Let's do the animation jitter

I'm not a budding Chuck Jones, so appologies in advance for mostly not knowing what the hell I'm talking about.

Using QAvimator I've set up a not too complex animation of someone going from standing to kneeling on the ground. The first version looped to the final frame and worked great but seemed overly static so I tacked another 60 frames onto it and put in a few minor head movements. Every other joint remains where it was. Then I adjusted the loop so that it started at the proper frame.

The start and end frame of the loop are identical and the "fidget" is located equidistant between the start and end of the loop.

In QAvimator it looks great.

In SL... Not so much. Despite the fact that all of the joints in the arms and shoulders are locked, the arms and hands start floating up as the frames pass and when the loop hits both hands drop suddenly back to the proper position. Let me reiterate now that there's not a single fram of arm or hand motion inside the loop

I've played with the Start and end frame for the loop, reducing the size of the loop by almost 50% but only managed to make the fidget jumpy as well.

Then I eliminated everything between the start and end of the loop. Same thing.

Then - mostly at this point cause I'm a little crazy - I copied the start frame of the loop into every frame between the start and end of the loop.

Same thing.

So what the heck? I mean... What. The. Heck?

Thanks for any sanity saving suggestions

You said you fixed the joints in the arms and shoulders - you may need to fix the joints in the collar, chest and abdomen as well.

Another thing could be the priority of upload - this needs to be set high enough to over-ride the default animations - what did you upload it at?

There could be optimsation issues as well - but your copying the start frame of the loop into every frame between the start and end of the loop, ought to have eliminated that.

That's all I can think of - hopefully others will have further insights into this.

I'm afraid I had mostly the same problems: tried everything, even had advice from Deira here, but to no avail. I think there are issues with uploading animations via the most recent clients or possibly QAvimator doesn't work as it used to. At any rate I can't find documentation in SL or the QAvimator forums to clarify what exactly is going on.

I did find a thread somewhere about a problem called 'torso drift' that has crept back into SL animations. That seems to be the problem you are describing with hands and arms on your animation.


One thing I am pretty sure of is that the extra frames could easily have reduced interpolation between one frame and the next: SL optimizes the bvh files on upload so movement between frames disappears below a certain threshold and limbs that move too slowly get locked.

Having said that, I recently spent more than 2,000 lindens and a vast amount of time trying everything I could to get a fairly simple animation to loop properly after the intro. I gave up on the pretty certain grounds that something needs to be fixed in SL (surprise, surprise) or I perhaps need to invest in Poser if I am going to make any headway with animation.

Unfortunately my respect for animation in SL has diminished somewhat also, because I have started to find subtle variations of these issues in every other animation I see, which is alarming since it is such a fundamental feature of virtual life.

Hi Deria and Ephraim, and thanks for responding.

Originally I had locked the entire pose and was getting the same thing. I read in another thread that the default SL breathing might be causing issues - plus the breathing would be a nice additional "fidget" so I tried unlocking the abdomen, chest, neck and head. Same thing.

The animation is priority 4, and the extra frames take the whole thing up to 120 total frames. While I do tend to stick mainly to static poses, I have in the past done several 500 plus frame animations without this happening.

How the heck do the folks at Sinewave and the other big animation companys manage it?

So, you are trying to loop only a portion of an animation? Unfortunately that's broken right now, the workaround would be to use one animation for the one-shot portion and then play a second separate for the loop.

An attempted fix was put into the 1.22 release candidate viewer, you can download that and see if there is a difference, but there are also reports that it's still broken there.

More: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2387

Sine Wave use motion capture to create animations, which is so incredibly expensive that only film companies and professional effects studios can afford to buy and maintain the equipment. I believe there are cheap alternatives but I haven't looked into them.

Apart from dances, I personally don't much care for motion capture animations: I invested in quite a few before I realised they just don't work right in AOs and often they are not edited sufficiently well to loop even as stand-alone animations. I get the impression many mo-cap animations have been created during downtime at the kind of places mentioned above without much thought about how they will fit in with SL.

I much prefer a good hand-made animation that takes the limitations of SL's frame rate and the effect of motion on certain sensitive joints of the avatar mesh into account.

Oh not the mo-cap, that's tons more than I need for my little thing. But with all those motions how do they manage a clean upload and functioning animation in A Bug's Life?

Err, Second Life

I have no idea. I guess there must be some animating skill involved whereby they correct or remove any joint movement that isn't registering on the uploaded bvh file.

I think that SL is having too many issues with animation for a newcomer like myself to get into the field at this point, which is very frustrating. The JIRA Viktoria cited above explains quite a bit about the issues involved.

Even when things are working right, a good animation is a fine balance of a number of elements, so without having much experience, it is difficult to understand how much of a faulty animation is due to oversight on my part and how much of it is down to SL.

When the arms start floating up until the loop hits it sounds like the arms not locked at the beginning of the animation. At frame2 make sure you move the arms a bit. Sometimes an animation is unfixable and you have to start from scratch.

I think Viktoria's got it right. Looping animations in SL has always been flakey. You can't seem to match the loop in SL precisely with a frame, no matter how hard you try. You have to loop the whole thing, or have a big static pose for a bunch of frames at the beginning and end of the loop. In practice this only seem useful for things like lead-in to a static pose... that's all I've ever seen anyone successfully use it for anyway.

In my experience the biggest problem with uploading animations aside from the aforementioned loops bug is the "optimization" process, which really only comes into play when uploading animations that feature slow and/or subtle movements. A company like Sinewave, which mostly sells dances, manages to sidestep this issue most of the time since most dances don't involve a lot of slow subtle motions.

To check out some real artistry in this particular area, look at Craig Altman's couples' stuff (Bits And Bobs). His work is handmade to the best of my knowledge, and features in many cases some exceedingly delicate movements. I do animation in a similar vein (although I would never claim to match Craig's quality) and I can attest to the fact that outsmarting the uploader is a big pain in the neck that involves a lot of trial and error and a fair bit of planning.