My original purpose in using Poser was to build and animate educational illustrations. I had developed a crude system of bones, using just Windows line-drawings, which worked fairly well, but clearly didn't look right. So when I heard about Poser, I figured it would solve the problems I was running into...... Well, Poser looks a whole lot better than my original setup, but it turned out that the problems were still there! I had hoped that such an expensive system would have some way to prevent surfaces from passing through each other like ghosts. Nope. I also hoped that the strange question of turning things in three different directions would be solved. Nope. The latter problem is one you'll encounter sooner or later. It's called "gimbal lock" because it was first encountered in the gimbal systems of compasses and gyroscopes. A quick way to see it in Poser is shown here. As in the left image: Set up a box, scale it so you can tell which side is which, then use the parameter dials to wiggle it back and forth on each axis, returning to zero after each wiggle. (Shown here is a Z-wiggle.) Now set two of the rotations to 90 degrees, as shown in the right picture. Wiggle all three again. Presto! You only have two real axes! Where did the third one go? The head-hurting answer is that the third direction doesn't really exist. You can move an object to any possible orientation with only two pivots. The third direction is only there to make things more natural, because our joints and muscles are designed to pivot three ways. Poser's solution to this problem is so clever that it tends to go unnoticed. Every figure has a BODY, which is the main carrier, and a Hip, which pivots within the BODY. This means that you never have to get caught with your directions down; if you can't rotate the BODY in the desired axis, you can always rotate the Hip, and vice versa.

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