Poser - Creating a Walk Animation Not a Walk-in-Place animation

[Chip Midnight]

I'm trying to create a full catwalk animation that causes the av to walk down the runway, pose, turn, and walk back requiring just a single click of the play button. I have the animation created in Poser but when I export as bvh I'm getting all the bone rotations but not the actual movement across the floor. What am I missing?

[Maeve Balfour]

Have you moved the AV figure's positioning in the animation via the HIP, or via the BODY?

Reason I ask, is that the figure's HIP location is used for positioning etc within the 3D space, especially when saving out poses and animations as external files (and even as internal Poser animations and poses).

If you refer to your animation's keyframe locations for the BODY (the translation dials etc), and copy those values to the HIP dials for the same keyframes, your animation should work fine (you might need a little tweaking, but it should work okay).

It's a common oversight in Poser - it took me a while to realise the HIP is the critical factor for the body's translation/movement in the 3D space.

I hope this helps fix your animation :matte-motes-smile:

EDITED TO ADD: Also worth mentioning - Poser's measurement units can be a bit flaky when converted to SL, specifically the translation/movement in 3D space values. The distance you see the AV figure move inside of Poser may differ significantly when played in SL. At times, this can be a lot of trial and error if actual distance travelled is a critical factor.

[Chip Midnight]

I think I figured it out. The walk down and back up the runway were created with the walk designer and two paths. The pose and turn in the middle were keyframed by hand. Only the hand keyed portion registered hip movement. The walk designer portions only registered rotations, even though it created keys for the position tracks. I tried resampling the keyframes hoping that would bake the path animations into proper keys but no such luck.

[Maeve Balfour]

Hmm... The walk designer in Poser is something I haven't really played with much to date (despite using Poser for ages).

Just wondering - I assume it generates a standard animation timeline, and as such, I would assume each frame would have hip translation coordinates on the dials. If you say, open up the frame when a specific direction movement changes, you could create a hip keyframe there, using the co-ordinates of the hip at that specific moment. This would in theory create the needed 3D hip movements in an exported BVH file.

I'd suggest opening up the animation layers window, and try it in there (works kind of like Photoshop layers, in that changes are non-destructive to the underlying animation (the manual explains things better than I can here)). If you create hip keyframes for the needed walk path, and use the spline (green) interpolation, you should get a decent result.
If your walk path is on a long curve, that could be a bit fiddly depending on how the "tweening" works. Probably extra keyframes would help - and the spline interpolation would help smooth out the transitions.

Definitely worth trying to see if it will salvage your walk designer animation. (I should experiment with it myself sometime - another thing on my endless "to do" list!).

:matte-motes-smile:

[Chip Midnight]

The walk designer creates a key in every track on every frame so it's mystifying that the position along the walk path isn't being stored. Setting additional hip keys on a new layer might do it. Hadn't thought of trying that. I ended up creating a second avatar, reimporting the bvh onto it, and then was hand keying hip positions every few frames to match the first avatar. A tedious endeavor.

In my searching around to see if anyone had found a workaroud for the problem I stumbled across Abu Nasu's BVH exporter for 3ds Max which somehow I'd managed to miss when it was created years ago. It's buried in the forum archive now. I grabbed that and got it working so I've moved the project over to Max where I'm much more at home. Animating in Poser is just painful.

Thanks for the suggestions

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Movement in Poser is not the same as in SL. I never grasped the convertion completely, nor did I really try to, but this is what I noticed:

Move the hip (for your actual path movement) forward in Poser a meter and in SL you will see much less movement. The longer the path, the bigger the difference. I even believe there is a limit in movement, around 3 meters, not sure about that though.

It really shows when you lock hands or feet. If you do that and move the hip forward in poser, in SL you will get about half the distance and you'll see the feet and hands going into the other direction.

The problem I think, is in how SL interprets the bvh file, so making your animation in another program won't really help I'm afraid. You might want to play around with moving poseballs or something, although synching and animation transitions will be a true pain then. Anyway, good luck!

[Fantasy Difference]

I had this very same project to do and after many hours of work, found that there is a limit of 10 meters your avatar can move from a fixed point in space.  This means you will have to script the prim to move down the runway while playing a walking in place animation, stop and do a pose, and then a walk back to your original point.  The advice is correct in you must move the hip in the animation, and Poser uses the body position instead of the hip to walk along a set path in Poser.  Was a really frustrating learning process.  I would be interested in hearing how you get it to work if it's different from any of these suggested ways.  Good Luck!

