Qavimator Freezing

[Orwar]

   Not sure what's up with it, tried doing fresh installs and everything, but no matter what I do it freezes to unresponsiveness whenever a bone is manipulated (it bounces back after a few seconds, but it's pretty annoying to work with 80% of the work time being just waiting for it to catch its breath). Not having any performance issues with anything else with the computer either, it's just with Qavimator. I got it working once when rebooting the computer, but that broke again. Any ideas what might be causing it?

   From what I gather, the creator isn't active anymore, so I guess it might be time to start considering alternatives if it can't be fixed - so, alternatively to fixes, are there any animation programs that doesn't require me to work in Blender? 

[Chic Aeon]

48 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   Not sure what's up with it, tried doing fresh installs and everything, but no matter what I do it freezes to unresponsiveness whenever a bone is manipulated (it bounces back after a few seconds, but it's pretty annoying to work with 80% of the work time being just waiting for it to catch its breath). Not having any performance issues with anything else with the computer either, it's just with Qavimator. I got it working once when rebooting the computer, but that broke again. Any ideas what might be causing it?

   From what I gather, the creator isn't active anymore, so I guess it might be time to start considering alternatives if it can't be fixed - so, alternatively to fixes, are there any animation programs that doesn't require me to work in Blender? 

 VERY old program and especially if you are on Win11 it just may not work any longer. You can run a utilities program like Glary and see if you can fix any issue. Updates break things for me regularly but usually Glary fixes it.  And yes, creator has stopped working long ago.  I liked it too as it was simple.   Your current choice is Blender with Avastar == at least that is what most folks are using. 

[Frionil Fang]

20 hours ago, Orwar said:

From what I gather, the creator isn't active anymore, so I guess it might be time to start considering alternatives if it can't be fixed - so, alternatively to fixes, are there any animation programs that doesn't require me to work in Blender? 

Black Dragon viewer lets you craft poses from scratch inworld and then save them as animations. Supposedly also does animation but didn't try that part. The upside is that you get to see it on your avatar and don't have to touch Blender or pay for Avastar. The downside is that it takes a moment to figure out how it works and isn't quite finished yet iirc.

[Orwar]

1 hour ago, Frionil Fang said:

Black Dragon viewer lets you craft poses from scratch inworld and then save them as animations. Supposedly also does animation but didn't try that part. The upside is that you get to see it on your avatar and don't have to touch Blender or pay for Avastar. The downside is that it takes a moment to figure out how it works and isn't quite finished yet iirc.

   Last I played around with that it didn't allow you to actually save animations, have they changed that now?

   @NiranV Dean was saying something about LL not allowing it or something a while back, unless I misremember. 

[Frionil Fang]

I've certainly made some hand poses with BD and uploaded the results. The files did need some hex editing to cull out unused bones (it saves all bones instead of just the active ones, even if it implies it shouldn't be doing that) and fix the bone priorities (the whole point for me was to get properly working priority 6 animations for hand overrides, which no longer works properly if you upload a .bvh instead of an .anim with bone-level priorities) but still a better deal for me than paying a subscription for a tool that I need 2 times a year.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

21 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

the whole point for me was to get properly working priority 6 animations for hand overrides, which no longer works properly if you upload a .bvh

When did .bvh uploads ever allow priority 6?

[Frionil Fang]

11 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

When did .bvh uploads ever allow priority 6?

Since forever and even right now, at least on Firestorm, but they no longer seem to work correctly.

Pretty sure I have some properly working priority 6 animations from ancient times, and back then you could just use a debug setting in the viewer to set the max priority to whatever you pleased. Now it seems to mess with the bone priority at server side; the animation is reported as "priority 6" but keeps getting overridden by priority 4 ones, so that sounds certainly sounds like the bone priority getting clamped to 4 so whatever plays latest wins.

Rephrase edit: "since forever" as in I'm 99% certain they worked before, and you can still upload a prio 6 .bvh, and it is identified in the viewer as prio 6, but doesn't work like a prio 6 anymore.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Frionil Fang

[Chic Aeon]

2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

When did .bvh uploads ever allow priority 6?

I was NEVER able to get that to work and all the info that I could find said that Priority 5 or 6 would only work with ANIME files.  I used qavimator since it first came out and certainly since 2013 when I did a lot in Opensim.  So the last ten years ...

[Frionil Fang]

10 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

I was NEVER able to get that to work and all the info that I could find said that Priority 5 or 6 would only work with ANIME files.

I've never been a prolific animation uploader, but I found a priority 6 arm/hand pose from March 2012 and it is not overridden by priority 4 animations. I have no recollection what tool I would've used to make it, but it has to have been a .bvh file, the only .anim capable tool I've used is Black Dragon.

