Medhue Animations

Medhue Bento Elephant for Second Life

Here's a look at my new Bento Elephant for the virtual world of Second Life. This elephant uses the new Bento skeleton, and because of the uniqueness of the trunk, I needed to create a control rig to be able to animate it correctly.

 The control rig only controls the trunk, mouth, and ears. This is why I've made those bones different colors.

 The elephant is also very customizable using the Second Life body shape sliders. Not all the sliders work, but the range of customization is pretty vast. The images below show the range of customization possible.

The elephant comes with a HUD, with special animations. 1 set of those animations controls how long the tusks are. It also includes a number of facial expressions, and full body animations. In the video below, I go through all the different animations in the elephant and in the HUD.

Have fun with the elephant and I'll see you in Second Life!

Purchase the elephant here:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Medhue-Elephant-Bento/10246984

 

Second Life, Project Bento, and Large Wolves

Over the past year, Linden Lab, the company that runs and develops Second Life, has been working on a new skeleton for their virtual world, dubbed Project Bento. The goal being to add more bones for popular items like wings and tails, but also to add fingers and facial bones for avatars to be more expressive. The end result has become so much more.

Not only do we get all these new bones, but with a few tricks we can reconfigure the rig to follow any skeleton one can think of, including spiders, centaurs, and dragons. Hind bones, which are those 2nd set of legs, were added and gives an extra set of limbs to do whatever we want with. Just below is an example of using the rig in a completely unconventional way. I'm using a control rig to get the ears and trunk to move in a way more suitable for an elephant.

Wait! Bento's not done yet!

Our meshes, especially the face, are now affected by a good number of the body shape sliders. In Second Life, we have Body Shapes. The Shapes gives us access to sliders than can change parts of our bodies and parts of our face, meaning bigger eyes, or longer nose, and so on. So, with Project Bento comes complete customization of mesh avatars. In my opinion, this is HUGE! It's a game changer. As a creator in SL, I could not be more geeked. As a consumer, who doesn't love customizing their avatars?

As you can see, the range of wolves that can be created is quite wide.

This brings me to the point of this whole blog, which is to announce my first Bento product!

YEP!!!! Giant Talking Wolves!!!!!!

It comes in a range of colors, and I give you the textures. The mesh has different SL Faces, so you can mix and match the textures to create any combination. The wolf also utilizes Bump map textures, as well as Specular map textures to enhance the look of the fur and overall realism.

I use more than 50+ animations to control the wolf, many of those being short and looping but combine together to form random ear, tail, and facial movements. The wolf is quite expressive, and I give 4 or 5 expressions to trigger from a HUD. Speech gestures allows the jaw and face to move as you use voice in Second Life. This feature alone really does help to sell the feeling of the wolf really being you. Combine this with the shape customizations that are possible, and now we have something very compelling for the people of Second Life.

Pick up 1 of my MEGAWolves on the Marketplace and give it a whirl. Comes with eyelashes too, for the ladies. Be sure to use a Bento compatible viewer, or you will not see the wolf properly. Bento hopefully goes live, meaning in all the viewers, soon, so if you are reading this months from now the viewer won't be an issue. Links are below! Have fun!

Medhue MEGAWolf - Bento

Second Life Bento Viewer

P.S. If you are a creator looking to make Bento Avatars, I'd suggest picking up an add on or a plug in to help you along. Many are being developed for different programs. I'll post the links to those below when I find them.

Avastar2 - Blender

Written by Medhue Simoni — October 01, 2016

Snakes Everywhere!!! Especially in Unity3D!

Well, maybe not everywhere, but definitely in Secondlife, and in any Unity game. Although, I did learn, in the process of creating these snakes, that I have rattlesnakes in the woods around me. I live in Michigan, and was very big into mountain biking through all the back woods of my local parks within an hour of me. Never was I informed that there are rattlesnakes in Michigan. I'm not sure that I would have been so reckless, speeding through the woods, alone, and only 1 mistake from major injuring, after crashing massively, which happened many times. At least I did wear a helmet, lol.

