What am i doing wrong? New to animations...pleae help?

Okay, so i d/led avimator. I followed the tutorial, and saved my file as a .bvh
i did everything it said to the letter, but when I try to upload the animation to see if it worked the screen just said 'failed to initialize motion'. And the upload button is greyed out. See below for a screenshot of it.

What am i doing wrong? Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Really kind of hard to say, unfortunately. Can you open the .bvh file in a text editor and make sure that it actually looks like a .bvh file?

For instance, a properly written .bvh file should start with something that looks like this:

HIERARCHY
ROOT hip
{
	OFFSET 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
	CHANNELS 6 Xposition Yposition Zposition Xrotation Zrotation Yrotation
	JOINT abdomen
	{
		OFFSET 0.000000 6.096000 0.000000
		CHANNELS 3 Xrotation Zrotation Yrotation
		JOINT chest
		{
			OFFSET 0.000000 15.118080 -1.219199
			CHANNELS 3 Xrotation Zrotation Yrotation
			JOINT neck
			{
				OFFSET 0.000000 18.287994 -0.487680
				CHANNELS 3 Xrotation Zrotation Yrotation
				JOINT head
				{
					OFFSET 0.000000 5.608322 0.000000
					CHANNELS 3 Xrotation Zrotation Yrotation
					End Site
					{
						OFFSET 0.000000 5.608314 0.000000
					}
				}

If everything still looks correct, perhaps posting the entire .bvh file (or another sample you make using the same process) would allow someone to troubleshoot the problem a little better.

The only time I've had that error is when I made the animation too long. Check the number of frames you have and the framerate. Both at the bottom left of avimator.

Also the first frame of your animation should be at the default T-pose. Basically just don't touch it. Start animating at the 2nd frame.

If your first frame wasn't the zero rotation T-pose, then this was the most likely cause.

If you had frame 1 set to the default T-pose, then check all the joints and make quite sure they all are at zero.

Start your pose or animation on frame 2 and make sure that you move every joint you want to animate by at least a few degrees. If you do not want to animate a particular joint, make sure it remains at zero rotation on frame 2, then it will be ignored when you upload to SL.

Frame one is used as a reference frame and doesn't show in the animation in SL - but it has to be there as all the motion is calculated relative to the joint positions in the T-pose. If there is no change betwen frame 1 and 2 on a joint, then that joint will be ignored and when you run the animation, the SL default animation (whichever one is running) will show.

I don't use Avimator, I use Poser. So this may or may not be helpful to you.

When I receive the error message you described, it's because I did not check the appropriate .bvh export settings in Poser, and the file ends up much bigger than normal, I assume because it has a lot of extra informatoin that SL doesn't accept.

Investigate the export settings you might have on Avimator (if any), and see if that's causing you trouble.

wow....ok, lol. Im a dunce. I sorted it.

i went back to check, and it turns out that because i had restarted the tut a few times, I forgot a few steps lol. i hadn't set the key frame and had forgotten to leave fame 1 as the reference frame

Thanks for the suggestions