Reel Expression

What you will learn very quickly about me is that I’m a bit anal retentive. I’m an editor by trade and one of the most important aspects of it is ease of work flow. That means spending a bit of extra time having everything in it’s correct spot before ever starting a project.

To animate for SL, there are some important technical issues that you need to deal with for every new animation. Instead of dealing with it each time, in this tutorial we are going to create a starting file that you can use for each new anim.

First you need to download the SL avatar here. Then go to where you installed poser - typically c:\program files\curious labs\poser\runtime\ libraries\character and drag the SL avatar folder into there.

Open up Poser and in your workspace, if you have an avatar in it just select it anywhere and delete.

Then go into window drop down menu -> Library. You will see a window pop up like the image to the right.

Click on figures. You will then see a list of folders with SL Avatar listed, double click this.

Select the figure you want to use and click the icon at the bottom with double check mark.

Save this as a new file. I use “starting anim” as the name.

The way SL reads animations is that it takes the difference between frame 1 and frame 2 in the amount of degrees. The problem with this is that its sort of confusing at first. Not to worry, you should really only need to do this once.

First start off by turning off IK. The default starting file has IK on for the legs. Go to the figure drop down menu -> use inverse kinematics and select the left leg. Do it again for the right leg making sure all 4 do not have check marks in front of them.

See the image on the left that says “Frame 002 of 002″? That is your frame range. That means there are a total of 2 frames and I’m currently on frame 2. Click on the second box and enter 2. It’ll pop up with a box asking if it’s ok to delete the frames. Just go ahead and say yes. Not to worry, you’ll be able to add more later. This just makes it easier for the later stuff.

Make sure the first box says 1. Just to be on the safe side, go to the edit drop down menu -> restore -> figure. Then on the lower right of the screen press the + button. This will add a keyframe at frame 1 with the default T-Pose. If frame 1 is not in the default T-Pose, your animation will not upload.

Move to frame two by either the arrow on the keyboard or typing it into the box. Click on the + button to add a keyframe.

Any part of the body that you want to control with the animation, you must move it at least 1 degree in every rotation in frame 2. We’ll start with moving every body part, but in the AO section I’ll show you how to easily get them back to default.

The easiest way of animating in Poser (for me at least) is to left click on the body part I want to move then use the parameters box. You can either use the dial under the name or click on the numbers to type in.

Since we know we are moving it only degree, we’ll type it in.

Start with the head and then change all the numbers by 1 for all the ones with yellow names. Yellow = rotation but the joints for some odd reasons have different names.

Do that with each part: neck, left collar, left shoulder, left forearm, left hand, right collar, right shoulder, right forearm, right hand, chest, abdomen, hips, left thigh, left shin, left foot, right thigh, right shin, and right foot.

Save File.

One of the largest problems with creating animations is that you spend a long time making it in Poser only to upload it into SL and it doesn’t fit. This is because of the large range of customization we can do to our shapes.

For instance, if you made a pose with your hands on your hips you’d have to spend even more time adjusting the positioning for SL. Shorter arms in poser would mean you’d have to move them closer to your body then make them go into you in SL.

It might be difficult to tell in the picture on the left but the default poser avie has a shorter neck, torso, arms and legs then my SL avie. Without points of reference, this can be difficult to correct at first.

When uploading, SL only takes the rotation (yellow) and translate (orange - hips only) values… not scale (green). So you can make your hands down to the ground if you want to, it won’t show up in SL. Might make working a bit tough on you though :P

While this might not be the easiest way to go about doing it, what I did was make a few different poses - saving as different files each time - and then wrote down whatever value was best at for xscale.

A few ideas are: for legs do a sitting pose with the poser figure’s bottom on the ground. Ctrl + D will drop to the floor. If you are sinking in the ground in SL - the poser figure’s legs are too long. Hovering and they are too short.

With arms and torso you can do hands at side, hands on hips, and hands on waist. However this is a rather long process and may take some time to get right.

Once you are happy with the results you can go to your starting anim file and change the xscale in frame 1 and 2. I also save a backup incase I accidently overwrite, delete or somehow loose the file.