I'm wondering if Oculus is planning to add new features to the Avatar SDK anytime soon? A few things that would be nice to have:
1) Make it easy to replace the mesh with a custom mesh, and/or replace the material with custom materials. 2) Make it easy to smoothly transition to and from a custom grip pose. As it is, there doesn't even appear to be a method that can be called to update the pose, I would have to access the variables directly. 3) Make it easy to isolate components of the Avatar (for example, I would like to render a hand in a position that I choose, with only the grip pose being updated by the Avatar system).
I'm sure that I could hack some of these features in myself, but that does not seem ideal (it seems that any hack would need to start out by duplicating a lot of the structure that is automated by the SDK, and my hacks might break if the Avatar system is improved / changed later). Also, I bet a lot of people would find them useful. It would save us from re-inventing a lot of wheels.
It seems to me like the best way to handle smooth hand pose transitions would be to animate the pose transform hierarchy that you feed into the avatar sdk. You could make one frame animation clips out of the static poses and feed them into mecanim with whatever blends you want, then apply the output as an animation to a copy of the hand transform hierarchy in your scene, finally feeding that transform into the avatar custom hand pose. This might work now, though I haven't tried it. The hand pose helper scene kind of works this way, except you manually rotate the bones instead of animating them.
The big problem currently is there is no way to blend in and out of the built in hand poses smoothly, even if we can blend between custom ones. We would have to dig into the sdk code to extract the skeleton and do some manual interpolation, far from ideal.
I'm wondering if Oculus is planning to add new features to the Avatar SDK anytime soon? A few things that would be nice to have:
1) Make it easy to replace the mesh with a custom mesh, and/or replace the material with custom materials. 2) Make it easy to smoothly transition to and from a custom grip pose. As it is, there doesn't even appear to be a method that can be called to update the pose, I would have to access the variables directly. 3) Make it easy to isolate components of the Avatar (for example, I would like to render a hand in a position that I choose, with only the grip pose being updated by the Avatar system).
I'm sure that I could hack some of these features in myself, but that does not seem ideal (it seems that any hack would need to start out by duplicating a lot of the structure that is automated by the SDK, and my hacks might break if the Avatar system is improved / changed later). Also, I bet a lot of people would find them useful. It would save us from re-inventing a lot of wheels.
If any of these are already easy to do (hopefully in a non-hacky way), I would be interested to know how people are handling them...
Are you talking about using Unity? With C++ you definitely don't have problems 1) and 3). As I haven't looked into custom poses I can't really comment on 2)
