Jonas Bakalava

Hi Chip, i have been working on a series of wrestling animations and ran into the same problem but i found the perfect solution: here is the detailed workaround: first of all, use the walk designer and choose the walk in place. Since you are making the figure walk down the runway and back, double the recommended frames plus 10 to rotate at the end of the runway for the walk back. now go into the animation palette. find the first frame of the animation and select the hip. there you will put your negative z location, say itr is - 7 meters. then blank out all the z location values to the end of the set. now at the end of the runway, enter the z positive number say 7.0 meters. when you play the animation the figure will walk down the runway.make sure to select the yellow linear section.on both ends of the hip z location line. Then, at the end of the runway walk, rotate the figure hip 180 degrees in say add another 10 frames to rotate , and then to have the figure walk back.. this will require entering the original position of - 7 meters and again removing all the in between z line location markers. the basic issue is it making the figure look like is it really walking which requires some tweaking, between frame rate and the number of frames. You will be amazed at the simplicity of this. You can even have the figure walk at a diagonal by involving the x axis in the same manner or adding frames to so something like the model stopping at some point to intereact with the audience, sign autographs etc. i am using poser 10 and it has quite a selection of walks which when mixed produce quite remarkable and unique walks, jonas

thanks for the tip Bitsy, wish that was available years ago. I tried getting on to beta today but i was prevented from signing in. The point i would like to make though, is my time is worth something. If second life had agreed to accept posers help, it wouldn't require hours of work trying to make a finger touch an avatars nose or making a dancers hands meet perfectly on the dance floor. The interface is horrible, and it has never been addressed. Crouching down brings an avatars feet up off the floor, and don't get me started on trigonometry (or the utter lack thereof) From SL creating copy bot and driving most earnest businesses off, to suddenly banning gambling and ruining the economy, to the ensueing run on the sl bank and the loss of 125 million (i personally lost 15,000 US dollars, everything i had earned from sl over many years,) and sl making animating even more onerous, and creating an ambiguous "complexity" rule is when i quit my successful business on sl. i had seen enough. I thought the loss of Phillip Linden who personally generously helped me to learn to use maya to create mesh, and who was the inspiration for sl, was indeed the death knell for sl. I should be running for the hills too, like so many others. But the truth is, despite the many negatives, after all these years i still love sl. and i am ever hopeful that someone will step up to the plate and knock one out of the park.

years ago, i had made poser aware of these problems and they agreed to help second life repair their awful interface but sl simply flatly refused which i suppose the hunt and peck method with the repeated costly downloads required to get it right were seen as a money making advantage by second life. Now, poser was sold to a new "company" which has utterly no interest or knowledge of animation, and they do not have any meaningful help or support to offer. it is like asking a janitor to do rocket science. And at this time second life has a new venture going called sansar . In typical fashion SL just rather than repairing what they have are lured by new technologies like vr goggles (wow i can see my hands) to make a virtual game which is clumsy, boring and about as much fun as watching paint dry. It is a misfortune that without the leadership and foresight of Philip Linden it now seems for the minions of believers in SL all hopes are dashed. At this point only a miracle can seem able to pump sense and moxy into the minds of the brass tacks of SL.Who only seem to have a penchant for destrucion.

Hiya Medhue, You are probably right about Sl never fixing any of this. Some years ago i was in contact with the poser staff before it went to Smith Micro, and they were totally willing and actually anxious to try to help SL fix all their animation bugs. Unfortunately SL simply chose to ignore posers offer to help and nothing ever got resolved. I simply cannot understand SL reluctance to accept free help. In light of all the incredibly wonderful stuff being done with animation and mesh figures in games today, SL is falling so hopelessly light years behind. I think the only thing that will ever shift this laxidaisical policy unfortunately is if a really strong contender comes out with a totally new SL which incorporates all the latest and greatest, and offers it with modern hi capacity servers with a drop dead tier pricing setup. Then i feel we would see overnight changes but this is equivalent to waiting for lightning to strike your neighbors pit bull that is mauling your daughter. Yeah it would be a miracle, SMDH Jonas Bakalava

There are so many ugly problems with the sl interface for animation, but one of the worst in my opinion is the difference in scale between what is made for example in poser, to what is seen when a bvh is loaded into second life. Generally a 1 meter measure in poser will move a figure about .730 of a meter in sl. This is true of all xyx moves. A simple fix would be to multiply all the motion generated by poser in the bvh file x 1.36. This would eliminate for example the feet coming off the ground in sl when a figure crouches, or why when making dances the spatial difference between figures is so wonky. Does anyone know of some kind of program that would be able to take a bvh file and convert the numbers according to a known scale discrepancy like this? I have been an animator in sl for a long time, and i keep hoping that eventually sl will decide to fix the animation interface so it works flawlessly without the greasy feet wiggling, unintended motion and so on that ruins a perfectly made animation, and especially this scale issue. It should not require 100 downloads to repair all the butchering sl does to a good animation. But until sl decides to tackle this problem in addition to their not using trig in their rotational interpolation-- what did they use??? Apparently we all have to suffer their lack of interest in trying to make things better and come up with improvisational patch jobs in order to compensate for all their buggered stuff. I used to go through animations 1 keyframe at a time and do this manually but with several figures in a 900 frame animation this is a total white knuckle mind bender, Certainly there has to be something out there to do this and if you know of it i would sure appreciate your sharing your info.. I would strongly urge anyone reading this, if you love sl, and would love to see it flourish, to collectively put some pressure on sl to totally revamp their animation setup, not only to repair it but to gloriously allow for facial and hand expression. For goodness sake, sims 2 was made in the 80s and had it way back then. If you are as tired as i am of looking at plastic avies with glazed dead frozen eye emotionless faces, frozen stiff hands, and zombie like animations, It is time for us all to work together to wake up sl and get them off their dead complacent corporate A--es Thank you Jonas Bakalava JB Balls

I have been in sl a pretty long time. I basically think it has stagnated to the point it is merely coasting precariously on the coat-tails of Philip Linden. You still can't teleport succesfully all the time, sim crossings are still messed up, the avitars are more and more grossly outdated by todays standards, lag is absolutely horrible, online shopping is a joke since nothing rezzes, servers are grossly inadequate, there is no support for clubs to make the experience for people better, losses of things you buy is huge with no attempt to get them back, and despite the terrible economy no attempt whatsoever is made to roll back extremely exhorbitant tiers, making people sacrificing dearly to aviod losing their sims. The situation with animations was always dreadful with more flaws in the interface than you can shake a stick at, and now, with shortened times and undefined limits the scenario is positively dreadful, and despite implementing mesh no effort whatsoever has been made to make better avitars with full facial expressions of full hand and finger motions possible. Despite the thongs of complaints, dresses on girls STILL make them look like rhinos. Can't you even do some simple thing to fix this or the skimpy area between the legs with so few polygons making clothing bleen practically to the knees???? The long and short of it is that sl without its founder has completely lost its fire and now the management seems content with just putting tinsel on the christmas tree with nothing under it and milking sl simply as a cash cow. Probably pleases the stock holders, but what about your customers? you know, the ones that pay the bills???? As a lover of Sl and all i believe it can be, i am very discouraged at what Second Life has become. I dont know whether there are any people at all who share my frustration, but if there are some i wish you all would collectively let your voices be heard to the managment that we expect more and demand more for our money. I would encourage those who are in charge of this company to reinstill the fire and passion that brought this company to life to make it what it is, and to dream bigger and ro look far beyond to the future full of exciting and wonderful possibilities and exciting changes.