keyframes being lost on upload

Okay, here's a really annoying problem that I actually first noticed months ago and then forgot about because it hadn't been affecting any other animations since, only just tonight it's happening again.

The upload appears to be dropping keyframes, resulting in movements that glide over the entire animation instead of moving to a position and holding that for the rest of the animation. In other words, the entire animation is 70 frames, and the abdomen tips forward from the beginning to frame 15, then that position is held for the rest of the animation. It looks great in Poser, but when uploaded to SL it becomes just a continuous slow movement over the entire 70 frames, like the keyframe on 15 is lost.

I forget if a solution to this was already explained and I can't find the old thread. Does anyone know how to fix this, or is it a bug?

Johan

There are no keyframes in SL. Poser (and other animation programs) uses keyframes to define particular points in the animation and then interpolates between them. You export animations to bvh files which don't use keyframes. They simply define every single frame individually. What I think this means, is that your problem must be in the export process. Have you imported the bvh back into poser and looked at it?

I know that bvh has a keyframe for every frame, that's what makes this especially perplexing. Yes, I imported the bvh back into Poser and it looks fine. Apparently the SL upload is simply ignoring the animation data for the abdomen (and just the abdomen; the arms and head are fine) until the keyframes near the end of the animation.

Perhaps I need to manually set a keyframe every frame for the abdomen, to force SL to pay attention to those keyframes? Dunno, I'll try that tonight.

ADDITION: I'm also going to try copying all the keyframes and pasting into a new file. I know that's kinda silly, but this animation did work at first and then stopped working in SL after one tweak I made, so maybe that'll make a difference.

ADDITION 2: Okay, I just found a workaround. If I set some of the keyframes to Linear interpolation, instead of Spline interpolation, the animation works right in SL. It's pretty random which keyframes to change, and it's trial-and-error to figure out which keyframes to adjust; changing them all just breaks it again.

I don't remember the details but the SL importer drops frames that changed only a little (or not at all) compared to the previous frames. Should be described somewhere in animation FAQ

I had this problem running an animation for someone in the weapons development group I'm in. I had started with Poser's default 30 frames a second for the animation. Showed fine there, fine in Avimator, and fine in SL's upload preview.

The animation, once loaded (an elbow bash), would drop the actual final lunge and impact animation.

My recommendation (and this seems a common workaround) is to cut your framerate to 15 or even 10 and retime the animation to match. SL doesn't drop frames quite the same way as one would expect, so sometimes it drops those one or two critical frames in the animations and effectively breaks it.

When I did this for the elbow bash, it cleared the problem right up.

I agree, try dropping your FPS to 15 FPS. I get a more faithful rendition that way. I don't know technically whether SL "drops frames" or something else, but it certainly doesn't faithfully import every aspect of your lovingly-crafted Poser .BVH file. The best workaround is to limit the number of keyframes you use per second. I limit myself to two or at most three keyframes per second.

So if you have a 30 fps animation that has 180 frames, you change the fps to 15 you must retime and change the source frames to 90 and the destination frames to 90? is this correct?

I don't remember where I read it, but the official SL animation documentation states that some keyframes are lost at import when movements are too subtle. In about 20 avatar animations at 30 seconds each I made, this happened only once in a small part of one of the animations. I use Qavimator.

yeah this is my problem, everytime i make an animation SL deletes frames from mine. So i'm tryign to find a way to workaround the issue with poser 6

Why does SL do this anyway?


okay i switched to 10 fps and for some reason seems to correct the problem, but then i've only done one animation so far.

i did not retime the animation at all as that seems to delete the tail end of animation data in poser.

I didn't think of reducing the framerate, I'll try that next time. I'm guessing the reason that helps is that there is a greater change between frames; SL drops frames if there isn't much change since last frame.