My First SL Animations - Basic Sword Strikes - Problems with Uploads

Heyla and well met!

I wanted a few sword animations to use with a sword I had made (I'm also learning how to script, so that the sword can be an actual, functioning sword), and since many of the full perm sword animations are way out of my price range, I decided to make my own. Why not? I already had Poser 5, and animating shouldn't be all that different from posing a model. Well, the sword strike animations do, indeed, look just fine in Poser 5, and bvhacker didn't seem to detect or show any problems with the animations, either. However, whenever I preview my animations for upload, some of the frames seem to skip, so that the avatar looks like it's simply flicking its hand, rather than raising its whole arm and actually swinging down. I'm not quite sure what's wrong, as I've made sure that frame 1 starts with the TPose and that the pose in frame 2 has at least one degree of rotation in all the body parts to ensure that all parts are animated. When I exported the bvh file, I selected "scale automatically."

At this point, I'm wondering if the length of the animations has anything to do with the skipping frames? They're about 6 to 11 frames each, at 20 fps. When I altered one of the animations so that it took a whole second to play out, it seemed to look better when I previewed it in upload, although, every now and then, the arm tends to swing out a touch rather than up. I'm still testing to see if the animation length is the real reason for my trouble, but this raises another question:

Shouldn't sword animations be really fast if they're to be used with sword scripting? Or is a 1 or 2 second sword animation actually the standard?

Thanks to anyone who can help me out with this,
Keeper S. Karu (KeeperSKAru)

This part makes it sound like you missed moving a joint, quite possibly the collar.

Hm... are you saying that I need to pose all joints in the arm to actually see the arm move as expected in an SL animation? Does this also mean that I need to make my movements more exaggerated in order for them to look good in an SL animation?

Yes, you must move all the joints or SL will move them for you. Also yes, you need to exaggerate your movements, especially small ones, as SL may not move it if SL deems the move to be too small.

Thank you! I had tried this with my basic overhead sword strike animation, and it looks just as good in SL as it did in Poser. When I inserted the animation into the free sword script I had, it worked much better than I had hoped. Again, thank you for the help!

/me smiles.

I haven't smiled since yesterday when I found out I will probably have to move my store again because my landlord will be losing money under the new OS pircing structure. I love the sim I am in and am sad that I will be losing it.

So, thank you for the smile you put on my face.

I'm very glad I was able to make you smile! I'm sorry you have to leave a place you love. I hope that you find a place that you can love just as much or even more!

I too am trying to create sword strikes now... due to the same reason... I managed to pick up a copy of Poser (6 I think) 2nd hand, but it looks more confusing than qavimator, so I am using that for now.

Any tips would be greatly appeciated. ^^