Animation : Shifting weight on legs and breathing natural in a sabre fencing stance

[Alexander Causten]

Hello all,

Ive been making a stance for a sabre and so far it's come out alright, the whole stance is now to a point where I want to add in breathing and life to it - only one problem, I pin both feet to the floor ( I should mention im using DazStudio) and use the hip to sway the legs, only when it comes to placing this into SL, it just looks as if im sliding. I attempted the same with animating the legs to shuffle, but this also causes my feet to go through the floor or levitate for a moment, looks downright awful.

Anyway, im a noob at this whole animating thing, I think it just might be a rookie mistake.
Could anyone help based on the information ive given?

[Frawmusl]

Have you imported the bones/model of the avatar to Daz? If not you are working with more bones than SL has available which will explain the difference in animation. Google and find the model to import, use that. You may have to rework your animation But it will be more accurate to what you see in Daz next time you bring it to SL

[Alexander Causten]

Im using the SL base avatar that I downloaded. The naim for just simply holding and posing imports fine, but Im looking to add more natural breathing and weight shifting into it, the only problem im having is that just pinning the feet and moving the body up and down to put more weight on the legs tends to have, glitchy results.

Such as the feet clipping through the floor and such

What is usually animated with the breathing anims?

Would the chest be moved forwards and back to a beat and the legs would move ever so slightly?

Just need a push in the right direction so I can 'see' it. 

[Medhue Simoni]

Daz is a great animation program, but I have also seen problems with any animation moving in any direction. It's like the program is doubling or tripling the distance. Maybe this has something to do with the scale of the SL figure versus the scale of the genesis figure. I don't see these issues when I animate for the genesis character. What I do, is I animate the character in Daz, then I bring the animation into SLat or Qavi and adjust it.

[Maeve Balfour]

Your AV sliding / feet clipping issue is probably due to the movements you are applying to the HIP JOINT. Similar to Poser (and I assume DAZ Studio), SL uses the HIP of the AV for positioning inworld (location, movement from A to B, rotation etc).

With your moving of the hip joint side to side and up/down, SL sees that as the entire AV figure moving side-to-side and up and down in world. This wouldn't be a problem IF the pinning of the feet you are doing in DAZ Studio was being recognised in the export process to the BVH file. My guess is that this isn't happening for some reason. Possibly there's an overlooked option in the BVH export section? (I'm not a DAZ Studio user, so I can't offer help here unfortunately).

A possible workaround would be to manually keyframe the feet positions in relation to the ground plane for relevant frames in the animation in DAZ Studio - the start and end points of the hip swaying, and probably midway points to help get more natural looking movements. I am assuming DAZ Studio will interpolate the rest of the frames to suit. The headache will likely be in getting the feet to remain planted in the exact same ground location to avoid them sliding around - you could possibly get the feet coordinates for the relevant frames from your existing animation, and apply those manually instead of using pinning. Another option would be to place prim rectangular objects under the feet in DAZ, scaled and rotated to be a close match to the feet, and use those as manual positioning guides - since you will probably have to pull the feet/legs to get them to those locations for each keyframe.

Not ideal, but should be workable. :matte-motes-smile: