Tutorial Flux Studio linking a H-Anim skeleton to a single mesh avatar
From Flux Developer Wiki
With the last tutorial we created a single mesh avatar. Well refer to this as the Character Mesh.
Please fire up Flux Studio and load the avatar file. Let's take the front view.
Next thing to do is to hit Character > Create Character H-anim Avatar and choose LOA 1 Avatar (first item) in the menu. I usually uncheck the boxes below, so as to not include Segments and Sites nodes.
Select the Humanoid and use "Zero All" in the translation panel. Put the Character Mesh beside it, scale it down so its size corresponds.
Use Rotation and pick successively the shoulders, elbow and wrist (left and right) in the Vl5 joints, then the hip, knee and ankle joints in the Sacroiliac joint (left and right), to position the "skeleton" to the same spread-out position as the Character Mesh.
For this, you need to see the blue 3D-diamonds which represent the joints. You can either drag the Character Mesh out of the way (use "Zero All" in the Translation tab to put it back later), or you can change the Material (Red default color) to Transparent, by putting value 0.5 in the transparency field of tab "Edit Material"
Go to the GUI panel, in the Hierarchy Tree, drag and drop the Character Mesh onto your Humanoid node. That is, click and drag the IFS and put it over the Humanoid. It should become a child inside Humanoid, that is, on the same level as the HumanoidRoot.
Then, turn on the H-Anim Envelope Editor, its in Character > Enable Character Skin Envelope Editor
Use non-uniform scale, and alternately Front, Above, left-right views to adjust each of the Spheres of Influence (or SOI, the red transparent ellipsoids) to cover COMPLETELY the body
Dont hesitate to translate, rotate, scale these spheres. It's not much a problem if they overlap, it's much of a problem if they leave out vertices !! An uncovered vertex will stay in place when the animated limb moves, creating a "chewing-gum effect" !!
Flux Studio's algorithm takes care of overlaps.
Be sure to click on the spheres in the Object Hierarchy Tree (OHT) in the GUI Panel not on the joints in 3d.
Note : the SOI's only appear if you have enabled the Envelope editor. (Yellow circle at right)
Hit the "Bind Skin to Joints" button, right above to the Enable Envelope Editor. Flux Studio will ask you to fill some info, now is the time to prefix it with a differentiating name, like "John" or "Mr Phillip" ;-)
A few tips for exporting your completed H-Anim character.
1. From Character menu select "Deform Skin as Joints Move" so there is a tick next to it.
2. Find "l_shoulder" Joint and "r_shoulder" Joint nodes and zero the rotations. So your avatar looks something like this. H-Anim standard pose
4. To export from Flux Studio as vrml97 .wrl use the pulldown to change it from .x3d
5. For vrml export open your .wrl file with texteditor/vrmlpad. Search and replace "HAnim" with ""
6. paste these protos below at the top of the files just below #VRML V2.0 utf8.
link
7. save this code as "h-anim-protos.wrl"
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