for the past few days I been playing around with the animation features in P4PP and have been reading this fourm and see the term BVH and how it can speed up and make animations easier or somthing can someone explain this to me in laymens terms please. Also can anyone give me some good tips and pointers on how to learn animation in poser even tutorials would be great, not ones that teach you to make a ball bounce up and down but ones that can be useful and relevent to say making a animation movie or something like having a character open a door, punch something or someone ect ect those kinds of tuts can be useful anyways thanks for your helps Dark Raven

Basically, BVH is a motion-capture file format. Studios that specialize in this technology strap sensors onto performers and record their movements. This motion data can then be applied to 3D characters. It usually creates more realistic results than manually posing the characters, keyframe by keyframe.

BioVision's .bvh format is one of the industry standards, and Poser can import these files for use with Posette, Michael, etc.

This Poser animation, for instance, uses a .bvh file which was recorded from a real dancer:

Sabrina Dance Studio (MPEG format, 1.37MB)

The trick is to find the mo-cap file you need. Some are available for free on the 'Net; others are sold here in the Marketplace, at DAZ and Turbo Squid, and other places. The motion capture hardware itself can be purchased for private use, and the mo-cap studios (House of Moves, LocoMotion, etc.) can also be contracted to record custom motions, provided you can afford it.

But even if you have the perfect motion file on hand, you'll likely need to make some small adjustments within Poser to fit your scene. So learning how to keyframe your own animations and effectively use the animation graph is still essential.

geep has an excellent animation tutorial in the Poser forum, which teaches the basics of the interface.

You might notice that Poser can both import and export .bvh files. If you manually create your own animation for a figure, you can save it to .bvh format and share it with others. Poser's pose files (.pz2) can store motion data, also, but they only work within Poser. .bvh can be used in a variety of programs.

thanks little dragon see now this was more informative then what I found in the P4 Users Guide if you know any other good tuts or info to help me please let me know thanks buddy Dark Raven