Stiff animation, Blender > SL

[akleigh]

So, I've been messing around with Avastar. And while everything seems to look fine previewed in Blender, I notice the keyframe interpolation after uploading (I've tried with both BVH and ANIM) is really.. just not good in my experience.

 

You can see the "speeds" it seems to lock to in the curves, rather than something smooth---- it's... like a curve made up of distinct lines. It's hard to explain with words. 

 

But half the time bones will move at ONE speed. Just start to finish. It's like my avatar is doing the robot.

 

I can't figure out what's wrong.

[EnCore Mayne]

the interpolations between your keyframes, as can be played, viewed, paused, & edited in Blender should be what you get in SL. i don't know of any means of viewing the animation frame by frame in SL as you seem to suggest. aside from a host of other factors that can destroy your one to one ideal if what you see in SL isn't what you see in Blender, you can change Blender's viewport "Frame Rate" from the Dimensions tab of the Animations panel. (this setting is not the "Animation Export" fps, just how it's played in Blender.) you can play with either at your pleasure till it feels right. don't forget in Aditi uploads are free.

[OptimoMaximo]

On 8/6/2020 at 4:03 AM, akleigh said:

So, I've been messing around with Avastar. And while everything seems to look fine previewed in Blender, I notice the keyframe interpolation after uploading (I've tried with both BVH and ANIM) is really.. just not good in my experience.

 

You can see the "speeds" it seems to lock to in the curves, rather than something smooth---- it's... like a curve made up of distinct lines. It's hard to explain with words. 

 

But half the time bones will move at ONE speed. Just start to finish. It's like my avatar is doing the robot.

 

I can't figure out what's wrong.

First and foremost, you should look at the 12 animation principles, among which there's the concept of overlap. This means that if all joints start and finish their motions at the same time, the look will be unnatural. 

Second, you want to polish your animations by fiddling in the fcurve editor. 

Third, you must also know that avastar runs a cleanup process under the hoods to ensure a smaller file size. The anim format is made of linear curves from frame to frame by design. The lower fps you work with in blender, the stronger this effect will appear once the animation is uploaded. BUT the higher the fps, the more difficult is to manage an animation, so you'll need to balance that out per animation, there's no 1 setting fits al cases. 

To avoid the cleanup process from avastar taking place on a certain frame, you should add a marker named "fix" with no quotes. And no, it's not a "place one and all animation is affected", just that single frame will be. I know that someone made a template animation scene in which all frames are marked with that fix marker from frame 1 to 1000 and they load that to animate. You do it once and keep it for as long as that scene would work with the avastar version they work with. 

[Very Mysterious]

On 8/7/2020 at 9:11 AM, OptimoMaximo said:

First and foremost, you should look at the 12 animation principles, among which there's the concept of overlap. This means that if all joints start and finish their motions at the same time, the look will be unnatural. 

Second, you want to polish your animations by fiddling in the fcurve editor. 

Third, you must also know that avastar runs a cleanup process under the hoods to ensure a smaller file size. The anim format is made of linear curves from frame to frame by design. The lower fps you work with in blender, the stronger this effect will appear once the animation is uploaded. BUT the higher the fps, the more difficult is to manage an animation, so you'll need to balance that out per animation, there's no 1 setting fits al cases. 

To avoid the cleanup process from avastar taking place on a certain frame, you should add a marker named "fix" with no quotes. And no, it's not a "place one and all animation is affected", just that single frame will be. I know that someone made a template animation scene in which all frames are marked with that fix marker from frame 1 to 1000 and they load that to animate. You do it once and keep it for as long as that scene would work with the avastar version they work with. 

I made a small script to add a fix marker to every frame in 2.79, can be pasted into the Python Console or run in the text editor. However you like to run custom scripts in blender.
 

import bpy
scene = bpy.data.scenes['Scene']
for i in range(1,1000):
    scene.timeline_markers.new('fix', frame=i)

You can edit the range(1,1000) to be whatever number of frames you need.

This fixed my issue. Appreciate the posts!