For contrast, I found animations that list themselves as "priority 6" in the Firestorm animation details panel that were uploaded in 2016, 2018 and 2020 are overridden by priority 4, and not by priority 3. Curiously I also have one prio 6 from 2018 that's tagged as "fixed" and isn't overridden by prio 4, whereas its  "broken" counterpart is overridden, despite obviously being the same animation file... no idea what happened there. Immediate edit: I think I found a *very* janky .bvh-to-.anim converter around that time, it was too broken to get much use out of but I may have used that.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Frionil Fang

[AmeliaJ08]

On 11/28/2023 at 2:13 AM, Orwar said:

   Not sure what's up with it, tried doing fresh installs and everything, but no matter what I do it freezes to unresponsiveness whenever a bone is manipulated (it bounces back after a few seconds, but it's pretty annoying to work with 80% of the work time being just waiting for it to catch its breath). Not having any performance issues with anything else with the computer either, it's just with Qavimator. I got it working once when rebooting the computer, but that broke again. Any ideas what might be causing it?

   From what I gather, the creator isn't active anymore, so I guess it might be time to start considering alternatives if it can't be fixed - so, alternatively to fixes, are there any animation programs that doesn't require me to work in Blender? 

I have it and haven't noticed this but I haven't used it that heavily.

If an old application is acting weird though it's sometimes worth using some of the compatibility modes in Windows, right click the exe and try some of the older version compatibility modes and see if it helps.

 

[Orwar]

20 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

If an old application is acting weird though it's sometimes worth using some of the compatibility modes in Windows, right click the exe and try some of the older version compatibility modes and see if it helps.

   Don't know why I didn't think of that, used to be half the games I played had to be tinkered with that stuff (getting Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance working on Windows 10 was a trip). Just tried it, set it to Windows 7, and .. It appears to be working!

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

   Don't know why I didn't think of that, used to be half the games I played had to be tinkered with that stuff (getting Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance working on Windows 10 was a trip). Just tried it, set it to Windows 7, and .. It appears to be working!

I've never quite understood what those modes do (for software already written for Windows NT) but they sometimes seem to have an effect, glad to hear it

 

Edited November 29, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Chic Aeon]

7 hours ago, Frionil Fang said:

I've never been a prolific animation uploader, but I found a priority 6 arm/hand pose from March 2012 and it is not overridden by priority 4 animations. I have no recollection what tool I would've used to make it, but it has to have been a .bvh file, the only .anim capable tool I've used is Black Dragon.

For contrast, I found animations that list themselves as "priority 6" in the Firestorm animation details panel that were uploaded in 2016, 2018 and 2020 are overridden by priority 4, and not by priority 3. Curiously I also have one prio 6 from 2018 that's tagged as "fixed" and isn't overridden by prio 4, whereas its  "broken" counterpart is overridden, despite obviously being the same animation file... no idea what happened there. Immediate edit: I think I found a *very* janky .bvh-to-.anim converter around that time, it was too broken to get much use out of but I may have used that.

Avast exports anime files and I think "poser" might (haven't used it and forget who makes it). What I READ was that long ago anime file was the default format for SL and then bvh was added.  The only reason (or a big one) that I bought Avastar was so that I could make animations again -- this time from Blender.  There have been long conversations on this in the past so if you do some searching in the archives you may get more info.  

[Frionil Fang]

10 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Avast exports anime files and I think "poser" might (haven't used it and forget who makes it). What I READ was that long ago anime file was the default format for SL and then bvh was added.  The only reason (or a big one) that I bought Avastar was so that I could make animations again -- this time from Blender.  There have been long conversations on this in the past so if you do some searching in the archives you may get more info.  

I know Avastar does them, I'm fairly sure I didn't have that in 2012. Not that there's anything wrong with .bvh from QAvimator or inworld export-capable posing tools if you settle for priority 4 or lower, but it's nice to have a free tool that can actually export raw .anim files, paying for Avastar wouldn't really make sense for my level of use.

Whatever I used back in 2012 (most likely Avimator, the precedessor to QAvimator), it made a .bvh and successfully created a priority 6 asset in SL. At some point that just stopped working due to some kind of a server-side check, if I had to guess. .bvh is a non-SL-specific generic text-based format and has to be converted to the internal binary .anim format, after all, so if the servers handling that are more strict now, no amount of priority hacking at the viewer side is going to bypass that.

Anyway, not really related to the subject of the thread any longer, I tested my old copy of QAvimator with Win7 compatibility mode and it works a treat, so that's good to know it's not out of the picture yet.

[NiranV Dean]

On 11/29/2023 at 1:40 AM, Frionil Fang said:

I've certainly made some hand poses with BD and uploaded the results. The files did need some hex editing to cull out unused bones (it saves all bones instead of just the active ones, even if it implies it shouldn't be doing that) and fix the bone priorities (the whole point for me was to get properly working priority 6 animations for hand overrides, which no longer works properly if you upload a .bvh instead of an .anim with bone-level priorities) but still a better deal for me than paying a subscription for a tool that I need 2 times a year.

That was in the first version, it has since been fixed, the Viewer only saves keyframes you actually added now.

Per-bone priority is also coming, now knowing that its actually working.

On 11/29/2023 at 1:24 AM, Orwar said:

   Last I played around with that it didn't allow you to actually save animations, have they changed that now?

   @NiranV Dean was saying something about LL not allowing it or something a while back, unless I misremember. 

That was posing others