Several animations, part 2

[solar hull]

I was told in a pervious thread that if I wanted several animations to play at once and to loop they all have to be idle. Which I understand.

I was told to rig everything inside of 1 idle animation time line (sparkles, ear twitches, a dancing animation, a heart beat animation all sitting in one single animation file). So they would all play at once upon activation.

But from there I'm a bit lost. I closed my threat pre-maturely and am not sure if I can re-open it without penalty..

So my questions from here, assuming all my idles are animated and working on one singular idle file..

1.) How do I mix and match them, if they are all playing at once?

Example: Ear twitches + sparkles or Ear twitches + dance or dance + sparkle. Or Dance + ear twitch + sparkle.

2.) I spoke to a rigger previously that mentioned some of his idles are physics based, rather than animations. So he can run the phys based animation along with any other random idle.

How does that work??

I understand the concept of making an empty animation parameter that you set as an input. That way it takes from your physics. But you still have to make an animation file for it.

Hence in that case you still have 1 idle file and can't use others.
I asked the rigger specifically how he made this work, but he's busy with commissions and hasn't been able to reply.

If anyone has visual references, that would help as well 🙇‍♀️

[candid ocean]

Are you on the free or paid version of live2d?

[solar hull]

paid!

[candid ocean]

I figured but wanted to check as this method can't be used on free

For the "ear twitches" you should be able to use this method to change between different ear physics, which would allow you to have the regular ear physics and then the one that's linked to the animated input:

https://youtu.be/EJg9IHv86iE?si=MOzcOA7IsQsonzoA

For things like sparkles you can just leave the animation for them running and have the toggle simply turn the opacity off

[solar hull]

That sounds good. I've done conditional phys for tail and ears.

But what do you mean have a toggle for the opacity for the sparkles animation?

I put the tail/ear aniamtion into one file together.

Then the sparkle is a different animation. So 2 total.

Not sure how to change the opacity of the animation once I made things exported to VTS.

Plus, if these are both supposed to be looping, there can only be one looping animation playing at a time right? So how would that work with 2 seperate anim files that need to loop?

[candid ocean]

Can you show me the sparkle animation?

Bc hypothetically what you would do, is rig the tail, ear, sparkles onto a singular animation file

Then you create a deformer on top of the sparkles (or use the sparkle art layer is fine too if it's not already keyed to anything), and rig it to a "sparkle toggle" parameter

When "sparkle toggle" is off, the opacity is 0. When it's on, opacity is 100

Then in VTS you setup the hotkey for "sparkle toggle" and turn on the "stop after sec." button, and set it to turn off after however long you want the animation to play for

As for the dance animation, I haven't done many full body anims for models so someone else would have to advise you on that as I don't want to give advice I'm not confident on

[solar hull]

My L2D files are acting up, I can't load the sparkle animation. So I'll have to get it a bit later.

But what you're saying is

• Rig tail/ears/sparkles on the same file. Soeverything is moving at the same time
• Have one super big deformer over top of all the sparkles that toggles opacity ONLY. This param will be the on/off switch in VTS
• Within VTS I would take the animation file and load it as an idle (because I need it to loop)

After that,how do I set up the on/off toggle for the sparkles?

[solar hull]

No worries that's fine! I figured with idles I may just eat the loss with possibly not having the twitchy ears/tail.

My tail is rigged to breathing anyways...so trying ro figure out how to make it move smoothly with body's movements would be a bit confusing to me anyhaow haha

[candid ocean]

Yes! The toggle would be for the "sparkle toggle" parameter that has the opacity set to it. Then in the same place where you select what hotkey to use for the toggle, there is a button that says "stop after sec.". If you turn that on, you can input how many seconds until the toggle turns back off (and when it turns back off, the sparkles will become invisible again)

You could ofc instead use "stop when key is let go" which would allow the vtuber to keep the sparkles on for however long they hold down the key

[solar hull]

I have my normal sparkle animation playing in VTS currently as an idle. It doesn't have anything rigged to it other than the sparkle animation params because I can't edit the file plus like 2 opacity toggles.

Within the animation there is a param that turns on the sparks within the eyes opacity. And one that turns on the sparks that will glow opacity.

I created a new expression that just toggles the opacity of the sparkles within the eyes. But it doesn't turn off when I have the idle playing. Did I do something wrong?

[candid ocean]

The animation itself can't have the opacity toggle keyed or else it doesn't work

[solar hull]

So my opacity toggles would be the....
Eye sparkles
Extra sparkles

The "extra sparkles" are animated. But the opacity of the "Extra sparkles" isn't keyed. Only the movement.

SO, if I want the eye sparkles to be active WITH the extra animated sparkles thats where I turn on the opacity toggle for the animated sparkles?

And while all of this is happening I still have the tail/ears animations playing because they are permanent idle animations keyed on the main animation file