Linden Lab announced today that SecondLife will get a new avatar skeleton with bones that enables finger, facial and tail animations in addition to the possibility of adding more arms and legs to an avatar.
"We are introducing extensions to the standard Second Life Avatar Skeleton that give you dozens of new bones to support both rigging and animation, and accompanying new attachment points! This extended skeleton, which is fully backward compatible with existing avatars, rigging and animation, gives creators the power to build more sophisticated avatars than ever before.”
The new skeleton is made available to content creators through sample files and a project viewer and will add the following new bones to it:
- 11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
- 6 tail bones
- 30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!)
- 30 bones for facial expressions
- 2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae
- 13 new attachment points associated with the new bones
The new skeleton imported into Cheetah 3D
Full details and download links to the project viewer and demo material in the SecondLife Blog.