Looping Troubles

I have been working with Poser 6 for about 2 wks now, on and off, and I have been able to create some nice animations. They do what they're supposed to, and they loop beautifully... in poser.

When I try to upload them to SL, they jerk when they loop. I'm not sure what's causing this or how to fix it...

I've tried retiming the animations so that they fall exactlyon the % marks, I've tried resetting the animations so that there's a gap of about 5 frames that are still and identical on either side of the animaiton. Neither seem to have helped any. It seems that if I do a whole looping animation, I can get it to loop properly, but for something that only loops part of the animation, it just won't do it smoothly.

Does anyone know what might be causing this and how to fix it?

Yeah I noticed this too Amelia, haven't found a "fix" for it perse. You can manually edit your anim to drift in the opposite direction of where its drifting in SL. So if you're foot is drifting to the right, and then snapping back into place, make the foot in your anim drift to the left. Takes alot of guesstimation but it helps to cut down on the jerkiness a bit. (read: cut down, havent removed it yet heh)

Hello Archanox, nice to see you. There would be not many ppl who referd ppl to your article as much as me.

Hi Amelia, does the loop animation which you told beautifully in Poser work from the second frame to the last frame? You mean you changed the loop range on the Animation Pallete? I'm afraid you created your loop animation involved in the first frame on Poser.

Hmm, this is one problem I don't have. I just routinely copy frame 2 to frame 899, my final frame. And I "break spline" on both frames to prevent any odd in-between movements, especially in frame 2. Frame 1, of course, must be the default T-shape pose. So two questions for you:

1. Is your frame 2 absolutely identical to your final frame? To achieve this, use the "Key" interface to select frame 2, left click on the the element in question, press CTL C, move to your final frame, click on the corresponding element, and press CTL V to paste. (It's easiest to do this by "collapsing" the figure's elements in the Key interface so that you can copy it all as one "cell".)

2. Do the frames right after frame 2, and right before your final frame, run smoothly? Are there any odd or wild or unexpected movements there? If so, "break spline" on frame 2 by using the appropriate ~ icon in the Key interface. Then copy frame 2 to your final frame to ensure, again, that they are identical.

I'm trying to loop from, say frame 90 to frame 150 of a 200 frame animation. If I'm trying to loop from beginning to end, it works properly. It just seems silly that if there is the capacity to provide a lead-in to a loop and a walk-out to the same loop along with the loop animation, that I should have to upload 3 animations to do the same thing. I COULD upload frames 1-90, frames 91-150, and 151-200 all seperately, and then do some fancy scripting to make the enterance and exit to the animation work properly, or I could get the loop working properly and allow SL to do the enterance and exits for me, as seems intentional from the way animation uploads are set up.

Ricky: because I have had to redo the animation so many times in an attempt to make this work, I've actually set up pose dots for each key-frame of the animation. There are 4 pose dots total, the animation should run as follows:

dot 1, dot 2, loop dot 3, dot 4, dot 3 end loop dot 2, dot 1.

The animation runs totally smoothly in poser, both as a loop from frame 2 through frame 200 as well as a loop from frame 90 through frame 150.

In my attempt to get it to run properly as a loop, I have tried copying and keyframing frames 90-93 and making them all the same keyframe, as well as 150-153. In other words, 90, 91, 92 and 93 are all pose dot 3, as are frames, 150, 151, 152, and 153.

This mostly seems to be exactly what Archanox Underthorn was talking about with the various parts of my character "drifting" in the exported BZH file. They don't go FAR, but they go just far enough that there's a distinct "pop" when the loop goes back to the beginning. Again, if I loop from 0% through 100%, I can get the looping to work totally correctly, it's only when I try to loop part of the animation that I run into problems.

Sorry, my poor English skill did not allow me to understand what Amelia was saying.
I entrust this issue to Ricky.

Hmm, I don't think I tried making the first and last frames of the loop set to break spline. I'll try that when I get home later and let ya know how it goes.

