Decision time for me: I have to do an animation that requires a figure walking in to an 'x-ray type machine that has glass doors all around on 3 sides and a place to place his hand for ID as well as eye ID (george owell-here we come). in the past I would combine the poser movement with carrara using various quicktime videos and layers....time to move up. whats the status of placing a poser model in carrara and having the dude walk, stop move etc (decide and do the movement within carrara.....or the reverse making a 3D model carrara and exporting it to poser?....

Tranposer is designed to import Poser motion along with the figure into Carrara. The way I've handled stuff like this is to make a low resolution set in Carrara, import it into Poser (.obj) and create the movements sequences in Poser. Once the movement is done, I delete the scene objects and save a duplicate file. (this let's me keep the Poser file with the scene elements if I need to go back in to change motion later) Back in Carrara where I created the scene objects, I import the duplicated Poser file which contains only the character. Then while in Carrara I can further model the scene, texture it and finally render the animation. Mark

sounds good, when your back in carrara after having imported the poser model can you modify the poser model or are you "stuck" with the sequence that you made while in poser

You are stuck with it. However, you can go back into the Poser file and change the motion. Carrara will update accordingly. If you want true in-Carrara control you need to import the Poser character as an .obj or .3ds file and create bones in Carrara. Since I'm pretty lazy I like to let Poser do the thinking for me though. ;)

thanks Mark...i start the work in a couple of weeks....and I think I 'll skip the "bones" aspect -

This might be a bit off topic (more of a Poser question then Carrara), but can you set bones on a model made in Carrara within poser to be able to use the walk command, to import it back in to Carrara for further work? If this is the case I will have to get poser.

Not at this time... :(

Not true, Mark. If you have Poser 5, or Pro Pack, you can easily apply bones to a figure, and if you make it to the specifications of one of the existing figures, (P4 male & female, Don or Judy etc) and apply that skeleton to your figure, you can use the walk designer. You can also create walk designer files for other figures, but it involves animating the walk cycle at least once. (i think Mike & Vicki can use the walk designer too.) If you're planning on doing character animation, and you already use carrara, poser is the way to go. There are many things you can do with your characters using poser that carrara can't do on it's own. Aside from morph targets (which Carrara 4 can do) Poser also does morphs that affect more than one body part, you can save poses, or partial posessave and re-use animation for all or some body parts, create conforming clothing, and posable props. There's also Poser's own magnet and wave deformers, which are extremely useful for modifying and animating organics and cloth. (There's also the hope that transposer will be updated to include dynamic hair and cloth...) You can also get DAZ's Mimic, and use automated lip synching for your characters....

Thanks for the info Brainmuffin. I'll have to check that out - I didn't think you could. So apparantly I know just enough to be dangerous... ;) Mark

Well I guess I will have to get Poser after all. Thanks brainumffin. I have played around with Poser 3 and it dose seem kind of intuitive, but from what I hear Poser 5 is a pretty complex program. I guess I will have to make time to find out how it works.