Legs not moving as set up in Qavimator

So I've made an animation where an avatar's hip rotates about 3 degrees and readjusted the legs to appear to have stayed in the same position. Moving them each a total of at least 1 on rotation. This gives the appearance of a slight swaying motion.

When uploaded to the game the legs don't move at all.

This is the case with a hugging animation I made too. What causes this? And what do i need to do to fix it. And please don't tell me its default animation overriding because that's all I ever hear and that is 100% not the problem.

Thanks for any helpful suggestions.

SL will often optimise out very small movements - the bane of my life! You could try making the movements bigger and/or run your animation at 15 fps. This can help reduce this problem.

Ew ok, thank you

I routinely use 10 FPS to help minimize this problem, and my animations still look plenty smooth. SL does interpolate between frames, I tested this specifically using a 1FPS animation. Rarely do you need more than 10 FPS, and if you do, your animation won't look good for a big chunk of the SL population, running on less-than-ideal hardware.

If I am ever able to build the client again, I'll start looking into this optimization problem again, to see if I can come up with a better algorithm: one that saves nearly as many bytes, but preserves more features of the animation. Still hoping to find someone who understands the math behind the dpsimp algorithm! Ok, sidetracking, sorry.

/me hates the optimizer, which turns graceful motion into choppy jerks, yet allows huge animation files for wild movement. But, at least it's an earnest attempt to solve a real problem, and not incompetence.

Lear thank you for the tip that help save me from going insane. I was having a serious problem with this exact same issue.

The animation was ment for the legs to belt, while the feet staying still and in place. Instead the feet would move and curl the legs. So it didn't look like my person was standing, it looked like they was swimming!

That optimization is the absolute worse thing ever. Of all things to optimization in SL they decide to do it with the files that are absolutely the smallest file you can upload to SL.

A single texture can go up to as much as 1MB or more. Yet the size of the animation file I had was only 27kb! Do you seriously need to optimise that any further??? I don't even have a single animation that I created which is over 100kb. Then again I'm not making dancing animations.

They seriously.. need to cut out that optimization feature.

When anims are uploaded, SL client converts them to a denser format than .bvh files, taking about 120 bytes per frame. So, without optimization, a 30 second 30 FPS anim would take a bit over 100K.

I think they should simply discard frames until the resulting FPS is under, say, 15. Then the biggest would be a bit over 50K. Results would be more predictable and look better. (But the average size would still be quite a bit larger.)

Another possibility would be to detect and discard all but the key frames -- discarding any frames where the numbers don't match interpolating between neighboring frames. Since most of us use programs like qavimator and poser, most of our animations are keyframe-based. This would lead to very tiny files for these animations.

Unfortunately, SL thinks that subtle motions are a bad thing. :-/