Ok, I'm a newbie to Poser and all I have seen are still scenes of models. Has anyone sucessfully done a Poser animation scene? Would someone WANT to do this or is there a better program? I have the Pro Pack and I'm finding that some of the animated scenes seem to screw up and put strange twists in the arms when waving. Any help is appreciated.

"Has anyone sucessfully done a Poser animation scene?" Lots and lots and lots of times! Plugging my own latest production, which is BY NO MEANS the best or even a good example, but it's mine...... :) ockhamsbungalow.com/Movies/DerGeist.mpg (The clip is meant to answer the question: Does God hear the prayers of mice?) Poser animations have been used (not often) in movies and TV, and (often!) in custom-made applications for educational, scientific, and theater purposes. As for the strange twists: you're most likely running into the side-effects of spline interpolation. The Poser manual describes this but not very helpfully. Search this forum for "spline" and you'll find several helpful discussions.

Hey thanks for the help. The program looks really good and I want it to work. I can find plenty of still renderings of Poser but rarely do I find any animated scenes. If you have anymore animations done with Poser, please post them.

When you start an animation, you might want to go to the first frame on the animation palette, click the radio button that applies to All Frames and click the green/Linear interpolation button. All the cells should turn green instead of orange. The default setting is Spline interpolation (orange cells), which can give more realistic movement between keyframes, but also tends to overshoot the keyframe's pose, producing those weird movements. HTH - Elisa/gryffnn

For whatever reason, animations are just not very common here. Partly it's a matter of file size and downloading convenience. A useful animation takes at least 2 MB even in tiny hard-to-see format. Keep at it and keep asking... there are about a dozen active animators here, who will be ready to answer questions. One general bit of advice: Quickly learn to use the keyframe graph. It's a bit daunting, but if you get into the habit of using the graph as a kind of "storyline", you'll progress much faster than if you just use the display for posing.

Attached Link: poser animation 1meg

Attached Link: gratuitous naked chick

Attached Link: customedia.

Thanks for posting the animations. I guess we all know what kind of woman you like. :) If those breastessis get any bigger she's going to have back trouble.

MimicMouse render test (MPEG format, 316KB)
Sabrina Dance Studio (MPEG format, 1.37MB)
Mimic Wolf render test (MPEG format, 556KB)
Florence render test (MPEG format, 536KB)

Obligatory credits:

Sabrina Eric Schwartz, Sabrina Online
Florence Ambrose Mark Stanley, Freefall
"Little Red Riding Hood" Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
Additional music by Chopin

Of course, you realize this means war, ScottA. And I have the army to fight it ....

Are you sure you want to declare war on a guy with an arsenal of Giant Toho figures at his disposal LD? ;-) I do have a small request from you If I may be so bold good sir. Your .Gifs are usually over 100k and they cause some problems with my slow phone connection. Is there any chance you could reduce the colors more to get them down to around 60k? I usually strive for no bigger than 30k. But sometimes it's not possible. And if I can't do it in under 80k. I won't post it. I use GIF ANIMATOR5 same as you. And I have the compression cranked almost as high as it can go. I Don't mean to be wet blanket. If you make em' smaller. I'll be happy to declare WAR! 8-)

I use JASC Animation Shop, actually.

No promises, ScottA, but I'll keep file sizes in mind for future .gif creations. I prefer MPEG format, anyway.

The Sabrina Army .gif is already on the Renderosity server, which is why I keep recycling it. The only way I can get it under 80k is to halve the frame count and reduce it to 15 colours, and/or possibly scale it down to postage-stamp size. And then it looks truly wretched.

Oops. I meant to say JASC Animation Shop. Couldn't remember the name cause I have both. But I use JASC these days myself. My animations are usually washed out to keep them small. Just a courtesy thing so the thread doesn't slow down. Cable and DSL users probably aren't even aware of it. I wonder if other people have the same problems as I do? Get a couple 100k .gifs loaded in the same thread. And I can hardly scroll anymore. Are you a broadband user?

Always have been. Never had dialup. I waited five years without internet service for the cable company to upgrade its hardware in my region, and while I roughed it without home access I used the computers at the local library. It was the principle of the thing .... (or sheer stubbornness)

So what you are saying Little Dragon is that you missed out on the "free" days of the Internet. The days when information was spread by users for users without the use of pop up ads or pay sites. :)

Attached Link: http://homepage.mac.com/kflach/first.html

Attached Link: http://homepage.mac.com/kflach/media/BabyS.mov

Sorry for hijacking this thread Pyg. I personally use the Graph a lot in Poser animations. It's really handy to edit multiple frames at once. But it's not documented very well in the manual. Converting the frames to KEYFRAMES by clicking on the the + icon in the animation pallet helps when you get things close. That way you can edit each frame without the other frames changing as well. Do a search for Geep. He posted an animation tutorial here that explained it a little If I rember correctly.

The Graph Editor is life!

