Tricks for slow and smooth animations?

I have made lots of animations for sl and I am a pretty experienced Poser-user. But every time when I have to make a new animation I get frustrated that some movements are not imported into sl.

I know that small movements and most movements within a short frame range don't work. But why is it that - for instance - a slow arm movement from shoulder to hip over 200 frames is not imported by the sl engine? The movement has enough distance and the frame range isn't too short either.

What is the best trick to get this to work? Because now, every time I feel forced to make my animations faster and less smooth than I would like to.

Because the theory is inaccurate?

A long, slow movement IS little movement! (From frame to frame...)

To make the move more dramatic, shorten the time over which it runs or make the amount of change greater (apparently it looks at all the axis, so adding a change to another might help), or I've also heard decreasing from 30 fps to 15 fps can help, as then you have twice as much change from frame to frame and SL supposedly smooths between them anyway?

Ah okay, I'll try that, makes sense. Now I have 900 frames in my animation. So I guess I have to recalculate that back to 450 and then set 15 fps right?

But still I wonder what most animation makers do. All around animation shops I see smooth and slow animations, sometimes with hands or arms just moving slightly, like a writing animation I saw. Is this done with the 15 fps method?

I'm new to animation and am lucky enough to have a 'mentor' peeking over my shoulder and helping. The first thing she told me was that SL ignores every joint that isn't changed from the initial frame 1 (T position). If it isn't different between frame 1 and frame 2, SL just ignores it completely.

I assume you already know that .. but just in case you didn't, I thought I'd mention it.

Wow this could really help me thanks

Thanks BigJack. That might solve some problems. But what also helped was the change to 15 fps (and from 900 to 440 frames). It seems that the sl import handles the file differently, as Crystal already stated. It still isn't totally predictable and it doesn't work in all cases, but for one of my animations it worked well enough. But making animations keeps on being a process of much trial and error, at least for me it is.

10 fps?

You also might find not using ease in/outs (which create less change frame to frame) might help. For moves so subtle they are getting optimized out, eases probably won't be very apparent anyway.

With experience you'll find fewer problems, as you adjust your work habits to avoid such things to begin with!

so if you know you will need to move something later in the animation, you need to move it (a fragment?) between the 1st and 2nd frames?

why not jus tmove everything jsut a teeny bit then? that sounds time consuming, but if we have to....

but that explains something i've been fighting. i'm a REAL NEWBIE when it comes to animations, so i am listening closely.

Yup.


I have a template that I use where this is already done and saved.


Yeah... I think everyone fights that at first. It's very frustrating, but it can actually be nice if you only want to animate one limb, such as an arm/hand holding an umbrella, for instance. Such an animation then works quite nicely with other animations, like your AO's default stand, etc.


.

Eek!! No!

Because then you'll freeze everything and make more statues rather than animations. You'll stop breathing, avatars won't be able to control/move their heads because you've locked them, it may conflict badly with other animations, etc.

You only want to tell SL what parts you are moving, you do not want to tell it you are moving ALL parts (unless you really are).

Doing what is described above is just as bad as setting the priority too high.

In my experimentation, I have discovered that if the angluar movement between frames is less than about .03 degrees, then SL ignores the movement. This means that if you have a sequence of frames with less than this movement and then one that just barely is above it - you may see the avatar jerk suddenly. The key is to make sure that your transitions are all as smooth as possible and to be able to take a look at the numbers as you go from frame to frame.

I am not sure whether this is true for all the joint movement under the threshold if one of the joints is moving above this threshold - (if anyone has done this experiment, please post it here.)

I have a number of "still" animations where the avatars are breathing or very slowly moving their hands or legs to give a sense of life in a still position (e.g. sleeping or sitting by a fire.)

I have used frame rates as low as 5 per second for subtle movement. This makes the movements between each frame sufficient to be recognized by SL and yet subtle enough to be realistic in the final product. although a frame rate of 5 seems slow, with such subtle motion, it is rather nice and you cannot notice that it is slow in SL because it is barely moving anyway. Since the maximum lenght of an animation is 30 seconds - low frame rates is much easier in long animations.

In all my animations, I cannot tell the difference between 15 and 30 FPS in the quality of the animation in SL. If there is a lot of lag, then High frame rate animations can get bogged down if SL drops the projecting frame rate to 10 or 8 to cover lag.

If you design the animation with lower frame rate, you have a better chance that it will behave properly under all the varying SL conditions.

Experiment with it - you can always see what it looks like in the preview on import without importing it.

I tried to move a leg just 3 degrees, and SL ignores. The same with arms, but can do it with hands por example. I realized degrees had to be more than 5 for SL to recognize the movement. I almost got crazy about this because I'm still learning SL limitations

Also not sure how much ease in /out have to use for a fly/hover, etc. animation on the AO, because I still seeing some of the default SL animaton between them

P.D. Sorry for my english.

Over what amount of time? 3 degrees over 3 frames is a lot more than 3 degrees over 60 frames, right? I would bet the first would show up in preview, while the later probably would not.

I'd also read, probably in the anim FAQ, that the formula totals the rotation on all axis, so adding an unnoticeable rotation on another axis may help.

But what I need is to move 2 or 3 degrees the arm in short time, don't wanna make a slow movement neither use a lot of frames.
Are there any limit on frames we can use? thought lot of frames would be worst for sl...