How many frames should I use for a dance animation?

[Victoria Lenoirre]

I've been using Qavimator for a month or so. I really like the interface and find it easy to learn, except when working wit arm positioning.

I want to do some dance animations. How many frames can I use? Minimum and maximum number of frames?

Also, is there a way to have 2 models in Qavi?

Thanks!

[Medhue Simoni]

How many frames?

This all depends on you. In SL, the only real limits there are is that you can't go over 30 FPS, and you can't go over 30 seconds for 1 animation. My suggestion would be to create the dance at 10 fps, and make the dance with as few animations as you can. If you want minimums and maxes, I guess 900 frames would be around the max, and the minimum is, of course, 2. Remember tho, that every bit of data that you tack on adds to upload times for the user, so you want to keep things at a reasonable rate, which is why i suggest 10 fps.

 

2 models in Qavi?

Goto, File/Open to bring in the first model, which will be a bvh file, then goto File/Add to bring in the 2nd model, or bvh file.

 

Good Luck!

[Linda Brynner]

What i understand is that the movie business these days uses 25 and 30 frames per second.

Simply because the human/brain eye doesn't seem to be able to process more.

Smooth anims in SL are made like that as well. Users of higher end computers can see the actual smooth anim, while users of lower spec computers will see less fps automatically.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Linda Brynner wrote:

What i understand is that the movie business these days uses 25 and 30 frames per second.

Simply because the human/brain eye doesn't seem to be able to process more.

Smooth anims in SL are made like that as well. Users of higher end computers can see the actual smooth anim, while users of lower spec computers will see less fps automatically.

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While it might be great to upload every animation at 30 fps, as a movie might use, doing this in SL will ensure that your animations will take a long time to load. By a long time, I mean up to 10 seconds. While this might be fine for other things to take 10 seconds to load, with animation, the whole point of using the animation will be lost. Even with an AO, if you made every animation in the ao at 30 fps, then you would walk 10 meters before your walk kicked in. Not to mention how much space that AO would take up in your cache.

Deciding what FPS to use on an animation is totally depended on what the animation is. If you are making a stand which has little or no movement, 5 fps is more than good enough. Adding more frames would not make any difference at all to the animation. More frames would just make the animation larger than it needs to be.

 If you are making a laugh, which has lots of tiny little movements happening very quickly, then you will require more FPS to actually see all the movement. With animation, things happen in fractions of a second and when you have many things moving very quickly, then you will need as many frame as you can get.

The same goes for when you are recording motion. If you are recording a motion that moves very fast, you will need to record that motion at a very high rate, something closer to 60 FPS, and then trim it down to 30 fps, or lower, when editing it for SL.

[Haldir Meskin]

"What i understand is that the movie business these days uses 25 and 30 frames per second. Simply because the human/brain eye doesn't seem to be able to process more."

You have misunderstood, or been given incorrect information. The movie business can get away with that low fps due to 2 things, motion blur, and the fact that the fps stays at a constant rate. We do not have those things in most real time rendered environments, thus more fps gives a noticeably better experience.

We can see much more than 25-30fps. In fact it has been proven by the US Air Force that the limit is somewhere past 200fps. An interesting article is here... http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html