Modifying Poses

I am new to animations and have noticed that some poses are "No Mod". How can you mod a pose? I know how to adjust the position on the pose ball but how can you modify the actual "pose"? If I make a pose and it is wrong I have to re-upload another version that is costing me a bomb.
Thanks in anticipation

Modify vs. no modify doesn't really mean a lot when it comes to animations, all you can really change with the in-world tools are the name and description anyway.

To change an animation, you really need to upload a new version. SL uses its own weird internal animation format, there isn't much in the way of external programs that can do much with it. Uploads are normally done using a restricted form of BVH format, and the viewer converts that to the SL form at upload time.

Do your testing on the beta grid Del to save the L$s - I'm sure I'd be in a debtor's prison by now if I didn't test on beta!

Thanks for that Deira, I must try that.

You can't. People who sell no-mod animations are ... well, it's not a polite word.

Although there was probably never a viewer that was designed to do so, modifying animations (and having the item point to the new asset) and even replacing existing assets (as long as you uploaded it during the same session) was possible pre-1.27 server. With this month's rollout we're saying goodbye to those possibilities...

The word is "professional", actually.

Animators tend to make them no-mod for a couple of reasons.

If someone changes the name it can be confusing when customers refer to it by a different name - " I saw an animation called xyz and your name is the creator, but I can't find an animation called that in your shop."

There is software that will alow you to download full permission assets from your SL inventory. This includes animations. If they are re-uploaded, then the creators name will not be the real creator - it is a method of theft. So animators who sell to other content creators for use in SL, will often sell copy/transfer - no-mod, rather than full permissions.

There is software that will allow you to download all assets from your SL inventory, no matter what the permissions. In fact the SL permissions system has absolutely no effect on external copying on anything but scripts: if you know the UUID of an asset, you can download it, because that's how the client works.

Making animations no-mod does not prevent piracy, it just makes it harder for customers to organize their inventory.

I feel another round of the DMCA coming on now! (Not an easy route!)

I sympathise about your inventory sorting, but it is still confusing when I get asked things like, "You know your animation xyz, could you do it on the other leg/arm/faster/slower/for a kid avatar...?" - and I reply, I've never made one called that - are you sure it's mine? What does it look like?"

I sell the Flight Feather script full perm. You wouldn't believe some of the messages I get about it. So I understand your frustration, but it comes down to frustrating one person or many people...

I agree with you and I sell either mod/transfer or mod/copy - but I still would not supply full permissions unless I was being paid for my real life time in real life rates. I will sell, at low cost, some copy/transfer animations, but strictly for re-use within other products in Second Life and not for re-sale solely as animations or pose balls.

I can perfectly well understand scrips being sold no-mod - otherwise the creator would be continually asked to sort out problems caused by people modifying them. You would have to be very strong minded to sell them in a modifyable form and insiist that you can give no support if they have been changed. I don't mind helping other animators, but I should not be well pleased if someone came to me and said, "I just tried to change your animation to rotate the other way and now it looks all wrong, help me please!"

You can't mod an animation within SL (other than name and description), but if you hacked into the client and got one out, what form is it in? Is it in a form that could be modified or imported into animation software and modified? SL holds it in some wierd format - according to Viktoria's post (above).

Oh, I wasn't suggesting you sell full perm, just because I'm a raving nutcase.

Well, I've been distributing software that way since the early '80s, so draw your own conclusions about whether "strong minded" is an appropriate term.

I'm sure it's in a form that can be massaged fairly easily back into a regular animation format, otherwise how would the client itself use it? The avatar is basically an old Poser model.

Yeah, the SL format can be converted back to BVH, but what you'll get will reflect the "optimization" done by the viewer at upload time. LL's BVH "parser" is kind of nasty, but the conversion into their format is readable enough to figure out how to reverse the process.

The avatar has the same skeleton as the Poser 2 figure. The animation asset file is a condensed format of some sort - that I am sure of - and it is very much smaller than the Poser file and also smaller than the bvh upload file. The size of the bvh file is not a direct indication of the resultant size of the animation asset file either.

I have an animation of 30 seconds with a bvh of 523 Kb which has uploaded ok and another one of 23 seconds and a bvh file size of 509 Kb which hits the maximum 60 kb limit for an animation asset and fails to upload! (The corresponding Poser files are in the 12000 - 13000 Kb size range.) Whatever this format is, the actual amount and complexity of the movement seems significant to the size.

[If that isn't annoying enough - the upload error message says "Please try later"! Of course you can keep trying till Zindra freezes over, but it will never upload until I make it smaller somehow.]

Perhaps the client is designed to play it's own specific animation format - but there are people here who have looked into the client code and maybe they will know whether the animation asset file is played in the format in which it is held, or is converted to another.

You can certainly import bvh files into Poser and modify an animation that way - but you will have to amend every single frame. I can (in most cases for SL) do it quicker working from scratch - it's simply not worth the effort to start with a bvh file. In SL you are limited to just 30 seconds and not very complicated motion - so this puts a ceiling on things. Importing a bvh file for a much longer and/or much more complex animation may save time.

The one exception, I can remember, is when I was asked to help someone in SL who wanted a number of "walks" which illustrated the varous forms of disability caused by cerebral palsy. He had some bvh files from mocap data which I took into Poser and amended for the SL avatar figure - I had to amend every frame and it took some time, even though they were very short animations. However, I could not have done it otherwise as I do not have the medical knowledge to be able to accurately animate a specific disability like this.