I ran into this thread while searching for 'drifting'... I'm having the same problem with some body part drifting away and it makes looping impossible (without that body part snapping back into place)

I tried to use the 'break splines' mentioned here, which didn't seem to do anything at all and I also tried to adjust for the drifting by moving the arm the opposite direction (arm in this case, but legs have done it too) but the arm moves a bit, then just drifts back to where ever it wants to go but even faster. And please forgive me if I've missed something obvious, both Poser and animating in SL are very new to me... I've read the links in the FAQ here which have sort of helped, sort of confused me..

Here's what I've done: I'm using the model downloaded from here and I made my first and second frames identical and key frames of the starting position I found on Ulrika's tutorial (the one in the downloads section here is different -- the arms are straight out rather than at a 45 degree angle down; Ulrika's seem to look better though). At this point I don't much care if the animation starts out funny... correct me if that's a bad thing to think -- I'm just glad it doesn't make the body go all twisty and crazy. Then at frame 15, I move a couple things, at frame 30 I move things those things a little more. At, say, frame 45, I put a duplicate of frame 15. What I want is to play 2-15, then loop 15-45.

One of the things I move just goes where it wants, almost like it's drawn to some point in space then snaps to where it's supposed to. The rest of the body loops 15-45 just fine but, say, an arm will keep going the direction it was going in 15-30 during frames 30-45 which, by that frame, is way off from where it should be. It looks just fine in Poser...

I feel like something is either bugged or I'm missing something terribly obvious. Thanks in advance for any help. (and yes, I've kicked the computer several times, which helps me, but not my animation )

Hello Breah, welcome to SL.

As the elementary notion, the first frame in Poser is used as a reference of whole parts, that is, it should be all default which is called the default T-Pose. Open "Parameter Dials" and right click each part's right triangle and select "Reset", you can get proper values. This frame's pose doesn't appear on SL.

The second frame is the start point of your SL animation. You can move any parts. Open "Animation Pallete", and you can make sure which part you set keyframes. But don't touch its "Body" and "CenterOfMass". Those keyframes aren't exported into bvh. If you touched and moved them, you wouldn't get proper positon that you expected on SL. And you might need to break spline on this frame. Unless you do that, you would get odd movement of parts on the latter frames because Poser automatically calculated "In between" frames.

I guess you set "Loop In(%) 33.333 Out(%) 100" on the upload window.Did you set any keyframes on the arm on the second frame latter? If not, the default animation overrides your animation. If you can upload your animation here, I can look through it more.

Thanks for the reply

Well, I gave up on trying to have it loop from the middle to the end and it seemed to work okay, but the animation was ultimately too small and fast (which is why I don't think I noticed it actually wasn't okay)

I expanded it, by putting key frames several seconds apart. In Poser it seems to be just fine... I upload it to SL and I have an arm that drifts away then returns at the end of the animation. (It does, however, loop fine)

What I want is to have hands clasped behind the avatar, their weight shift from one foot to the other. Frame 1 is the default pose, the spline is broken in that and the second frame. The second frame is a centered pose.. Then a few seconds later, to the right, centered, left, then the last frame is centered. However, after the next to last key frame, the left arm moves away from the body, then returns in the last frame.

In Poser, the hands are clasped just fine the entire time. I've also deleted all references to body and center of gravity in all frames (but the first, which can't seem to be deleted, and probably rightfully so)

This is also just in the preview before actually uploading it, so it shouldn't be a priority problem of some kind. It just seems like SL is making an assumption or something and making a body part do what it wants and it just goes goofy.

Hi Breah, did you try to contact to me in world? Sorry for not seeing you.SL animation is 30 frames per second like NTSC. If you made your animation of 45 frames, it would play for 1.5 seconds.hmm... Try to play your animation under walking state on the upload window. And if your animation, especially your arm doesn't play correctly even when you set priorty 4, it must be your fault.

Yay!! Thank you again Seagel for your help (in world )

So others may see the ... solution ... my problem was the height (and possibly thickness) of my figure in Poser vs. SL (even though I was using the figure from the downloads here). I had seen problems with the height mentioned in the forums before, but didn't make the connection to a body part drifting and that's what the problem seems to be.

At least I know the problem wasn't me doing something obviously stupid