 

On to business.... In the past couples of week, I have released a number of different snake products. I was asked, by a client, to create a rattlesnake for their game, and considering what is possible in Unity today, I decided that it made sense to not only make a rattlesnake, but that same model could morph into any snake possible. In theory and in practice, it was possible, but not quite as straight forward as it would seem. When creating all the different snake heads, such as a cobra, or viper, or python type of head, there can be some major differences. I simply altered the scaling of the bones of the head and jaw, to create the different head types. This creates problems, because whether I include scaling of the bones in the animations or not, Unity's engine reads it. This being the case, I had to create different animations for every snake type, which I guess isn't such a bad thing, as snakes do not all move alike.

http://www.medhueanimations.com/collections/frontpage/products/medhue-snakes-for-unity3d

 

These snakes are not really low polygon, but also do not have excessive geometry. Snakes bend and twist in pretty extreme ways, and require more polygons and bones to be able to bend in those ways. The snakes are low enough that it should not be an issue for most games. Here's a look at their wireframe:

 

There are some snakes that are more popular than others, 1 being the cobra. I have separated the package out into some individual snakes that developers might want or need. Currently, you can purchase a cobra, rattlesnake, python, or buy the full package, which includes body and types of 6 different snakes, head types of 7 different types of snakes, and textures packs for 9 different snake skins. The full package includes an anaconda, black mamba, cobra, coral snake, king snake, python, rattlesnake, and viper. Using all these different morphs(blend shapes), you could create almost any snake possible.

http://www.medhueanimations.com/collections/frontpage/products/medhue-cobra-for-unity3d

http://www.medhueanimations.com/collections/frontpage/products/medhue-rattlesnake-for-unity3d

http://www.medhueanimations.com/collections/frontpage/products/medhue-python-for-unity3d

 

I have also created a Youtube video that shows off the snakes and the full package in Unity.

 

 

In the virtual world of Secondlife, I have used the cobra version of this model to rig it to the Secondlife skeleton. Not an easy task, and very limited in bones, but I still very much enjoy being a cobra in SL. Plus, Secondlife has many very cool features, like gestures and animations triggered by voice that really makes being a cobra an interesting and unique experience for both you and your friends.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Medhue-Cobra-Bento/10549161

 

Have fun!

Medhue

 

 

 

We now accept Bitcoins!!!!

We are happy to announce today that we are now accepting payments in Bitcoins. Just procede through the normal checkout process and you will see an options to pay in Bitcoins. 1AKYrRB8c35UcwrmoGA5SBmJzCSSrSjeXQ

 

 

The Lycans are Released!!!!

This packages comes with the avatar, and an animation hud that handles all his movements. He is only available in the virtual worlds of Secondlife, and InWorldz. The avatar and animations were a 2 month project to model, rig, and animate him completely. Plus, there was the added work of clothing options. His Jaw is rigged and weighted to his skull bone, which allows me to animate it properly.

There was also the matter of giving him fur. This can add alot more processing for computers to render, so I tried to keep the fur to a minimum.

It was truely a labour of love, no matter how many hours I spend weighting and reweighting him. It definitely helps to have fur on him, and really adds to the feel of being a Lycan. I also made some hair options, but I have not released those to the public yet.

Most of the animations work was reworked inside of Blender. I purchased the Avastar plugin for Blender, which makes the process of rigging, weighting, and animating, so much easier. The plugin was made to help with the creation process for Secondlife characters. Being able to retarget my werewolf animations onto this avatar, and animated directly on him, made the whole process a joy. Of course, this character comes with over 100 animations total, so it did take some time.

I got a little help, from October Lewsey at Definitive Urban Designs, on some of the texture work, but most from the original release was done by me. Since Secondlife now allows us to use bump maps and specular maps, I took some extra time to add some detail to his skin, and other features. InWorldz doesn't have bumps and speculars, so you won't see any of that in there.