[Chip Midnight]

Good to know that it's storing path position in Body instead of Hip. I wonder if there's a way to copy the position tracks from the body to the hip. Then you'd just need to correct for the height difference between then which could probably be done with a single key on a new layer. I didn't measure the final walk but didn't seem to hit any limitation on travel distance. Maybe I just didn't go 10 meters. Poser's manipulators for posing in the viewport are hard to use since they work relative to the camera position instead of on the bone's local coordinates. You end up having to do every pose with the numerical inputs and spinners to get precise control which is very slow. Not having bezier controls in the animation curve editor is also a major drawback. It's a really cumbersome app to animate in. That interface is in desperate need of a major overhaul. Doing it in Max was a heck of a lot easier. I did the whole thing as a single animation and then used a poseball script in the runway so I could easily tweak height and position relative to the stage.

[Maeve Balfour]

This is just an assumption that I haven't tested as yet, but worth a try (I am using Poser-7, but this should work for most versions):

With the walkpathed animation loaded, go into the Animation Palette (keyframes tab), find the BODY row, and click the dropdown arrow so that the individual dial parameters are revealed. Select the full animation timeline ROWS for the BODY xTran, yTran and zTran, and then Control-C to COPY these keyframes to memory.

Now go to the HIP row, click the dropdown arrow to reveal the dial parameters, select the same corresponding timeline rows for xTran, yTran and zTran, and then Control-V to PASTE the copied body keyframes to the HIP section.

I did a quick test with a basic animation (NOT walkpathed), where I moved the figure via the BODY, and then copied the parameters above to the HIP keyframe rows, and it seemed to work fine - hopefully the same principle applies to walkpathed animations. (It's simply duplicating dial settings from one section to the other). You might need to delete other body parameters (legs, feet etc) if you get strange results. (In my case, I forgot to turn OFF Inverse Kinematics prior, and the feet/legs acted strangely with the Hip keyframe pasting. I deleted those errant keyframes, and the static body moved fine).
If nothing else, this will hopefully create a clean HIP-only set of animation keyframes for the walk path, which in theory could be overlaid in a separate animation layer in conjunction with the original walk animation to get the movement in 3D space happening.

Again, due to Poser's unreliable/quirky metrics conversion to SL, the results will probably vary.

:matte-motes-smile:

(And yah, the Poser interface is a really strange / old-fashioned one. Blame that on the long-term legacy mindset of the developers. I guess since I have used/persevered with Poser for so long now, I don't notice the painful interface as much as others do!)

:matte-motes-wink:

[Jonas Bakalava]

years ago, i had made poser aware of these problems and they agreed to help second life  repair their awful interface but sl simply flatly refused which i suppose the hunt and peck method with the repeated costly downloads required to get it right were seen as a money making  advantage by second life. Now, poser was sold to a new "company" which has utterly no interest or knowledge    of animation, and they do not have any meaningful help or support to offer. it is like asking a janitor to do rocket science.   And at this time second life has a new venture going called sansar . In typical fashion SL just rather than repairing what they have are lured by new technologies like vr goggles (wow i can see my hands)  to make a virtual game which is clumsy, boring and about as much fun as watching paint dry.  It is a misfortune that without the leadership and foresight of Philip Linden it now seems for the minions of believers in SL all hopes are dashed.

At this point only a miracle can seem able to pump sense and moxy into the minds of the brass tacks of SL.Who only seem to have a penchant for destrucion. 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Do your testing on the beta grid Jonas. It's free.

[Jonas Bakalava]

thanks for the tip Bitsy, wish that was available years ago. I tried getting on to beta today but  i was prevented from signing in. The point i would like to make though, is my time is worth something. If second life had agreed to accept posers help, it wouldn't require hours of work trying to make a finger touch an avatars nose or making a dancers hands meet perfectly on the dance floor. The interface is horrible, and it has never been addressed. Crouching down brings an avatars feet up off the floor, and don't get me started on trigonometry (or the utter lack thereof)

From SL creating copy bot and driving most earnest businesses off, to suddenly banning gambling and ruining the economy, to the ensueing run on the sl bank and the loss of 125 million (i personally lost 15,000 US dollars, everything i had earned from sl over many years,) and sl making animating even more onerous, and creating an ambiguous "complexity" rule is when i quit my successful business on sl. i had seen enough. I thought the loss of Phillip Linden who personally generously helped  me to learn to use maya to create mesh, and who was the inspiration for sl, was indeed the death knell for sl. I should be running for the hills too, like so many others. 

