Animation issues

Hi there,

I have been playing around with Avimator and QAvimator and have been having a problem with drifting hands and feet when uploading into SL.

The animation appears to be just fine on the stand alone program, but on preview in SL, the hands and/or feet start drifting. One animation even has a little jump part way through, which I just can not find in the stand alone program.

I have followed other hints here in the forums, mainly:

Leave first frame; and
Rotate all joints by 1 in second frame.

Does anyone have any more ideas to fix this.

I don't know if this is the same issue but I was wondering if anyone has tips for fixing the slidey feet syndrome. My feet are planted nicely in Poser but slip around in SL.

Could this be the optimization SL does? If key frames aren't dramatically different, based on all three axis, that motion is optimized out. So with that key ignored, the part drifts from the previous key to the next one that is different enough to show I believe.

There are several things that we can do, make the motion more dramatic (more motion over the same time, or the same motion in less time). Using a lower fps (15 instead of 30 would be twice as much difference, 10 instead of 30 three times as much) since SL smooths between them anyway.

I remember reading the optimization involves all the axis, so add an unnoticeable rotation to another axis? I've done that successfully without having to work too hard to change too much!

I think that generally it isn't a good idea to go above 15 fps anyway. Anything more seems to push the technical capabilities of Second Life and/or most people's computer hardware. If you are using 30 fps, you might find that simply dropping down to 15 fps solves a lot of your animation troubles right away.

To my eyes, 15 fps looks just fine, and 12 fps is even pretty good. I haven't tried less. At 30 fps, what I looked at in my animation program and what Second Life played were never even remotely the same.

1. Animating at 15fps instead of the standard 30fps will help greatly with optimization issues which could be causing the drift.

2. You could also be experiencing the limb drift bug that's been around for a while. Jira entry: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2387

Thanks for your replies.

In order for me to be able to reduce the FPS to 15, I will have to create 2 animations because of the 30second limit.

So, that means finding a script that then goes from one animation to the next and loops.

It does also look like the bug that Luth referred to. *sigh*

You might also want to take a look at frame 2 of your animation and make sure the hands and feet have been rotated by a degree.. so they appear green. If you leave them unlocked they move according to the default animations and that will make the hands and feet move. I'm guessing this is probably not the issue but I thought I'd throw out the suggestion just in case.

Keep in mind that fps does not matter when it comes to the 30-second limit for uploading an animation to Second Life. An 899 frame animation at 30 fps comes in under the Second Life 30-second limit; a 451 frame animiation at 15 fps is over the Second LIfe 30-second limit.

(Further, I have discovered that Second Life is a little flakey, and may not like a 29.93 second animation- there's some sort of fraction of a second Twilight Zone just below 30 seconds.)

Not if you keep the way the animation plays at the same speed. If you 1/2 the fps, the amount of frames in length should be 1/2 so the actual time would be the same. Both would look like they are the same speed but in the 15fps version the keyframes appear closer together in the BVH file so it tricks SL's optimization.

If you don't retime the animation, then you'll just end up with the same issue of the keyframes being too far apart. Sorry, I should have put that in my original post. Damn cold meds. Of course, if that's even the issue at all.

I haven't played with Avimator or QAvimator so I can't tell you the best way to retime your animation. Basically what would need to happen is that you need to 1/2 the space between keyframes. So if you have keyframes at 10, 20, 30, 40 you'd need to change it to 5, 10, 15, 20 ect.

Don't be too quick to blame it on the bug. I just helped someone else a couple of weeks ago with major drifts and after retiming the animation to 15fps it fixed all but a slight torso drift. The bug seems to be very random and (at least for me) sort of rare. The annoying way SL throws out perfectly good keyframes to "optimize for lag" is a far more constant problem.

Thanks, Luth. That was helpful info, although I haven't tried it as yet. (I had actually wanted the animation to be longer, but understand why you are saying it needs to be re-timed).

@ Bree: I did go back and double check that frame 2, and had certainly moved all joints by 1 in that 2nd frame.

Now back to trying to fix my animations.

(anyone know of a timed animation script that runs 2-3 animations in turn and loops back to the first to run through them all again?)