So, you have Poser and your figures are created.


You named your figures intelligently, and colored them if you have characters of the same sex. Set the number of frames you want to have in the animation. You can change that later if you need to, but if you know now, then you should set it. Longer animations will look less boring because you can add more variations. So if you want just a simple rocking motion of say 1 second, and you make a 5 second animation, you can have 5 different variations of other parts of the bodies, so it will look more natural. Even for a simple pose, like a cuddle, the pose will look more inviting if you add some motion, like hands rubbing or faces looking toward and away from each other.

Now you are ready to set up the figure T-poses. Don’t forget to set the cameras to be non-animating for any cameras that you want to use.

• Lock the hand parts of your figures. They aren’t going to animate in SL anyway, and it’s a pain to move a finger when you want to move the hand. Save yourself a lot of grief and lock the hands.
• Open the timeline and set the marker to frame one.
• Pose each figure’s start position in the animation. Frame 1 is the T-pose for the character. It does not appear to be different, but apparently it is different. Experts that have used other tools that have better manuals may know precisely why the T-pose is different, but of course there is no SL documentation and Poser is very light in it’s books about what exactly is going on with such details.
• This frame 1 is important too because for a smooth loop, the last frame and the first frame must be identical. To make the two frames the same, you must select and copy, then paste the first key frame to the end of the animation. If you ever make a change to the frame 1, you need to do this again to avoid the annoying jerk as the animation loops. You need to be familiar with cutting and pasting keyframes in the timeline of Poser.
• You want to be using Spline Interpolation to do your animation. Sometimes you will be tempted to use linear, because it’s easy to get out of control with splines. But if you use linear, you will look more like a robot than a human when you play the animation. The problem is the saw-tooth or snap reversal when the limb changes direction. Spline animation smooths this out so that it looks natural. I’ll mention later how to watch for and fix out of control splines.
• Learn to use IK – Inverse Kinematics – when posing the limbs. IK has its problems to be sure. But the alternative is too time consuming to contemplate. You will need to have patience when you make a radical movement of a limb such as a wave or a slap, since this is likely to result in a wild rotation of the hand on that limb. Also you will notice that the Bend, Twist and Side2Side don’t mean the same thing with IK is enabled. Too bad! I think this is a Big time bug in Poser, but what do I know. I’m only a user over the last several years.

Animation Steps
This is not a detailed tutorial, but let’s go through some of the steps as you make an animation:

1. Set up your T-Pose.
2. Copy the T-Pose to another point along the timeline and change it slightly.
3. If the figure is going to do a rocking movement, you can then paste the T-Pose again along the timeline.
4. Select a range of frames and then copy them. Paste them further along the timeline to replicate the motion. Now you can make changes to some of these key frames to vary the motion. Your timeline may look like this after a while:
   
5. You will notice that the key frames are only marked for the body parts that you moved:
   
   This can be useful in several ways. After you add the basic motion based on the rocking motion from the T-Pose and second pose, you can add other motions in later iterations by editing those frames. You will need to expand the timeline view and then delete key frames for just those body parts that may interfere with the motion you are adding. For example, she is rocking back and forth on the floor, but now you want her head to move out of step with that rocking. So add a head motion to a few of the key frames out of synch with the rocking and then delete the key frames for the neck and shoulders that prevent this motion. You can cut and paste the keyframes for just the head and shoulders to rock them out of step with the hips and tummy if you like. The more variations the better. The only thing required to get a smooth loop is that the last frame and the T-pose be identical.
6. As you have been doing this, you have been using Spline interpolation. If not you can select a set of keyframes – when the figure is collapsed is easiest – and then click the to set spline interpolation over the range. You need to watch carefully as you animate since you may see the character wildly go out of control. Splines can do that. They are sort of like tossing the figure’s parts sometimes. If the body part goes out of control, just add a key frame or two to control it. This is better than using linear interpolation, which keeps the figure in control, but looks like a robot.
7. Learn to use Play Range markers.
   
   These can serve two purposes. Save you a lot of time when you are working on only a section of the animation and need to replay it several times. And also it can allow you to check the end part of an animation if you want only the end to loop. You may want to have an animation start in a certain way and then loop back to the middle. SL allows you to set a percent start and end point for the loop. Of course the start and end points that you will want to use are in frames in Poser, so you will need to do the conversion to percent. You have math skills, right? What percent is frame 150 of 300 frames? If you don’t know, get a good math course and come back to see me.

