LIXA¶
- LIXA
- Status
- Comparison to BVH
- Lixa Exporter
- Installation and Usage
- *3ds Max*
- *Maya*
- Using LIXA in VastPark
- Reference Links
- Comments
The LIXA (Lightweight XML Animation) format is an XML animation format used in the VastPark platform for bone-based animations.
It offers a number of benefits over other animation formats, namely:
- The ability to define "Groups" of bones, allowing specific animations to play on specific bone groups independently.
- Lightweight design, giving the artist the ability to define which transformations are included for each bone, keeping file size to a minimum.
- Human readable layout, making it easy to copy and paste animation sequences from one file to another.
Status¶
In production
Comparison to BVH¶
BVH is a popular animation format. LIXA has a similar layout and coordinate description. A benefit of LIXA is that it is easy to hand edit, something nearly impossible with BVH unless it is your animation file. One advantage of BVH is that it is highly compressed, though LIXA only writes out the keyframes it needs to so depending on the file and the number of moving bones, either one can be a smaller file. Given that LIXA has been influenced by BVH, it would be easy to export back and forth between them.
Lixa Exporter¶
Installation and Usage¶
3ds Max¶
Download: LIXA Exporter for 3ds Max
Once installed, and Max has been restarted, help can be accessed via 3ds Max's "Help" menu, selecting "Additional Help" and choosing "LIXA Animation Exporter" from the list.
The help file is currently still in development, however contains enough information to get started exporting animations.
Maya¶
A Maya version of the exporter is currently under development.
Using LIXA in VastPark¶
VastPark uses the LIXA animation file format for its avatar animations.
Once the zip file containing the LIXA .xml file has been placed online, it can be referenced in the plugin via the AnimationSource parameter, for example:
<Plugin Name="AvatarController" Enabled="True" Source="...">
<Parameter Key="AnimationSource" Value="http://www.example.com/animation-file.zip"/>
</Plugin>