Walking in SL

There was something about the way Ellen Page just walked down the sidewalk with her bottle of Sunny Delight in Juno that made me want to try capturing that in a SL walk.

I've totally failed. However, It did give me some more insight on how to make a walk a bit more realistic. I've been letting the animation program do most of the movement and just making minor adjustments. I've been going with a fairly simple 30 Frame 1 second loop. I've found that 32 FPS or so seems to match the movement speed in SL also. Only problem is... That's fast.

In order to keep SL happy with their animation I've recently switched to making it a 60 frame animation but looping only the middle 30 frames. This really has helped. It lets me have some motion... already happening if that makes sense. Basically think of it as a song on a wind up music box. Joint movement is tricky in animations, every joint pulls at the joints connected to it. And the programs generally don't "enforce" that movement. So you can get some very robotic looking movement. I've had a few people stop into the store and buy something, I then pull up what they have bought (especially with the early stuff) and say to myself, "Ack! I don't know that I really want that out there." I then play with it for about 10 minutes and have been known to send them an updated version I am much happier with now that I have gone up on the learning curve.