over 200$ and the manual bites everyone agree on that?

More or less, yeah. What's your specific problem? :o)

it doesnt tell me how to make animations very well. only still frames and if i move a figure then all goes to hell have you ahd this experience?

Sorry, does 'blows; and 'bites' means you think is is good or bad? I thought the manual was OK - if you look at a lot of the questions asked here though, very few people read much of it.

Nope. If you follow the tutorial and get your figure dressed and walking around and lighted and rendered you have already come to grips with the basic issues of 3d graphics. You will still have questions, but the questions you ask will be on those issues not covered in the manual or the FAQ. If you slop through a few pages and just barge in here, you'll be asking "why does the figure disappear when I click on the clothing item?" just like the other new users who have never learned how to read thoughtfully, use an index, or follow a tutorial all the way through. If you can follow a tutorial, I will suggest searching for Dr Geep's primers. He does an excellent job of breaking down complicated subjects with pictures and circles and arrows and a dollop of humor. As to why you are having problems with the animation ("all goes to hell" is really too vague as a description of a problem, but quite suitable for a rant), you will need to describe what you are trying to accomplish. If you have updated to Windows Media Player 9 (IIRC) it has major problems with Poser's animation tools. There is a thread discussing that. Finally, the manual should teach you how to use Poser, not how to animate. The software is a tool, and learning it is learning a skill. Animation is a very special art. Carolly

I agree, the P5 manual isn't very good. Seems very rushed and perfunctory to me. The P4 manual is much better - easier to understand, with more thorough tutorials. IME, the P5 manual is best used as a reference for those who already know what they're doing. The P4 manual is better for newbies who don't know what they're doing yet. However, there are other Poser books you can buy, not to mention lots of free online tutorials. And you can always ask here. If you a post a screenshot, people can usually tell you what you did wrong.

One way it might go to hell when a figure is moved is if you select the hip and translate it without first switching Inverse Kinematics off: either do that (Figure>Use Inverse Kinematics and untick everything in Poser 4) or select the Body, rather than a body part, to move it.

Animation is poser isn't easily taught, nor easily learned. It is not quick i is not easy, and it is not simple. It is quicker, and easier, and simpler than packages that cost a great deal more money. And they, also, have pretty crummy directions on animating. 3DS 4 comes to mind as one of the worst I've ever seen. Animation in 3d is full of jargon -- words that have meanings that aren't entirely the same as what one would expect them to mean. Learning them comes first. Then getting the concepts down is second. Keyframing. Spline editing. Camera motion and focal range. All of it is covered to some extent int he manual. It could be written better, yes, but it covers it. I happen to agree that the P5 manual is not very well done. Dr. Geep is a heaven sent blessing for getting the basics down, and the tutorials section here is pretty incredible. avail yourself of it. "Constructive criticism is admired. Venting is tolerated. Bitching is rude. Condemning is intolerable. Poser users are usually all of the above."

I am new to poser and to 3d art in general. My biggest stumbling block was learning the terms. Finding answers in the book is near impossible if you don't know the words your looking for, or find the answer but don't understand what it is saying. There is also a degree of intuitiveness that one would expect from a program. The issue with figures replacing each other is a prime example. I imagine most people new to poser (and 3d art) most likely are experienced with computers and many different programs. So they expect to be able to jump in and do at least the basics just by hitting what appears to be the logical buttons or double clicking in the most logical place. Poser has many things which are not logical or intuitive.

I will agree that the manual for p5 is next to useless, but more because nothing is put in a logical manner. Coming from other 3d programs, I would have thought that if you want to apply a texture, that is what you would look for in the sorry excuse of a manual. Nope, guess again. I haven't found it yet except by just playing with it until I got it to work. The manual is a bigger screwup than the bugs in the program. Geep's tuts are on an order of ten magnitudes better.

