Animations with offsets misbehaving recently

[Phate Shepherd]

Has anyone else seen their bikes or other vehicles misbehaving, especially low-riders? This only happen on vehicles where the animations changes as you drive, and only on vehicles that use offset animations (needed on low riding vehicles to prevent the avatar from raising the vehicle up.) The symptoms would be the avi jumping up into the air as the animation changes.

When creating vehicle animations, it is very common to create the animation with a negative Z offset so that the avatar drops down when the animation is played. This is necessary to prevent the avatar bounding box from hitting the ground and potentially raising the vehicle up and causing it to float.

In a BVH animation, this is represented by the first frame having a Z offset, and all subsequent frames having a lower Z offset. This first frame is special and NOT considered part of the animation, but a reference frame so that the BVH to anim conversion knows how to offset the avatar, as well as to determine which joints are animated and which ones are not.

In the past, I could switch at will between these offset animations in my vehicles, and they all stayed offset (typically 1M down from llSitTarget) without any problems. This keeps the avatar bounding box well above ground where it won't make the vehicle float.

Now, the Ease IN transition is being tweened from the llSitTarget that is up in the air, instead of the animation's offset position where it should be tweened from. This is causing the avatar to jump up and down as the animation is changed.

A sort-of work-around is to use an Ease-IN of 0, but that looks terrible, and doesn't fix past animations and products.

If you have seen this, can you chime in here:  https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-227435

[Bree Giffen]

I haven't seen it recently but I recall SL used to have a similar problem when switching between sitting poses on a chair for example and your avatar would jump up before switching to the next pose. This was a very long time ago.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 8/2/2019 at 3:01 AM, Phate Shepherd said:

The symptoms would be the avi jumping up into the air as the animation changes.

This could be because it takes a while for the animation to load into/from cache (client-side problem with network or hard drive), or because the script is lagging and there's a noticeable gap between playing (stop and start) the separate animations.

Edited August 9, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[animats]

At region crossings, or randomly?

You have to restart vehicle animations at region crossings to eliminate this problem. It's been around for years, but can and is dealt with in vehicle scripts.

[Phate Shepherd]

I found that if I add extra frames to the end of an animation, enough to cover the "ease out" period,  the problem goes away. Didn't have to do that before.