InWorldz has a system they call Dreamshare, which allows you to view 3D objects on a webpage, and interact, or turn them arounbd and zoom in. It's pretty interesting, but I have seen some texture bugs in them, and it has a low limit on polygons. You can see my Lycan avatar on this webpage, but it doesn't show his fur. Lycan on webpage

Here is a look at some of the animations in Secondlife, and how the AO HUD works.

Come be a Lycan in Secondlife or InWorldz!!!!

Click here to purchase him for Secondlife!

Click here to purchase him for InWorldz!

I hope everyone enjoys him!

Medhue

Written by Robert Lopp — September 08, 2013

Millenium SubDragon Animation Update!!!

 

 This morning, I just updated the Mill SubDragon Animation Set with all new AniBlocks, and Poser files. Being that the SubDragon works perfectly in Poser, I've included Poser(pz2,hz2,fz2) files for most of the same animations that I include in DazStudio. Those that love their AniBlocks should be very happy to see that their Dragons now have more options. 

On top of giving the users more file formats, I've also made some corrections with some of the wing movements. IMHO, the wings on the SubDragon are a bit too restrictive, and doing any kind of realist animations outside it normal bounds gets messy. So, I tried to stay within the bounds with these corrections, with there being on 1 real exception. In both DazStudio and Poser, you will need to loosen or turn off the up down limits on the right and left WingShldr bone for the flying animations to look as intended.

Everyone that purchased the Mill SubDragon Animation Max Set should have gotten an email to their download links. Those links have been reset so that all past purchasers can download the new version. Your original download links should also work for the next month or so.

Have fun,

Medhue

Zombies are here!

 Yesterday, I released the new Zombie Animation Set. This set will give you most of the animations you would need to animate a zombie for most scenes. It also comes with a set of poses. You have 3 different walks, actually 4, if you include the crawl. All the animations come in Aniblocks too. These zombie animations can be purchased in Secondlife at my main Medhue Animations store, or online here.  For DazStudio click here to purchase the set.


Here are a video that show all the animations.



Here is a video showing some of the motion capture clean up and animating of the feet, hands, neck, and head, with expressions.



Happy Halloween!!!!

Medhue

The Lycans are Spreading

 I'm are proud to announce that we have released the MS Lycan Animation Set. Medhue Animations is known for it's Werewolf animations in virtual worlds and now we have created werewolf animations for the Genesis MS Lycan in DazStudio. All the animations that anyone would need to create a werewolf movie is included in the set. Werewolves hold a special place in my heart, not only because I enjoy animating them, but also because my werewolf animations were a key factor in the success of Medhue Animations. Since the sale of my first werewolf animation override in the virtual world of Secondlife, Medhue Animations has become the leading seller of werewolf animations and we hope that the Daz community will enjoy what I've created for the DazStudio program.

Enjoy, and have fun!!!!

Medhue

 

Written by Robert Lopp — October 02, 2012

Since the Site Launch

 We've been hard at work putting together products, and thinking up new products for the site. Since the lauch, we have released 6 new products. These include a variety of different motion capture animations, keyframed animations, and poses, as well as some morphs

There is much more to come. This site and the delivery system has proven to be quite reliable and we hope that our customers enjoy what we have put together here. We are still working on some other products sets for the site, which will be released as time permits.


Have fun!!!!

Medhue


Much more coming!!!!

Oh boy!!!! I'm very excited to have our Marketplace up and running. Recently, I've been jumping around from character to character making different animations for all of them. Now that the site is up, I can start collecting many of those into packages for this site. I guess it would be good for me to tell ya what character animations you might be seeing on the site soon. Hopefully, I'll have Millennium Horse, Lion, Cat and Dog animations. As soon as I have time to put some packages together, they'll be up on the site. Also, these might be smaller packages to start with, but if I put out a larger package, I'll allow customers to just pay the difference to get the larger package. I like to have different priced packages anyways. This way there will be something for everyone's price range.

Thanks again for coming by the site and reading my little blog. More to come soon!!!

Medhue