Anyone who thinks the P5 manual is helpful must be reading a different manual. They use terms or menu names in the manual that are not in the program. Ooops maybe they didn't know what the terms would be when the manual was written? You are instructed to use processes or items which don't exist. Oh, and don't forget all the stuff that is called for in the tutorials that didn't make it into the Program CD. I think there was a waterfall.jpg background file that was essential for at least one tutorial.. Oooops it didn't appear till several weeks or months after Poser 5 was released. You get the idea.

Attached Link: LIVE IT LEARN IT!!!

*"Finally, the manual should teach you how to use Poser, not how to animate."* If it has character animation tools it should have comprehensive coverage of the proper use those tools in its manual in the manual... it doesnt :-( I learned to animate in poser only after using other high program like lightwave and Cinema4DXl. and as it turns out poser has very POWERFUL character animation tools including a "Dope sheet" (AKA animation pallette). every paremeter in a poser scene can be adjusted and/or animated in the poser graph editor you should **NOT** be reaching into the document window grabbing your figure by the arm trying to animate them or pose them for that matter :-) ALL movment can be done in the graph editor and i strongly suggest you animate nude figures in "bounding box" mode so you will have real time feed back, you can always export your motion as a BVH file and re-apply it to a fuly dress/textured figure for the animation render you can delete ANY mistakes you have made in ANY Channel by selecting those frames in the Dope sheet and deleting them.

I've been an animator for 15 years, and I repeat Finally, the manual should teach you how to use Poser, not how to animate. If a person doesn't know what kinematics is, or the difference between kinematics and animation (my article on this was published in an industry tradezine at least 10 years ago), or what inverse kinematics is, Poser will NOT teach him. If he doesn't know the basic rules of anticipation, action, follow-through, exaggeration, etc., Poser will NOT teach him. If he doesn't even know the vocabulary, much less the methodology, he better go find a book or course on animation... not Poser. Poser is simply a tool. It is a complex, wonderful, powerful tool. But it is just a tool. Telling a guy what end of a hammer to hold won't enable him to build a house. Telling this person how to use the graph editor will not make him an animator. Carolly

Beat me to it, Wolf... ;) The situation is pretty much like Poser itself. The program is doing all sorts of things that it was never designed to do, and no one really thought it could or should do, simply due to the experimentation of others. The manual is handy, but to -learn- about things like animation, you need to check out the tutorials, google your way around and see what kinds of research material you can find that might explain things. Animating is still considered something of a 'black art'...which is why more people don't mess with it. Perhaps with E-frontier being in the dominant seat, we might get that issue addressed, along with some more comprehensive information about the shader system....

It really isn't a particularly good manual for learning a program. It's okay for some reference, but it's somewhat perfunctory even as a reference. I defy anybody to figure out how to use the Poser 5 Material Room from reading the manual. I recently opened up the manual to figure out how to add a metallic reflection to a texture and there's nothing in there to explain how to do it properly, just quick one-liners briefly describing the nodes. The index isn't any help because it doesn't even point to anything in the Material Room for "reflect". Probably the reason that the Poser 4 manual is better than 5's is that it was done when Poser was under Metacreations. Their manual for Painter remains an excellent resource with examples and reference information neatly intertwined. It's one of the best put together manuals I've ever seen. Just flipping through the manual is fun because of all the visual examples.

"Sorry, does 'blows; and 'bites' means you think is is good or bad?" Well, if something "sucks", that's bad, I know that one. Blowing is the opposite of sucking, so "blows" must be the opposite of bad, i.e. good. "Bites" I dunno, never heard that one. Possibly the manual "walks" - no, it "snaps" - no, it "grabs" ...

mm cough cough !! poser manual I've just looked out my manual(blowing the dust off it ) and looked for deleting animation frames - loads on adding none on deleting. The animation engine is very powerful the manual is err - how shall I put this- lousy? bad? no,no Us brits have a word for it - pants... yup the poser manual is pants (lousy, bad, ill organised and devoid of any street cred whatsoever) Narsil- a working animator for more years than he cares to remember(OK the first CGI I did was using a PDP 8S computer in errm 1973) before that I was an onion skin merchant (still am -in extreme cases)

