Problems off the ground.

Hi everyone I have been playing with my poser the last couple days and doing ok with making animations thats not a problem.

Uploading them and setting them to opperate in sl is not a problem.

The problem lies in orientation and off the ground Animations.

I have made sure that my Animations are all on the zero plane in Poser and when moving from one part of the animation to the other keeping the figure on the same plane.

The problem I am having is.

If I bring in say a crouch animation my big av floats above the ground.

If I bring in one that is the average SL size av its ok.

If I bring in one that is a smallish child size it goes in the ground.


In reverse to that if I bring in one that is the average size

My other avatars IE big one and small one still either float or go in the ground.

I was told that .bvh doesnt really have a way to reference a ground plane when it is exported from poser is this true or is there something I am missing when I export and make my .bvh file format.


Any help would be appreciated.

Sincerely, Shadow

The reason for this is that when SL imports your animation, it normalizes it to the position of the hips in the first frame. SL always assumes that the hips in the first frame are at their normal height and orientation.

If the first frame of your animation has the avatar crouching and leaning forward, SL will normalize the animation such that your avatar is hovering above the ground and leaning backward. The first frame's translation and rotation are always assumed to be neutral, thus a deviation from this will result in translated and rotated animations.

To solve this, have your first frame be a neutral stance (actually just the hips) and start the animation on the second frame.

There's much more information on this in the posts below. Do read through them all.

~Ulrika~

understood and this is why I had asked is none of the forums actually coverd what I am requesting.

Currently when I develope an animation the first frame always is the standing position in poser. I finish the animation out with the position I want to achive. Ie if I want crouching that is the last frame and last key frame of the animation. Also note all this is based on the zero plane in poser. (plane that the default avatars feet are standing on.)

However, even with this done based on the size of the avatar I am using is what seems to base where the height level is on the animation.

For instance my normal everyday av Shadow Weaver is a large muscle bound guy.
In the crouch Animation I made he floats above the ground as though his feet are pulled up from the ground position.

If I use the normal sized Avatar from the newbie section that was recently put in for me the animation is fine.
However, if I use a smaller avatar for the same animation they go in the ground.

There is no way to dictate a set point for the normalization of the animation.

It almost seems to me you have to customise the animation to the size of the avatar your using or you will get fluxiations in height.

and if I may also butt in on Shadow's thread here, I still think there is more going on than hip orientation.

Why do the exact same animations that worked perfectly in preview not work now?

Why, when I use a perfectly zeroed frame 1, then create a walk with the walk designer which is perfectly level, does it start off at ground level then drill its way gradually into the ground like I'm walking downstairs?

Shadow, how are you making the crouch position? Are you bringing the legs up and then dropping the whole figure or are you pulling the body down to the ground?

edited to add:

If you're pulling the legs up and lowering the figure, that could be the problem. I was having the same problems and what I discovered was when you pull the legs up and then lower the body, SL doesn't pick up on the change in the hip height, even though your first frame is what it is supposed to be. If you bring the legs up and turn off the kinematics on the legs, you can pull the body down and it will read it...just make sure that you turn the inverse kinematics on the legs back on before you export.

You can always try drop figure to ground too, but that doesn't always work for me.

Dunno if this helped cause it's kinda along the lines of previous threads, but hey, it was worth a shot.

I did several more tests last night. It has nothing to do with the hip orientation or the .bvh file. Through several methodical tests I have come to a few conclusions.

The Crouch animation I mentioned previously was based on the Poser 2Lo Casual man. This is about the Size of your inital start up Avatar. So its driven off the center mass of the over all Avatar from what I can tell.

Why because I tested on 3 sized avatars in SL.( referenced 3 types of animations one based on the hip selected in Poser. one based on the body selected in poser and one based on the chest selected in poser. The following results held true for each animation.)

A) first avatar the base model Avatar. With normal animations from poser be them static or moving the normal avatar had no problems executing each with precision and not floating. The Crouch worked perfectly as well as the sit and stand and walk animations that I had.

B) second avatar was my normal Shadow Weaver whis is a gargantuan by most standards in SL. Every animation due to his size forced him to maintain a higher center mass thus picking him up off the ground for any animations that required the movement of the body going towards the ground.

C) third avatar was my Troll Shadow (since I was called a troll n sell out figured I needed to make a corrisponding av to fit the bill..LOL ) but when the little guy tried to use the same animation he would go below the ground.

Im convinced its basing off center mass some how just not sure how to reference it yet. I will be calling LL later today to see if we can get it figured out possibly but for now some types of animations or animated poses cannot be used with certain types of avatars. Either that or i am going to have to figure out how to mod the Poser 2Lo male avatar to reflect the size of the avatars in world that they are dealing with to make the poses work correctly. If this is the case. Then that opens a whole new realm of Custom Animations based on Avatar size and height.

If anyone else has any Ideas Lemme know I am very open to suggestions right now as this is getting flustrating.

Sincerely, Shadow

Princess, I was using static stand then pulling the hip down to the crouch position to the base plane that the avatars in poser stand on.