wants it without becoming registered developers.
After all there is nothing platform (or Avatar) specific as you output to whatever file format you're using, in the case of XNA it would probably be FBX and then you can create a description file if it's a new mesh or an animation loads literally just like you would overlay normally only loaded into the Avatar itself. Just more a case of getting the names of the limbs correct, facial animations are done via the code you have available in the api.

Sides, I'm not exactly discussing any of this out of context.

UberGeekGames:

I uploaded a better trailer to YouTube here!

Why are the fingers so long?!? :)

That's how they came out from the raw matrix data, I swear! I suppose I might be able to shorten them, but then it wouldn't be accurate...

The wrapper is mostly finished now! I've refactored everything into one easy to use class and documented it heavily. It works great on windows, but I have errors that keep coming up on the Xbox build:

Error    1    The best overloaded method match for 'SkinnedModel.AnimationPlayer.Update(System.TimeSpan, bool, Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix)' has some invalid arguments    C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\AvatarTest1\AvatarTest1\Avatar.cs    729    21    Xbox 360 Copy of AvatarTest1
Error    2    The type 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework, Version=3.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6d5c3888ef60e27d'.    C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\AvatarTest1\AvatarTest1\Avatar.cs    729    21    Xbox 360 Copy of AvatarTest1
Error    3    Argument '3': cannot convert from 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix [c:\Program Files\Microsoft XNA\XNA Game Studio\v3.1\References\Xbox360\Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll]' to 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix []'    C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\AvatarTest1\AvatarTest1\Avatar.cs    729    69    Xbox 360 Copy of AvatarTest1
Error    4    Cannot implicitly convert type 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix[] []' to 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Matrix[] [c:\Program Files\Microsoft XNA\XNA Game Studio\v3.1\References\Xbox360\Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll]'    C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\AvatarTest1\AvatarTest1\Avatar.cs    762    47    Xbox 360 Copy of AvatarTest1

The same code works fine on Windows.. It sounds like this could be a 3.1 issue. Any ideas? I'd like the release of this to be as bug-free as possible.

UberGeekGames:

The same code works fine on Windows.. It sounds like this could be a 3.1 issue. Any ideas?

That usually means you're referencing a Windows assembly from one of your Xbox projects.

Is it possible that you are referencing XNA 3.1 from the Windows project and XNA 3.0 from the XBOX one ?

EDIT: Shawn option makes more sense.

It must be the SkinnedModel class library.
I'm comparing the version in my project to the one in the sample, and they're both class libraries. The only difference is that mine has the C# app icon and the sample has the Xbox icon. There's no option to change the target platform like there is in the sample - how do I convert it to an Xbox 360 library in XNA 3.1?

Fixed it! I had accidentally created it as a class library instead of a game library - oops. Now I just have one last bug with the Xbox to fix and it should be ready for a release!

Uber:
MIT license is fine by me.

I couldn't open the animation either.  It should have more than a single frame of animation though (it's a 'walk cycle' of sorts - or at least it's supposed to be).  Are you sure you're updating the skinned model's animations?  It animates fine on my end.

It's finished. Really this time! I've upload release v1.00 to my website, here.

And Sowaz: I tried your animation again and it works! It's pretty, uh, strange, but most importantly, it's definitely animating. Woo-hoo!

Be sure to let me know how it works, any bugs and what to improve on next. :-)
It's written in standard Comments On Every Line (TM) notation, so it should be pretty easy to figure out how it works.

Not bad, not bad.

A few notes:
(1) Provide access to some of the Renderer members (or consider making it public, though probably not).  You're going to want to setup the light color/direction for 360.  On the PC that just wouldn't do anything - or it could, if you wanted.

(2) The animations on your YouTube video do look quite stretched.  Maybe it's just my eyes, but you might want to do some comparisons.

(3) When interpolating keyframes, you may want to slerp the rotation component and lerp the translation.  Right now you're just lerping both.  This supposedly gives better visual fidelity, though I'm not sure it's really required.

And things to consider for the future:
(1) Right now, the custom skeleton support is very brittle.  Most notably, you can't rename the joints, since the code relies on their names to do its reorganization.  This is bad from an artist's perspective.

(2) More animation features would be nice, but aren't really the point of this demo.  Proper looping, blending, and combining all come to mind.

Sowaz:

(1) Provide access to some of the Renderer members (or consider making it public, though probably not).  You're going to want to setup the light color/direction for 360.  On the PC that just wouldn't do anything - or it could, if you wanted.

Good point - should be very easy to add. I'll do that now.

Sowaz:

(2) The animations on your YouTube video do look quite stretched.  Maybe it's just my eyes, but you might want to do some comparisons.

I'll do a better video at some point. ;-)

Sowaz:

(3) When interpolating keyframes, you may want to slerp the rotation component and lerp the translation.  Right now you're just lerping both.  This supposedly gives better visual fidelity, though I'm not sure it's really required.

What would be the benefit of this?

Sowaz:

(1) Right now, the custom skeleton support is very brittle.  Most notably, you can't rename the joints, since the code relies on their names to do its reorganization.  This is bad from an artist's perspective.

You mean in your code block where it calculates the bone positions from the skinned model by parsing the joints?.. I'm not sure how to improve that any more than it is. Any suggestions on that would be good.

Sowaz:

(2) More animation features would be nice, but aren't really the point of this demo.  Proper looping, blending, and combining all come to mind.

I'm working on them next!

UberGeekGames:

Sowaz:

(3) When interpolating keyframes, you may want to slerp the rotation component and lerp the translation.  Right now you're just lerping both.  This supposedly gives better visual fidelity, though I'm not sure it's really required.

