Could somebody please talk me through how to creat an animation. As I got Vue4 & Mover for Chrismas & would like to import Poser animations & make Vue animations. I have created an animation through Mover. And am able to preview the animation - but when I render the animation it Just seems to render the picture...very confused as to what to do from here.

Would be very greaful for any advise.

Also what is the best size option for the animation to select?

e-onsoftware recommends to render in DivX codec. But you also can save your animations image by image and assemble it in another program like Quicktime. the advantage is, that, if ever your computer crashes while rendering, you don't loose all the animation. About the size: difficult to say. As big as possible, but this takes time and space. Maybe start with 360x240 renders. When you are satisfied, render bigger and when you have become an expert, you will like to have bigger anim anyhow:-)

To render an animation, click the small icon at right in the timeline. this opens the anim render options. Click advanced options to see more.

All your animations are rendered automatically inside the VueAnimations folder. Guitta

Many thanks - I down loaded the free versopn of DivX, but it gives an error message VIDEO DATA:FOURCC code "0" & says I my need to install a new video codec? Is it possable to use Realone?

Alse with regards to importing Poser animations. I created a simple walk animation within Poser & then exported to a Wavefront obj. Then when I to Load the obj into Vue is just lets me load on frame at a time.

any ideas? - sorry if these really silly questions, but i'll get there in the end.

John

BUSHY; Do -not- export as an .obj; Mover4 is designed to read the PZ3 file format that Poser uses. Set up your animation in Poser, save it as a PZ3, close Poser, Open Vue, create or load your scenery. Then go to the top bar, click on 'objects', and at the bottom of the list you'll find an option to 'import object'. Click on that, then find your PZ3 file. Vue will then produce a small box that gives you the option of importing either the entire Poser Animation, or part of it referencing the frame values you can enter. Choos the full import, click on the 'yes' button, and sit back and wait until (a) you see the red outline of the figure mesh in the main window, and the preview window is done with whatever level of rendering its set to (this is just to allow Vue enough time to find everything in Poser). This should also bring up the animation timeline bar. You can't edit the animation in Vue; all you can do is move the figure, and rotate it around its 3 axis. At this point you can click on the extreme left 'arrow' on the timeline, and this should open a box that lists all the animated items in your scene. Have fun!

Thanks Gebe & Dale B, I seem to be getting the hang of this now - although I do have another question. When I creat an animation either in Vue - or imported from poser (mainly)when I play it back it isn't smooth & tends to jump! Is this something to do with the key frames? and if so is it easy to correct? In poser I am using a BHV file that I purchsed from Daz3d. Thanks again John

It can. One thing that can cause 'jump' is for the framerate that the BVH uses and the rendering framerate in Vue to be different. If they are, Vue tries to interpolate to get the values for those 'in between keyframe' frames, and doesn't do a terribly accurate job of it. In Vue's defense, you can get into some seriously large floating point values (like 8-12 digits to the right of the decimal point) doing this, and even the big boys have trouble with it. This can be corrected in Poser by retiming the keyframes to match the FPS you want to use in Vue (less than 24 fps can have discernable roughness, and for broadcast quality smoothness, you need to consider 30fps.), or set Vue to the FPS setting that Poser is using for the animation file. Another thing that can cause jumping is what is the bvh motion actually doing? If this is a motion file where the figure is doing a complete rotation around one axis (such as a dancer doing a pirouette), then you are looking at an issue that starts with the actual motion capture. Run the animation in Vue, and take careful note of where the jumping occurs, then go back into Poser and play it there, with the Hip selected (the hip is the root node of a bvh file, so the actual spatial location and orientation of the entire model is based on its .trans and .rot values). Be scrolled down to where you can see the X,Y, and Z rotation values, then step through the frames and watch the values. At the point where the figure is going from -180 degrees through Zero to +1 degrees, (let's assume the Y axis, so we keep with the dancer analogy), your Yrot may jump to something like -.005, or -845. If the value jumps to something bizzare, look at the other two rotation values; they should have equally jumped to extremely strange values. The reason for this is the kind of interpolation that the bvh capture software used. Mathematically, it is correct, and Poser has no trouble with it due to the fact that it can handle multiple forms of keyframe interpolation. But VueMover can't. What you have to do to correct this is reset the values manually in the keyframes that have the odd values in Poser, and resave the animation. This does take a little practice, as it is easy to mis-guess the values to keep the smoothness of the original movement, but it does get easier with practice. I usually wind up exporting a corrected bvh file and rename it so that I don't have to fix it again, should I want to reuse it.

I just got Vue 4.2 in the mail today, and I'm having some trouble with Poser to Vue myself. When I go to import the pz3 file, I'm not getting any animation import options... I must be saving the poser file incorrectly? It only imports a single static frame. When I reopen Poser 5 and open the pz3 file, the animation is in there, so I'm at a loss as to where to look next. Any suggestions?

Sounds as if you don't have Mover 4. Vue 4 out of the box can only import static poser scenes. There is a difference between Mover and Mover4. Mover is the basic animation capabilities of Vue, and concerns itself with animating objects and materials native to Vue. Mover4 expands that to allow animated PZ3 import, and adds a lot of other options as well. If you -do- have Mover4, then either (a) the installation hosed itself somehow, or (b) there is something not quite right about the link up between Poser and Vue. For the latter, rename the Poser -folder- to something else and start Vue. When you try to import an object, it should ask you to locate the Poser.exe. Don't do it yet; close Vue, then change the Poser folder name back, and repeat the steps and locate the Poser.exe, then test and see if that solved the problem. If it is the first one, about the only thing I know to do is to back up your Vue content and materials, and nuke the installation completely (including searching the registry tree for the Eon entries), then doing a complete reinstall of Vue, then Mover4.

Arrrg... okay, that's what I get for being so excited I can finally order the software that I don't read the fine print. I didn't realize that mover and mover 4 were two separate entities with different features. Will there be any problem with ordering Mover 4 now, and then using it later if I decide to upgrade to Vue 4 Pro? Or should I upgrade to Pro first (which will be quite a bit of time down the line) and then just order Mover 4 for the Pro version?

No there will not be a problem. You can order Mover 4 later. Vue 4 alone integrates already the possibility to create animations. Mover 4 allows to import animated Poser 4 scenes. When you upgrade later to Vue Pro, there is a special "adapter" on the Pro CD, so that your Mover 4 will work with Pro. Hope this helps:-) Guitta