manual animation optimization on upload?

hi everyone.

i found that my very detailed animations look different in sl. that has to do with the automatic optimization sl does, when you upload the animation. my animations are pretty low in keyframe count in my anim software. not sure if the software creates on export a keyframe for every single frame and bodypart, but i can´t imagine that my animation with about 5 or 6 keyframes for every bodypart is too big to handle for sl servers...

what i would love to see is a manual optimization, maybe with a "max keyframe count/sec", that lets us animators decide which frames are important, and which can be deleted.

at the moment it makes very cool animations look simply cheap :-/

does anyone have some hints on how to trick out the optimization, aside from making bodyparts move faster?

and do linden people read here?

thanks and sorry if my english isn´t the best

ok i found a workaround for some of the problems here in the forums...


quote:
Let's say you create a 60 frame animation at 30 FPS in Poser (so, 2 seconds long). You have placed keys on frames 1, 30, and 60. When you export it as a BVH from Poser, the BVH file automatically has 60 keyframes of data for every joint (so you don't need to bake keyframes on every frame in Poser as was suggested above). You upload the BVH into SL, and notice that some of the joints appear to have lost all their data due to the optimization.

Go back to your animation in Poser. Use the "Retime Animation" feature to scale the time of the animation from 1-60 to 1-30. You should now have keys on frames 1, 15, and 30. Make sure to shorten the total frames in the animation to 30. A crucial step here is to now set the *rate* of the animation to 15 FPS (from the original 30 FPS). The animation will take 2 seconds to play through with the same number of keyframes, albeit at the lower, choppier rate.

Now export the animation as a BVH and import into SL. SL intopolates keyframe data to smooth animation on playback, so the fact that you exported the animation at a choppier rate will have little, if any, effect on it's playback in SL. (You could potentially animate at 2 FPS in Poser, and it will still look smooth in SL.) Since the changes across keyframes in the BVH file are greater, the optimization threshold may have been reached, restoring the subtle movements lost in the old version.

Granted, retiming your animation in Poser could result in lost detail depending on what you are animating and how you place your keyframes, and may also require some additional tweaking of the motion in Poser before exporting.



that woked pretty good in most cases, still i would love to see that manual optimization someday

Look around for some of the in-game tools for making animations. Unfortunately, I don't remember the particular names (I plan on buying them, but in the fugure). The ones I have seen tout their ability to make good in-world tweaks.

And always remember: though Second Life claims to handle 30 fps, more than 15 fps seem to be doomed to failure.

um, I use 30 fps most of the time. It just comes down to practice with the tools to understand the eccentricities. This is what separates a seasoned animator from a novice. For subtler animations I often have to do a lot of trial and error (upload, watch in SL, tweak in Poser, repeat) where I'm making small changes to keyframes.

In some cases, changing the interpolation of a problem keyframe will help. As in, the subtle movement is being lost on upload at first, so then I change the keyframe leading up to the lost frames to Linear interpolation, and now it uploads correctly. Of course, because Linear interpolation loses the smooth ease in/out for movement, I have to keyframe that back in by hand.