I guess my P5 manual is broken: I have yet to get it to expel wind, or "blow". Additionally, it has yet to close quickly on me and cause an injury, or "bite". Download SP4: the pdf file that comes with it includes a chapter on how to use the new "Make Art" button. You should be able to tweak this button to "Make Animation". Or, you could look through the turorials here and teach yourself how to use Poser, then how to create animations with 3-d programs, then how to use Poser to make animations. Frankly, I think this is a lot to cover in a manual that also has to include the entire workings of the Poser program.

In my expeprience as a technical writer, the Poser5 manual appears to be written as a series of afterthoughts. Nothing in any section is ever completed. Read some and the next thing is- for more information go to chapter xxxx. Hence I can see the frustration of anyone attempting to find answers.

Man, that has to be a bummer. Somebody tells you to RTFM, then somebody actually reads it and it's no good. But then, that's why there's such a great demand for forums like this. If they "off-shored" the P5 manual to some guys in Bombay or Beijing who had never used Poser, then translated it back into English from Hindi or Mandarin, it's not surprising. Maybe they won't be in such dire straits when the time comes to write the P6 manual.

It was written by Anthony Hernandez, who's currently working on .... the D|S manual.

Try these for help with animation: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1562059300/qid=1078336175//ref=pd_ka_2/104-1525390-9838365?v=glance&n=507846 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735700443/qid=1078336175//ref=pd_ka_1/104-1525390-9838365?v=glance&n=507846 http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/lessonplan/lesson.htm

The poser manuals aren`t the best, but I learned most of the basics of poser 4 by reading the manual when I got stuck.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=616696

>>In my expeprience as a technical writer, the Poser5 manual appears to be written as a series of afterthoughts. Nothing in any section is ever completed. Read some and the next thing is- for more information go to chapter xxxx. Hence I can see the frustration of anyone attempting to find answers. That is what I find most frustrating about the manual, is having to look in several different places for information on a complete process. It is more a reference manual than a learning manual ... which I think is the sad case for most software manuals. That is one of the reasons that third party books are so popular. I'm also a technical writer by profession ... and have been working on a Face Room tutorial that is **very** thorough and takes things through in a "hands on" type manner in the order that you use the face room features. So far, it's taken 25 pages just to go through prepping photos, loading photos, and adjusting feature points to create the texture and head. I still have to cover all of the Face Shaping Tool morphs (including examples of all of them) and the morph putty tool, so I suspect it will be at least 60-70 pages by the time it's done. Problem is how to distribute it ... the 25 pages is already over 3 megs in PDF format, so I might have to break it up into smaller sections. The tutorial uses a couple of photos from www.3d.sk in the screen grabs, so I still have to check with him to see if I can use his photos in the screen shots. But here's an example of the face I created in the face room while going through the steps ... just to show y'all that you can do wonders with Poser 5 if you take things in the right order.

Deecey, can I throw an idea at you: When you are creating your chapter, sub-chapters or sections save each as a pdf and hyperlink from a master page. It might keep the files smaller and easier to edit if you ever have to.

I was just thinking that's probably what I would have to do ... along with designing the site that it's going on. 8-) Dee

"Telling this person how to use the graph editor will not make him an animator." ---------------------------------------------------- Pardon me, but you are making a silly semantic argument thats not central to the persons problem. the poser graph editor is where any worthwhile animation must be done its that simple. :-) if you can show me some of your original poser animations that were not done using the Graph editor id love to see them. and ten year old "zine" articles dont count as animation expertise. Just got to any other forum (Lightwave,MAX Cinema) and ask about the graph editor and dope sheet for animation. NO using the graph editor wont "make" anyone an animator But NOT using it for your animation will guarantee that you will Never properly animate your figures.