NP on the highjack. The info I've gotten so far and help a LOT. So is it best for each frame to be a keyframe?

"So is it best for each frame to be a keyframe?" Absolutely not. Keyframes are points in time when something significant happens - a motion starts or stops. Once you've got those keyframes in, you add only as required to make the motion "flow" the way you want it. Depending on the complexity of what you're animating, how realistic you want it to be, and the timing , you may end up with a bunch of keyframes. The fewer keyframes you have the easier it will be to keep track of what's what. The Graph Editor helps you visualize how much change is going on and how smooth, or natural the motions is. You can add or subtract keyframes there as well as change them to different types.

Not always. That spline interpolation that is giving you such troubles now can sometimes be a godsend. It creates a natural organic flow from one frame to the next. But the problem is the computer doesn't know exactly how you want it to flow. When you convert to key frames. You lose the ability to change one frame. And have the other frames follow in a fluid type motion. It's best to only convert to KEY Frames when you are basically finished with the animation set up. And want to tweak a few frames to get it perfect. When I have a body part that goes where it shouldn't. I go to the Graph editor and drag the lines around until I get it close. Then edit the thing frame by frame to fine tune it.

You beat me too it bob.

It was the frame by frame tweak that I am trying to avoid. I realize I will have to tweak a LOT but I never expected an arm to be twisted like a pretzel.

Start simple. Open the ball prop. Go into the graph. And move the line around for the various axis. And see what it does. If you play around with that for 15-20mins. I think you'll be able to apply that knowledge to something more advanced. Like the human figures.

Scott's right. Start simple. When animating humans, things can get complex quite quickly. By learning the basics on simple objects, you can isolate what each control really does. And look for tutorials by "geep" - they're outstanding!

I've searched GEEP but returned nothing. I've done the simple stuff and I'm ready to get humans animated. When my guy started freaking out I thought I would come see if this were a problem with Poser or something I am doing. Once again, the help has been great.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=934392

Once again, thanks for all the help. My animations are coming along MUCH better now.

Please let us know when you've got 'em someplace they can be seen! We're trying to get the PTB to set up an Animation Gallery. It's taking some time but they're open to the idea. I think they're just very busy. Anyway, keep your eyes open for it. The relevant threads are in the Community Ideas forum.

Whenever I'm working on an animation, I'll go through and make a pose for each serious transition the figures gonna make, then when I finally decide to animate the thing, I toss em in every other keyframe. But I've got a question too... because a 45 second animation of mine is 90 mb... are they supposed to be that damn big?

SilentKnight, The ones I have seen that last any length of time at all are HUGE files. I'm looking to make 90 second to 3 minute animations for a projection system. I know the files are huge but that's what they make CD burners for. A 650 meg CD will hold a nice animation.

oh yeah, definetly. I've been splicing scenes and characters together for bout six months straight now... this isn't my computer... an I've erased all my brothers stuff on it... so he's in for a disappointment. ;) Cylent

The best investment I ever made was a Maxtor 120 gig hard drive for $129.00 at Best Buy. (7200 RPMs) I have never been a huge fan of Maxtor but so far I'm very happy with this purchase. 90 meg means nothing to me now. :)

Three basic factors affect file size. One factor is frame rate. TV uses 29.97 frames per second. Film uses 24 fps. [These are the North American standards - NTSC] High quality computer animations are usually 30 fps (computers play 30 fps better than 29.97 fps). If you reduce the frame rate, you get smaller file sizes. Another factor is the actual dimensions of the movie. Full screen TV/video is 720 pixels wide by 486 pixels high. DV is 720 x 480. The caveat is that these are rectangular pixels (based on TV screens) not the square ones found on computer monitors. If your software won't work with rectangular pixels (Poser and Bryce don't) you need to render at 720 x 540 and then use a video program (like Premiere or After Effects) to resize the animation to the desired rectangular pixel dimensions. Obviously, the smaller the dimensions of the animation, the smaller the file size. The third factor is that animations can be saved using different compression schemes (or none at all). The compression you choose affects both file size and file quality. Both divX compression (found in many of today's .avi files) and QuickTime (MPEG 4 or Sorenson compression) create good quality images with very reduced file sizes. There is always a trade off between image quality and file size and the compression schemes use different algorithms so the actual image itself makes a difference in both the quality and file size reduction they are able to produce. Thus, to reduce your file sizes you need to consider your output. If you're creating something to be put to TV or video tape, you're going to have large file sizes (high frame rate, full screen dimensions, and as little compression as you can for quality). If you're just creating something for playback on a computer, you can reduce the frame rate (15 or 12 fps usually works good), reduce the dimensions (320 x 240 is common) and apply whatever compression you want. I often create at a larger size (I work full screen broadcast quality at times) and then I reduce the frame rate, the dimensions, and compress the animation when I've got it finalized. That way I can test various combinations and pick the quality/file size that best fits my purposes.