Animation - Where is the ground?

I made my first decent animation, where the character goes from standing to kneeling stance. Everything looks good in Poser, still looks good in the SL animation preview, but once it happens in game I realize the character is kneeling/floating about a calves length above the ground! So I go back in to Poser, and using my patented knuckles length measurement technique I estimate where the "SL ground" is, reupload and it works fine; the character kneels on to the ground. After looking at a lot of the animations floating around I notice everyone else is having the same problem. All the sitting, sleeping, crouching animations in my inventory have the character floating in mid air. I'm not going to jump to conclusions and call this a bug, but it's definitely something animators need to watch out for, and if at some point the Lindens decide it is a bug everyone who's been compensating for the difference will find their avatars sunk in the ground.

How were you able to comensate for the difference? I can sink my poser avatar six feet under and it's still floating a couple feet off the ground in SL.

The yTran on the hips is -2.262 and both feet are at yTran -0.609 (accounting for the rotation of the feet since I'm kneeling). You'd need to go a lot lower for something like sleeping, but I can send you the kneeling .pz3 if you're animations are still floating.

So it seems like expensive prices on animations are justified after all! I like to break my animations up in to really basic things, then chain them with gestures.

Kneel -> Head Down -> Hands Up = Prayer

Kneel -> Hands Up And Open -> Head Forward Slightly = Mature

Considering each one takes maybe three uploads to get the placing right and the joint positioning right since the poser 2 default guy isn't a 100% match to SL avatars, I spend at least $100 per animation.

Interesting... and confusing. I can set the Y trans for the hip in poser only down to a certain point, below which it stops making a difference in SL... which is still floating a couple feet off the ground.

One thing I have noticed is that someone with a shorter av in SL can use the same animation and be closer to the ground (but still not on it) than my av.

See if this works for your av:

http://www.jhurliman.org/storage/kneel.pz3
http://www.jhurliman.org/storage/kneel-02.bvh

strange. Both of those seem to work, though the pz3 file yielded a much faster .bvh than yours. I'm guessing you have poser set to a different fps than I do. I'll have to do some more experimenting to see if I can get mine to work. It's really a shame that there's such a huge discrepancy between poser and SL as it makes creating a good SL animation difficult since you essentially have to animate it in poser incorrectly... on purpose

wierd... I've yet to encounter this problem.

My AVs were floating too.

I have just beeing pulling the hips downward a tad so that any portion of the model touching the ground sinks in a bit. You can learn to eyeball it fairly well.

Maybe ill play around with some of the ytran settings. There is so much about poser I don't know.

Thanks forn the tip.

yTrans is just the transformation (kind of a weird word to use) on the y axis, in this case for the hips. It's the "Poser correct" way of saying pulling the hips down. If you double-click on the hips and go to parameters you can see all the different animation things you can do to hips; move them along the x,y,z axis', scale them (has no effect in SL), bend and twist them etc. The thing that kills animators for SL is that every character has different length legs/torso/hips/etc. so using the center of the avatar for their y position isn't too helpful. Small avatars float and tall avatars sink through. But you can't use one of the feet as a measure because every time the av takes a step the entire model would lift off the ground.

*sigh*

I have no idea what I'm doing differently today than yesterday but I've been able to fix my floating problem. Must have been sun spots or too many microwave ovens in use or something.

I just wanted to chime in with a possible route for 'getting around' this - i realize it's not a 'fix' however. I have a short avatar and she tends to sink into the ground during a lot of even the 'regular' animations. I used the 'invisicube' yesterday in an attempt to get her to not sink in the laying poses - and it worked quite decently.

Might not be useful for everyone, but its made the height differences/floating/sinking bits a tad easier for -me- to deal with.

I think this depends on how you are moving the body around in Poser. One of my first animations i tried was a forward roll. to move the body around i moved the "body circle" or whatever it's called and a few hours later after uploading the animation i realised that my Av body didn't move at all. I think the body moves relativeo the body circle, not relative to the ground in Poser.

I have tested this and it seems to be the case. So if you want to move the body in poser, move it relative to the body circle (which means basically never move the body circle at all or it gets very confusing).

I hope this makes some sense if not IM me and i can explain

The reason for this has been discovered and characterized!

I have finished an online tutorial which explains the phenomenon of floating, sinking, and skating avatar feet in Second Life animations. It provides illustrated expamples and recommends solutions.

The web page can be accessed here:

http://www.ulrikasheim.org/animation/translation.html

~Ulrika~