Animation not loading into preview window!

I am just wondering if anyone else is having this problem or might have had this problem before and knows how to fix it.

When going to upload my file, the previewer is giving me an error message saying .........." Failed to initialize motion"

I saved the file correctly as bvh, saved my key frame and everything else I can think of.

I am not sure if it is something I did, or if SL is having one of its moments

I noticed this had not been answered (perhaps it has been elswhere) and I am by no means an expert animator (having only made my first one LOL). But, the very first mistake i made was not having the T pose at the very beginning.

I am almost embarrassed to write this as I truly know next to nothing and you may have already tried that. *S*

The only time I had that error was when I tried to put too many frames into the animation. It could be the t-pose too. Try making a very simple animation and see if you get the same error. And let us know what program you are using to make animations.

I've been seeing this message a lot, and I've been working with Maya. I finally figured out that it's really sensitive to the workflow. You must keyframe every channel on every joint on frame 1, and again on frame 2, without moving anything. Then on frame 2, you can move the joints you're going to use in your animation out of the T-pose. The difference in keyed rotations (and translations, if you're talking about the hip bone) is what tells SL that that body part is going to participate in the animation. Anything that doesn't move between frames 1 and 2 is assumed to be irrelevant.

My problem now is that only frame 2 seems to come in when I try to import it, and my animation is ignored. Still trying to figure that one out.

This seems to happen often when movements are too subtle and/or keyframes are too far apart. Try adding more keyframes and making the movement more pronounced.

Weird. All the things you're trained NOT to do in Maya animation courses. Okay, thanks, Dylan, I'll try adding more keys and see if that helps. The motion is already pretty pronounced, so it must be that I'm very spare on my keyframes.

I put in keyframes every four frames whether they were needed or not, and all I get is a little leg twitch (which is odd, because I haven't animated the legs at all in my test animation). I also made sure the motions were good and broad, dispensing with the notion of subtlety for now.

Still nothing.

I guess the next step is to examine the BVH file and see if it actually contains any joint rotations.

Is there a document anywhere that goes through the workflow for importing animations from Maya into Second Life? The technique described in the notes that came with the SLRig don't work as written. I've redone it meticulously so many times I've lost count now, and while I did get past the complete failure to upload the file, I'm still getting nothing in the animations themselves.


Has anybody else encountered the problem I'm having with Maya?

That's strange. I don't have Maya, so I can only guess at your problem. Is there an export setting to which you aren't paying attention, that causes you to only export the first two frames? Are the sizes of your .bvh files unusually small? When the SL preview screen shows you the running time at the top, is it giving you the running time you expect, or something significantly shorter?

Hmm, good question.

I'll have to check that - the exporter script APPEARS to be reading and calculating all the keyframes. It has to play the entire animation through to read the joint rotations per frame, since it can't pull the keys directly off the controls themselves.

Agh - apparently it's only writing zeros for the rotations, and only one frame of that.

I think this export script is substantially broken, I think that's my problem. I may have to rewrite this script before I can export a thing.

Thanks for your help - at least I know what's wrong now.

It turns out that a critical piece of information is missing from the how-to file included with the rig:

select -r hip;

And THEN select picked object as root, and then export. If you don't have the hip-bone selected, the BVH exporter isn't smart enough to figure out which object in the scene is the root bone of the model. Once I figured that out, everything worked.