unintentional reverse-poltergeist animation

I've been trying to get a simple 360* Z axis rotation animation going but have hit upon a snag. I'm having problems rotating the head.

I uploaded my simple animation and ran it in SL and the body looks great. It rotates around and you can walk around just rotating and rotating. The problem is that the head is doing a reverse exorcist by not rotating with the rest of my body. Sure, it looks cool, but it's not what I want.

At that point I added head keyframes for every frame to force the head to go with the rest of the body but that only worked 1/2 as well as I wanted. Now the head will rotate 90* to the left as the body rotates 180*, then the head will snap 180* to the left instantly and then rotate the rest of the 90* for one full loop. It appears that the head wants to face forward even if the body doesn't.

I did a complete kludge/patchjob/hack by over-rotating the head so it rotates twice as much as it should left (then right for the second half), which compensates for the 1/2 rotation in SL. This seems to work except for a little twich in the middle of the loop. This can't be the right solution! Tell me there's a better way!

Does anyone know of a way to get the head to face the direction of the body?
Is this a problem with SL or Poser 4?

A few notes:

1. All the test animations have been imported priority 4,loop,all other settings default
2. It works perfectly without the hack if I'm on a freeze platform
3. I'm using the provided SL Male Avatar and Poser 4

Thank you in advance.

[edit: changed 'poltergeist' to 'exorcist'. Thanks for the correction Ghoti!]

I don't have an answer to the problem, but want to point out I believe its "The Exorcist" you're thinking of, not "Poltergeist".

-Ghoti

by z axis you mean like the sims z axis that being the vertical axis?

If you just want to do that, the easest way is to just open your animation in a text editor and remove all the joints except for the pelvis.

something like this will do that, you might need to change the axis around to get it to work right.

HIERARCHY
ROOT hip
{
	OFFSET	0.00  0.00  0.00 
	CHANNELS 6 Xposition Yposition Zposition Xrotation Zrotation Yrotation
}
MOTION
Frames:     6
Frame Time: 0.033333
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 60.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 120.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 180.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 240.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 300.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000

I tried Strife's short .bvh animation and it shows the same behavior as my first script.
I guess I'll just have to make due with what I have.

BTW, the script actually moves the avatar straight up and doesn't do a rotation. It works if you change:

0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 60.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 120.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 180.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 240.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 300.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000

to:

0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 60.000000
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 120.000000
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 180.000000
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 240.000000
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 300.000000

Hi Timmy,

This is the exact same problem that I said I was stuck in 10 minutes the other day.
You need a tip in order not to move some parts of your body.
At first, you just set a keyframe on your head without moving. But it is not enough for you to just set keyframe on it. You need to move it slightly. Just one degree for x axis is ok.
And you don't have to set keyframes on all frames. The 1st one is for default, so just add keyframe on the 2nd one.
Unless you change parts' position or rotation, Poser won't export it into BVH file.

And you have to do it for both Head and Neck.

Hope this helps you.

Is Poser dumb enough to fall for "change its value, then change back to its original value to consitute a relevant keyframe"?

Though I thought I found this solution by myself, Archanox Underthorn told this here over a year ago.
That was an excellent explanation, I believe.
And talking about falling off info was my mistake. It seems to be a matter of priority. Sorry for annoying you.

I told you above....but I rememberd that I looked through the description of bvh. Yeah, it was acturally different and made sure that it must have lost infomations of the parts that you didn't move.
hmm.... And it is odd that priority is differnt each parts....

Sorry, I was confused. I checked bvh files again and found Poser exported all informations correctly. I think it is the matter of SL's bvh translation.
The 1st frame is used as just a gate between outer and inner. SL seems, however, to throw away following informatiions unless they vary from the 1st frame because of compression or something.
So unless you change the value of parts at the 2nd frame, SL takes thoes parts for no keyframes and deals with lowest priorities. It makes them overridden by the default animations.I believe the point is the difference of the value from the 1st frame's one. Even though the value changed back to the 1st one, it would never be thrown away, I hope.
Mind you, talking about Poser's matter was my fault. Sorry for confusing you. So if you meand that you changed the value once and back to the original at the same frame, i.e. the 2nd frame, it would have no effect.