Importing as bvh into second life, why ?

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

I think I'll have to do this manually

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

Alright, this still isn't working. I tried the following.

Firstly I started a new pz3 with the following setup

Two swords:

Sword A is the parent OF the right hand
Sword B is parented TO the right hand

I translate sword A around to pose.

When I'm done, I turn off IK as instructed. And this happens:

The right hand baloons up horribly. The swords are at 66% of their original size, which may have something to do with that.

So I tried saving the pose anyway. This is with IK OFF. Just adding it to the pose library on the right. It seems to save just fine.

Then I tried reimporting it into my main file. Just a static, single frame pose. And it came out like this.

What am I doing wrong ?

The sword will only be held in the right hand. Left is irrelevant for this.

Basically, what I'm worried about is that with theright hand parented to one sword, it won't be parented to the right forearm . does this mean that if I adjust the arm, the hand won't follow, and will just stay hovering where it is in space?

I'm not making a movie, which will perhaps remove some complexity. I'm creating bvh animations for second life. All I really need from this is two single frame poses, so getting them from another pz3 is sounding like the best idea.

If I were to use two swords, would the hand move properly when the other parts of the body move? eg, if the hand is parented to a sword, and a second sword is parented to the hand. And wouldn't doing that cause the first sword to be left behind when I move any part other than it ?

Then shouldn't changing the parenting change it for the whole thing?

Or will I need to save poses and reimport them into a new pz3 ?

Wouldn't not having an IK chain in the arm not make it move when the sword does? that seems pointless. Am I understanding correctly ?

Hmm, a little more advice needed. I think I have an idea of how this came about.

Basically, I had the sword in there parented to the hand, so that it would move properly with swings and such. However, for that particular .pz3, I was making an unsheathing animation.

It's pretty much necessary to have the sword move perfectly out of the sheath, and not clip through the edges. This didn't seem to be possible by simply positioning joints, at least not without spending days repositioning tiny parts.

The simple solution I used, was to reverse the parenting. Parent the hand to the sword instead. Then I translated the sword along one of it's local axes so that it moved perfectly smoothly out of the sheath, with the right arm readjusting itself naturally to hold it

Clearly, this is where something has gotten mixed up though. Is there any way I can use this technique, but prevent this corruption from ocurring again ?

Don't suppose there's something free that can accomplish this task ?

Thank you. I seem to have fixed it myself, I think, but this will be useful as a backup.

I wonder why this causes poser to crash. It should be deigned to warn the user of errors and abort the operation, instead of freezing up silently.

The figure is he Second Life avatar. It's available for download here: http://secondlife.com/community/avatar.php

just in case that'll help with diagnosing the problem..

Looks great, but it also looks human. Her skin does not look like stone, which makes the missing arms rather creepy ...

ok, I missed one of the props in the above attempt. A small invisible cube I used for attaching the left hand to the sword. After deleting this, poser crashed on saving the pz3, before I even got to bvh :(

hmm, I tried deleting the props, and exporting again. This time it didn't hang, but crashed outright

"poser.exe has enountered an error and needs to close.... blah blah"