"I'd like to hear about the things to avoid" First thing to avoid... the dreaded "character float". Make sure when you are animating, your characters are ON THE GROUND. Nothing looks more unprofessional than having a character "moonwalking" on the air instead of on the ground. In other words, make sure your figures are "dropped to floor" in every frame. Even one frame of "float" can screw up an entire scene. There's handy python utility scripts to drop actors/figures to floor on all frames. Use them. ;-) Second thing to avoid... excessive mesh tearing, folding, or "holes". In animation, you don't have the luxury of painting over these kinds of problems. Well, you can do it, if you have post-production software like AfterEffects or Combustion, but it would be very time consuming and frustrating, and may not look spot-on in the end. Best thing to do is avoid this from happening to begin with. Since Poser figures are actually "cut" meshes that are skinned together, mesh tearing can be a problem in situations where you animate/pose the figure beyond it's joint limits. Solution: either animate with "use limits" turned on, or make sure your motions are NATURAL and subtle, and try not to use situations in your scene that will force you to push the mesh beyond the breaking point. ;-) Sometimes things like folding and splitting can be hidden with careful and clever lighting, but often times, it will just look horrid, and kill a scene. Learn how to use the keyframe editor and curve graph. They are your friend. Third thing to avoid... "the Poser stare". Doesn't matter if it's a cartoon, realistic animation, or real life... PEOPLE BLINK. lol. Don't forget to take this into account when animating your character (especially if the shot is a close-up of the face). One of the worst things to do is to have a head shot of your character talking and they never blink their eyes even once. It's SPOOKY! Your audience will notice that. DAZ Mimic can integrate such subtle expressions as nods, winks, and blinks into the animation, which makes it much more natural. For shots where speech is not occuring, there's a python script available to incorporate blinking into your animation. There's also one to simulate breathing as well if you're into details. Fourth thing to avoid... rendering your animation as an AVI or movie file. MOST people make this mistake, and in Poser, it could be fatal (LOL). Aside from test renders, make sure when you go to render the FINAL work, you do it as an IMAGE FILE SEQUENCE. Then use a video editor afterwards to turn the sequence into the movie file of your choice. The reason: if Poser crashes, or hangs on a frame when rendering and you have to reboot, you could lose the entire animation file up to that point. WHen you render to images, it's much easier and safer to stop a render at any frame, then pick up again at the exact frame where the problem occured. If you have to stop your render, you're not at risk of having to start all over again from scratch. Most video editors worth their salt will accept image sequences, and allow you to output the result to an avi or whatever. TEST RENDER EVERYTHING. Don't trust just what you see in the viewport as far as movement is concerned. Run test renders periodically to be sure your movements are fluid and clean. You don't have to do a full lights/materials render each time... Poser lets you render using the 'current display settings' which is most helpful, and you'll get a much better representation of movement that way than just playing it back in your viewport.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.