Bugga-Boos
Now for some of the bugga-boos between Poser and SL. Poser and SL both use a sort of “industry standard” file format called BVH files. But SL doesn’t bother to document how they use it. Not so that I could find anywhere anyway. And neither does Poser. So, we have two black boxes that use a common format, sort of. This leads to several problems when you import animations. It sure would be nice if the Lindens were more interested in actually providing some sort of tool chain to build things in their world, but they provide some sort of undocumented, or minimally documented [Yes, I've seen the Wiki.] solutions for tasks, and then leave it to the populace to figure out what is really going on. The Second Life book is just a marketing tool, IMHO, and contains no real information of any substance about how to do interesting things in Second Life.

• I already mentioned that head and finger animations are just ignored by Second Life. You can use express_xxx and express_xxx_emote animations to animate the face. The head is ignored – bend twist and side2side. If you head isn’t pointing the right way when you get the animation into SL, go back to poser and look at the head positions. The head and neck may offset each other, so zero out the head, and then adjust the neck to get the face pointing the right way again in Poser. This is especially frequent when using Poser Physics – which we will talk about later – since PP does not take any restrictions into account and is likely to animate both the head and neck in opposite ways.
• The finger animations are just fixed at the time you import the BVH file into SL. Just choose a hand pose. This does work. But the “expression” portion of the import dialog apparently does not work at all, so you will have to using scripting support to cause expressions during your animations. I’m not clear whether the Lindens think this is a bug, or they have removed the feature and just never changed the import dialog.
• Second Life does not do the same thing as Poser, apparently, when keyframes are missing from a body part. If you set a pose for a hand, foot or some other part in the T-Pose [frame 1], and then there are no keyframes for that part at all, even if there are settings for it in the last frame of the animation, then SL will not animate that part correctly. I don’t know if this is a poser or an SL problem, but you need to have key frames for every part. So, if your figure just rocks back and forth the whole time, then choose a keyframe in the middle of the timeline, and jiggle each hand and each foot, with IK on of course, and this will set a keyframe for these body parts and probably fix your problem.
• Which brings up the point of looking carefully at your animations before import them. Sure it’s only a nickel [L$10/250 is about $04] to upload an animation, but it’s a lot of wasted time too if you don’t figure out there is a problem until the bed is running. Remember, once you import, you cannot change the animation, so if you used the wrong settings, then you have to pay again.
• The animation priority in SL import does not appear to work. Setting it to either 2 or 4 [are these high or low? which is Greater?? I have no clue.] does not stop other animations such as mouse looking or chat typing from overriding your animations.
• Body sizes in SL vary, of course, so it’s pretty much impossible to make reliable animations that cause more than one body part to make contact at the same time. Each pair of AVs will cause one or the other body part to match up. This is a big pain of course since you cannot hold someone around the waist and kiss them at the same time. Someday someone will work out a target based animation scheme and this will all be fixed, but animation has apparently not advanced at all in the last dozen years, so we are stuck with this blind joint bending scheme.

Exporting BVH Files
So once you have your animation done you need to export it as a BVH file so that you can import it into SL.

You need to select the figure to export. There is no dialog or confirmation of the exported figure. I find the the easiest way to keep track of what is selected is to use the left hand column of the timeline. Collapse all the figures and then click on the figure to select it. All the names are unique, so you can keep track of which one you are saving and name the BVH file correctly.

Now choose Export BVH from the menu.

You will almost always want to choose Scale. I only have had one failure to import, and the problem did not have to do with using the Scale option.

Now upload into SL.

You will want to check the animation very carefully in the preview dialog before you upload it. There are several things to make sure of:

• Make sure your settings are correct. Priority – I have no clue, but I set 4 in the hopes that this will override some other animations to keep a cleaner view in SL. Loop. With the start and stop points if they aren’t the beginning and end. Any hand pose, such as a fist to grasp a prop. As I have said, I have never seen the Expression work.
• Move the camera in the preview around and look at the pose to see if it’s correct. You can catch missing poses for body parts here. A straight leg or a miss placed hand will show up and save you time and trouble later when you are trying to adjust the pose and it just doesn’t fit.
• Watch the loop point for any jerks. Sometimes you get a smooth motion in Poser, but a jerk in SL. This may indicate a body part that does not have a keyframe. So go back into poser and set a key frame for that body part and try again. Jerks are very annoying in loops.

Next we’ll talk about animating with props.