Newbie "Animator" with Issues

First I Just want to say if anyone has links to some good "how to make animations specifically for SL" tutorials, I'd appreciate it. I just got Poser 5 a few months ago specifically for animations in SL, except it's a pretty complicated program for my pea brain to understand

Anyway, I decided to pick it up again for an avatar pet project, I'd like to make a Jurassic park style velociraptor standing pose and run animation.

Now, as far as poser goes, I've got the stand pose and the run animation, and it looks pretty good in Poser. When I try to upload the BHV to SL, that's when I run into problems. Hopefully this is something simple that I'm overlooking, as it took me a while just to figure out how to make the animations. I'd rather not start over.

But here's the problem: Naturally for the pose, I have the avatar's torso bending over (like he's going to pick something up from the ground). I have the arms/hands bent inwards. And I have the legs doing their running thing. When I upload it to SL, the torso looks like it's completely uneffected by the pose. It stays upright (90 degrees to the ground), the arms are sticking straight down, but the avatar is still 'bent over', and the legs run like they are supposed to, except it looks like the avatar is trying to run up a wall because of the positioning problem.

I know I such at descriptions, so I can probably provide screenshots if I'm not getting my point across.

Any advice? Tips?

OK, I got what you wanted to do. Then, I'd like to know what did you do in Poser.

1. Do you use the SL Avatar?
2. How much frames did you use this animation?
3. Which part of your avatar did you set as keyframes at the 2nd frame?
4. Did you rotate your hip? And make sure not to touch the whole body?

The single most important thing in any SL animation/pose is to make sure that frame # 1 is the standard T pose (figure standing, arms stretched out, legs together). You can get it into this pose by going to Edit-->Restore-->Figure. If you don't have frame 1 like this and you don't want to replace frame one, add an additional frame to the end of your animation. Bring up the keyframe editor (click the little key icon in the bottom right corner). Select all of the frames and then drag them all over one, so that the blank frame is now frame 1 and your final frame stops on the new frame you just added. Then go back to frame one and do Edit-->Restore-->Figure.

With the keyframe editor still open, select frame # 2 (the entire frame). Look on the right hand side of the keyframe editor and you should see a little icon for Break Spline. Click on that to break off frame #2. This will keep frame #1 from being used in the animation in Poser.

When you import the animation, frame #1 is ignored in SL. You don't see it. It is used as a reference of which joints are included. That is why it is important to have the figure in a standard T. If you don't, you will have unpredictable results because only the joints you actually had posed in frame #1 would be used and the rest would be ignored.

I hope this explanation didn't make your head explode. Let me know if you need more help

Thanks Cris, I have been animating for several months. I started using Ulrika's excellent tutorial (do a search on Poser tutorial and the link should come up for anyone looking for it). But I love it when newbies ask questions, I always learn something new.

Yep, that first frame was the problem. Thanks for the help! Now I can make a cute little velociraptor av!

Oh, was that a solution? Thanks, Cristiano. I didn't know what happened when I moved it at the first frame except the impossible to upload. Yeah, I've learned something new.