I'd like to share a method I've been using lately to generate poses. I call it 'pose farming'. It's kinda fun, which is the whole point of Poser to me :) It utilizes the magic of CG animation and it goes like this: Put a character in a scene at frame 1. Advance to frame 10. Change to another canned pose. Advance to frame 20. Change to another canned pose, etc, to frame 100 or whatever suits you. Now, go back to frame one and cycle through the frames one by one. When you stumble into a pose you like, save it. You'll usually find a few worth saving. Note that this process can be done very quickly. Several points become self evident. The more extreme the difference between two consecutive canned poses the more distinct poses you'll generate in the 'tweens' (the frames that the computer generates between your canned poses). Most of them will be garbage. Some of them will be good. If you're looking for that subtle 'just right' pose then start with a pose close to what you have in mind and make your 'every tenth' pose similar. Use poses designed for any character. i.e. you can generate some nice poses using canned P5 'male poses' with V3. The poses don't have to be designed for the character you're using. This gives you a lot of starting points. Of course, you don't have to use canned poses. I'm going to generate a small library of expressions and hand poses using this method, but I haven't done it yet. Appologies in advance if this method has already been posted by others, but I've been having fun with it, so I thought I'd post it for you guys. Also my appologies to the artists who loathe this kind of laziness. hehe ;)

If ya ask me, tis a damn fine idea!

Now that is an excellent idea! Thanks for sharing your ingenuity! I can see this would be excellent for getting the pose to have more of a sense of movement, something that can be difficult to achieve...

I always make my own poses as I go. The only times I have needed a standard pose, it was not in my Poser 4 and I had to make and save it: standing, sitting, saluting.

I often use this technique to tweak faces, except that I use frames 1 and 30, and then jump to 15 and look around from there.

excellant idea :) well done :)

Great info/tip. Thank You.

lol. And I thought I'd read all your tuts, Geep. How many more am I missing? ;)

That's a great idea, thank you. It's especially helpful to me because I create Poser "comics" and the hardest part is getting all those darned poses just right. This should be very helpful in creating and adding to my saved poses libraries.

I dunno, how many? ;=]

Wow! When will the CD be available? :)

HOLY COW, Doc!

You know geep, you should put out a book. Look at Shamms Morties, his stuff is nowhere near as good as your's and he charges 50 bucks a book.

When is it coming out?????

Doc, your tutorials are a class for themselves. I've collected as many as I could, but you're so productive, it's impossible to stay on target. I, for sure, would be happy to have a bound book for reference, even at a price of, say $30 to $50. Willy (nudge, nudge)

It would be the second Poser-book that's worth every dollar (or Euro, that is), after Bloodsongs "Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5". Willy

These are the ones I have.

Been doing that for some time now. Someone mentioned this a looong time ago. It's really addictive.

It would be useful if people could download all these tutorials at once in one big zipfile.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/index.ez?viewLink=434

Dr. Geep: As a suggestion, you could just put all your tutorials together for a CD and sell it as "The Compleat (so far) Dr. Geep Tutorial Archive." :) Renderosity has set procedures for dealing with that sort of thing - you can even send them a master CD and they'll send copy and send it to each purchaser. Might make back some of your bandwidth fees. :) People will know you provide these tutorials for free as a (much valued) public service - the archive would just be an additional bonus for those who wanted an easy reference. :) Tunsey: that's a neat suggestion - thanks!

... and a very good suggestion, April!