Breathing

Hi, I'm working on some AO stands and would like to implement a breathing motion of the chest. Problem: When I make the breathing look natural in Poser, it's getting lost in the upload, i. e. SL ignores the chest motion. Only when I make the movement a lot more pronounced in Poser is it being recognized by SL, but of course then the avatar is panting as if he's just completed a marathon. It must be possible to get a natural breathing motion in SL though, I've seen it many times. So how do you do it?

I think by default the idle animation has breathing. So if you just dont keyframe the chest joints at all and give it a normal priority setting, It should pretty much breathe automatically.

In order to reduce animation size, your animation is optimized when uploaded in SL.
All small animations (like breathing) are ignored. (You can try to reduce the framerate of your animations so modifications between frames are more important)

It's more accurate to say that the animation curves for each joint are reduced to lossy equation form. The gross motions are kept, but the smaller ones are "fuzzed out" by the process. This is done to improve the speed at which animations are downloaded to the users' client software - what we see is a mathematical approximation of the animations we uploaded, not the original animation itself.

Another factor is that while we animate to 24 fps, it's actually (and unfortunately) rare that a users' client will actually run at that speed. Nuance is lost because frames are dropped in an effort to keep the playback period for a given animation constant.

So, really, you're fighting not only the lossy nature of the animation compression algorithm, but playback speed capabilities client-side as well.

Yes, it's the breathe_rot motion generated on the fly by the SL viewer, not a static animation asset. It's at priority 1, and so it's easily overridden by anything else that controls the chest :/

If you can get your animation software to cooperate, that still might be the way to go, remove the chest from the joints your animations touch.

I've done it both ways, my pose package allows for the natural breathing to show through (because I didn't want to be a frozen statue and my customers want to appear more natural ) while sits and prone poses and things that require having the chest rotated have to have it animated obviously...simply work around the "optimization", which is good because I found too subtle breathing isn't seen from a normal camera view anyway. Perhaps slow your animated breathing to not appear like panting?