Here's a little teaser of my current animation project I am doing for a course at college. I am recreating a scene from the 80's movie "Tron" in Poser 5. Here's a still from it - FireFly render with raytracing, depth of field and box filter - no post outside Poser except for scaling/jpg conversion. Note that the helmet and shoulder pads are not extra geometry or morphs - they're just displacement maps! The whole figure is a standard P5 Don with all the morph dials a 0 (except for the expression). The whole suit is done in the material room except for the forearm/wrist protectors. I will post an animation and some more production details hopefully next week.

Very cool WIP. Can't wait for to see the animation. Nice work on the helmet.

cool! :)

Attached Link: http://www.cocs.com/poser/goodies.htm

Here's where I got the inital textures from, btw. They are intended for Mike, but work well on Don. I tweaked them a little in Photoshop and the material room and also took them as a starting point for the displacement maps.

That's a pretty enventive use of displacement.

Attached Link: http://www2.hdm-stuttgart.de/~sw19/files/tron.wmv

Here's a first Video download. In sucky WMV format, unfortunately. The original render is a beautiful 800x480 animation, but I don't have any other programs here to convert it besides Windows Movie Maker...if anyone has a good recommendation for a $0 animation converter, I'd be grateful.

You might want to look at Bink! from Rad Game Tools (www.radgametools.com). It's targeted to game developers who need to compress video sequences for games, but it is a handy general-purpose compressor. Their philosophy is that they don't mind taking a while during compression, as long as decompression is fast. I used Bink! to compress a 35-second 600 x 600 animation from over 1GB down to 500K. It took about 45 minutes to compress. You can also create self-extracting Bink! files, for those people who don't have Bink!. (Of course, since they are .exe files, they will make people nervous if you post them. You might be beter off just posting the link to where they can download Bink!) The best part is that Bink! is a free download, as long as you don't mind the Bink! logo popping up at the end of your animation. (And if you don't mind paying a bunch, they will sell you a version without the logo.) Lynn Grant Castle Development Group

.exe files are not an option - I'd love being able to watch the animation files on my Mac as well. I'm rather looking for something that'll do a simple conversion from a series of stills (.jpg, .tiff, whatever) to DivX or similar.

May I suggest TMPG Encoder? Perfect for converting Poser .avi files to industry-standard MPEG format. Freeware (although a commercial version that supports MPEG-2 is also available). It gives you complete control over the conversion process, so you can set the exact bitrate you desire for both audio and video. For you early adopters, the latest version supports Intel's new Hyper Threading technology.

Thank you very much for using my Tron textures in your animation project (and thanks for giving me credit). Yes, both the Tron and Video Warrior (the bad guys) can be downloaded from my site: The JCH Poser Page. The helmet that you made is much better- I "cheated" by putting the texture map on Mike. :) Best of luck with the animation- it looks great so far! I can't wait to see the final version! --John