But the truth is, despite the many negatives, after all these years i still love sl. and i am ever hopeful that someone  will step up to the plate and knock one out of the park.

[OptimoMaximo]

4 hours ago, Jonas Bakalava said:

I thought the loss of Phillip Linden who personally generously helped  me to learn to use maya to create mesh

If you use Maya, i released an animation tool that works with HIK as well as custom joint positioned skeletons and exports .anim format.

 

4 hours ago, Jonas Bakalava said:

The interface is horrible, and it has never been addressed.

The interface of what? the BVH upload thing? I'm not sure if you're aware of the BVH specs being an absolute contradiction to the actual environment. here is a schematic explanation of what happens with BVH files

1. BVH files have a standard Y up and Z forward. However, it should use meters as linear unit but, for SL compatible files, it's not the case. The original character was made in centimeter scale, so someone REALLY smart thought to convert it into a inch linear unit (from centimeters, scaling the character up by 39.37 you get that proportion). So an imported bvh for SL would showcase a rather small skeleton
2. Upon upload, the uploader performs the following procedures (among other things): 

• Recalculate the world orientation matrix to turn the whole character into Z up and +X forward
• Recalculate the distance between the joints and the mPelvis joint basing on the new orientation
• Convert those distances (inches) into an equivalently scaled-to-meters-joint-offset character
• Convert all the euler rotations found in the animation into normalized quaternions, plus they also perform an in place conjugation of such quaternions to maintain the W term sign consistent and, as such, can be trimmed off and be recalculated on the fly by the viewer (to include less data in the final animation file).

Now, after all these conversions and world rotations, add also the "clean up" it does for you, BVH files uploaded into SL are VERY lossy in comparison to the original animations you made. In the worst scenario possible, we top all this again with our Poser character not being properly scaled and we end up animating a sit animation that in SL looks more like a dive animation (joking here ) 

[OptimoMaximo]

5 hours ago, Jonas Bakalava said:

But the truth is, despite the many negatives, after all these years i still love sl. and i am ever hopeful that someone  will step up to the plate and knock one out of the park.

Here is an example how a few days ago another Maya user has been able to trash poser =) 

 

[OptimoMaximo]

10 hours ago, Jonas Bakalava said:

I thought the loss of Phillip Linden who personally generously helped  me to learn to use maya to create mesh, and who was the inspiration for sl...

On a second thought, and not at all serious, given the inclination LL has always showed toward Hinduist naming (from the main continent Samsara/Sansar, the word avatar etc etc) and being Maya "the illusion" (or, in more modern words, the matrix) he taught you to manipulate, why not chanting a mantra to him and his generous loving contribution?

Sri Phillip Meshinda hare Laggare, hey Net Binaryana viewerDeva 

(Lord Phillip lord of mesh destroyer of evil and the demon Lag, hey Net's peaceful binary place ward of the Divine Viewer!)

=)

[Jonas Bakalava]

On 8/26/2012 at 7:34 PM, Chip Midnight said:

I'm trying to create a full catwalk animation that causes the av to walk down the runway, pose, turn, and walk back requiring just a single click of the play button. I have the animation created in Poser but when I export as bvh I'm getting all the bone rotations but not the actual movement across the floor. What am I missing?

Hi Chip, i have been working on a series of wrestling animations and ran into the same problem but i found the perfect solution:

here is the detailed workaround:

first of all, use the walk designer and choose the walk in place.  Since you are making the figure walk down the runway and back, double the recommended frames plus 10 to rotate at the  end of the runway for the walk back.

now go into  the animation palette. find the first frame of the animation and select the hip. there you will put your  negative z location, say itr is - 7 meters. then blank out all the z location values to the end of the set. now at the end of the runway,  enter the z positive number say 7.0 meters. when you play the animation the figure will walk down the runway.make sure to select the yellow  linear section.on both ends of the hip z location line. Then, at the end of the runway walk, rotate the figure hip 180 degrees in say  add another 10 frames to rotate , and then to have the figure walk back.. this will require entering  the original position of - 7 meters and again removing all the in between z line location markers.

 

the basic issue is it making the figure look like is it really walking which requires some tweaking, between frame rate  and the number of frames. You will be amazed at the simplicity of this. You can even have the figure walk at a diagonal by involving the x axis in the same manner or adding frames to so something like the model stopping at some point to intereact with the audience, sign autographs etc. i am using poser 10 and it has quite a selection of walks which when mixed produce quite remarkable and unique walks,

jonas