What would be the benefit of this?

Not much. :-)  The rotation speed would be constant.  It might help the visual quality, but probably not much in a lot of cases.

UberGeekGames:

Sowaz:

(1) Right now, the custom skeleton support is very brittle.  Most notably, you can't rename the joints, since the code relies on their names to do its reorganization.  This is bad from an artist's perspective.

You mean in your code block where it calculates the bone positions from the skinned model by parsing the joints?.. I'm not sure how to improve that any more than it is. Any suggestions on that would be good.

I'm not sure either.  Some kind of mapping from the joint indices to what gets exported.  How that's done, though, depends on the art tool - some support binding 'extra data' to nodes which could be used to store the indices instead of using the name.

Is there any real reason for excluding avatar support in Windows?  I do PC-only development using XNA, and I see no reason (besides maybe some complicated legal one I'm not aware of) for excluding avatar support in Windows.

I'm using Reflector to disassemble the avatar-related dll's, but I don't see where the avatars are made to not render in a Windows environment.  Is there any kind of (legal) workaround to make avatars available in Windows?

On the xbox the XNA code wraps the already existing native Xbox APIs for avatars.

On Windows - even with Live for Windows there are no native avatar rendering or creation or support. So nothing for the managed libraries to wrap. Making it happen would have meant the XAN team porting the Xbox code to windows, and then testing it on lots of combinations of graphics cards.

Shields:

I'm using Reflector to disassemble the avatar-related dll's, but I don't see where the avatars are made to not render in a Windows environment. 

You are assuming avatars are disabled... they simply don't exist so the avatar code just returns having done nothing on windows.

Personally I would have at least liked a skeleton, or box/ellipse based representation but seems like the community is already pretty close to having that so seems like the team made the right priority decision.

Hello... Have you read the last 30 or so posts?
This code renders the avatar bones on PC.
As for the reasons for not supporting Avatars on PC, GFWL doesn't support them so XNA can't either.

Ah, I see, Zman... Well that stinks.  :-/

csharp1024:  I have read the posts.  Have you read mine?  I said I do PC development only, so having the bones doesn't really help.  Thanks anyway.

You can render the bones on PC if you create a model with the bones. Then the animations from xbox can be used for that. The skeleton that Sowaz posted is a start.

csharp1024:

You can render the bones on PC if you create a model with the bones. Then the animations from xbox can be used for that. The skeleton that Sowaz posted is a start.

I think you're missing the point.  He wants to use avatars in his PC game.  As in, he does not want to make a 360 game.  He wants to make a PC game with avatars.

Which you can't do, alas.  It'd be neat, but avatars don't exist on the PC currently.

Uber:
I looked into Blender today; sorry mate, I don't think it's happening.  ^_^  I tried every format that Maya AND Max could export that Blender could import natively, and nothing was happening.  Doing a quick Google search revealed a few forum posts where other people were having issues and nobody was having solutions.

I tried XSI, but unfortunately the import does not preserve the skeleton structure - all the joints come in as unconnected 'null' nodes.  I'll keep trying that angle though, as I like XSI animation.

You can always create the skeleton by hand with the bind pose data you have, though it'll be slightly painful.  At this point, it may be the only option.

Cheers,
--Brian

Dang.

The only other option may be to write a python script to import it - I have no experience with Python so that may be a problem. I'll try posting on the Blender forums later - maybe someone there can help. In theory it should be really easy since we can format the data into whatever format is easiest to read...

I haven't done XSI animation, but is it possible to manually reconnect the bones since you have their positions?

[edit]: Did you see that our wrapper is featured on Ziggyware? Very cool!!

Sowaz:

I think you're missing the point.  He wants to use avatars in his PC game.  As in, he does not want to make a 360 game.  He wants to make a PC game with avatars.

Which you can't do, alas.  It'd be neat, but avatars don't exist on the PC currently.

No i got that.
I'm saying that he can create a model avatar for PC and render that with the bones we have from this project.
Now it wouldn't have the user clothes and such, but it would at least be close.

UberGeekGames:

The only other option may be to write a python script to import it - I have no experience with Python so that may be a problem. I'll try posting on the Blender forums later - maybe someone there can help. In theory it should be really easy since we can format the data into whatever format is easiest to read...

Python's not hard.  Blender's API is a little... awkward:

Armature
Editbone

UberGeekGames:

I haven't done XSI animation, but is it possible to manually reconnect the bones since you have their positions?

I would imagine.  I've been having troubles with the XSI import beyond that... seems a bit wonky.

I've done about a hundred Google and Bing searches (not exaggerating at all) researching every possible way to get a Maya animation into Blender or Milkshape3D. Nothing. Every format I can think of either has a broken half-finished tool, expired links or links to a dead project. :-(

Now I'm trying to write a Python script to get it into Blender that way. Python is actually quite nice, but it's Blender's ridiculous API that is making things much more difficult then they should be. I've gotten some bones imported but they aren't attached to anything and are in a jumbled pile - almost like the bones aren't being transformed to world space before being saved but I know that they are. Bizarre. I'll upload the script and the C# exporter later if I can't get anything working.

I'd like to get something out there that all of the community can use (not just those with really really deep pockets!)... Any other ideas? Is XSI working at all?

I just thought of a very ugly way that it might be possible to transfer it - can you get vertices from Maya into Blender? If so, maybe you can replace all of the bone positions in Maya with vertices, import that into blender, and then recreate the skeleton in there?