This is so frustrating. I just spent an hour carefully tweaking individual frames here and there in a 200 frame anim, Then I save, export as bvh, and then reload the file to get around the horrible fact that bvh export turns every single frame into a keyframe. One slip of the wrist, and I clicked the wrong button: selected "yes" to save before reloading.

Now it's going to take at least another hour to weed out the hundreds of unnecessary frames, before the damn thing becomes useable again. WHY must poser do this? Is there any way to make it NOT turn everything into a keyframe on bvh export?

I think that is a limitation of the bvh file format, not an issue in Poser itself, but I could be wrong

I wrote the Sparsifier script for this purpose.  It's not perfect but it's a lot faster
than trying to cut down keyframes by hand!

http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/Sparsifier2.zip

Thats what a bvh file is , save it as an animated pose if you want only the keyframes you have set .
you may be able to select the keyframes you want and copy paste them into a new animation layer, then delete the base layer info and copy back .

WarKirby, if your animation started as a bvh, I've found one way to reduce the keyframes at the start is to apply the bvh to your figure, save that as an animated Pose, close, call up the figure again and apply the Pose. This seems to cut down a lot of the extraneous keyframes for things like "Taper" etc. that seems to get in there upon the original bvh import.

What's the problem with alot of keyframes? File size?

Quote - What's the problem with alot of keyframes? File size?

I think it's editing, for them.

No, it started as a pz3. The problem with a lot of keyframes is that they don't interpolate. To make them interpolate properl requires removing unnecessry keyframes.

The sparsifier looks awesome though. I'm going to try it now

Sparsifier isn't doing the job, unfortunately. Seems to make things look very spastic.

I think I'll have to do this manually

What is your ultimate intended use for these animations, Warkirby?

Importing as bvh into second life, why ?

I'm not sure if this is a similar situation, but I'm animating Poser figures in Cinema 4D using InterPoser Pro, but  was having a problem with the way IPP interpolated Poser's spline curves--it got the keyframes in the right place, but the curves were generally too sharp, so the animations looked choppy. What worked for me was to actually add keyframes to every relevant frame using a python script that adds frames to every non-zero morph & transition, but ignores everything else, so you don't have a lot of extraneous keyframes. I don't know how second life works, but could it be something like this?

Motion capture involves sampling motion at regular intervals so as to recreate the motion as best as possible - the higher the sampling rate, the better the quality.  This is practically the opposite of regular keyframing techniques where keyframes represent landmarks of a motion with interpolation providing the motion flow between.  This is why sparse keyframing to get motion that looks organic and real is so difficult and motion capture is used so often instead.

With respect to IPP, Poser and Cinema 4D use completely different animation spline interpolation algorithms.  R9 and R10 interpolation are also different.  The Poser spline interpolation is rectified on C4D keyframes using the key tangents in an attempt to match more closely but it is definitely not possible for an exact match.  Maybe a 'smooth' option or variable setting could help to remove the choppiness?

Oh--with respect to IPP (and Kuroyume)--once I get the animation built,  and keyframes worked out in Poser (which is really a snap with the python script I got from Phil C--thanks, Phil!), the import of the animation into Cinema 4D using IPP works great, and it's easy to update the animation from Poser to Cinema 4D if you make a change. For anyone who has Poser and Cinema 4D, I can't recommend IPP highly enough--stable, easy to use, great customer service.