Can someone point me to a tutor that will give me the basic's on making a movie with poser?

Well I've got "3 whole minutes" of edited footage in the can after over a year of planning and pulling my hair out, but I sorta think I might be of some help. What do you want to know? I can sure give some advice on things not to do ^_^

Message edited on: 10/04/2004 22:37

I'd like to hear about the things to avoid. I know it's very difficult and time-consuming to do animations, and I think we could all profit by hearing your list of "don'ts".

I don't know where you want to start, and I really haven't paid much attention on Tuts. on making a movie. I have made a short movie 8 minutes long, along with some short skits. I did the script, the animation, the editing, and the voices with some special effects in the voice, and O yes unless you are doing a silent movie you would be wise to get Mimic at DAZ. Then you need backgound music, and sound effects, Backgrounds of somekind. either made with things you can utlize with in Poser or Some background shots, or if you have a landscape program Like Vue, or Bryce, then you can make most any kind of backgroud. Last but by no means least, an Editing Program. I have Adobie Preimere, there are other edititing programs that can do a good enough job, depending on what you are wanting to do. Since you left the whole playing field open, 1st write a script with all your charatures, give them their own personality traits. use story boards. I don't know how far you want to go with this, but when you are ready to start animating. Don't start anti-aliasing untill you made the complete move and test the flow. ( A major problem you won't like is it take about an hour for about 10 second when you Alias the movie. Mostly depends on how sophistacated your charatures are, and the number of Items you have in the scene. the more the slower) Another Very important thing you need to do is Organize each Scene. (I don't know how much expirece you have, but a scene is not a guy running 90 steps then your into the next scene) What I do is have a folder for each scene. I lable them Scene 1, in Scene 1s folder I save Audio files, which can be music, sound effects, and each charitures voice. I then have the animation itself you can number it as simple as you like, 1, 2, 3, as long as you know your system. I also keep the preliminry animation and edit the whole movie. Why? because if you don't have good movement in a scene it will look like crap. I know I've had to edit some of my crap! So Save Those files because you never know when you might want to change the animation a little, then you would have to redo the voice again. You can get some free special effect stuff on the internet. if you need some sound effects try, http://www.grsites.com/sounds There are others also or you can by them. I make a lot of my own. Walking down an alley on cobble stone. You find something that sounds like walking in an alley by expiermenting with different things in the house. I can't rember what I used off hand, but when I applied it, and added a little reverb. It sounded just right. Well, this is what your up against. There is more, but this will get you at least moving in the right direction. Now I hope you aren't going to say. How do you make a guy walk. that's a long way from a movie! That is a different question which you can find in your Poser Book.

Hi Compdoctor,

Perhaps this ANIMATION TUTORIAL might help.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

"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.

Attached Link: http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/

Everything these guys said is good stuff. I'm going to make the assumption that you really want to make a movie, and put it out on DVD. (Which is what I'm working on slowly but surely) Here are some of my tips: Test your motion by making animatics. You can do this by making rendering your movie with DISPLAY settings instead of render settings, even with 2d motion blur checked this will be done in a few minutes VS a few hours for your final render. I usually do animatics as an uncompressed AVI (compression adds "render" time.) But always do finals as image files. Bite the bullet and buy some compositing software. It will be expensive but it will save you time, and free you up creatively. I use Bauhaus Mirage (See the attached link). Never heard of it? That's ok nobody has. It used to be called Aura and was put out by Newtek. What can you do once you get this software? You can render scene elements to seperate Layers, and adjust them, apply photoshop style filters etc...) One of my favorite tricks is faking animated Depth of field in this way. It also has a built in particle system so you can quite easily add special effects like fire, explosions, etc... to your scenes. I've personally used the particles to do snow and breath vapor on a cold day. :D Another compositing trick I use a lot is this: Say you have a long establishing shot, and you just want the camera to pan over the scene for a few seconds. You could render hundreds of frames in Poser or Vue... taking HOURS AND HOURS. Or you could render one Oversized Frame (say 2000x2000) and Pan across that. :D Or if you start the frame at say 70% size, and animate bringing it up to 100% You can zoom into the frame as well! You can rotate or do whatever... it's really like approaching 3d as if it were 2d animation. In traditional 2d animation Backgrounds are static paintings that are panned over with the camera. OK enough about Mirage. (I'm very enthusiastic about that software :D) I'll post more later. This post is ludicrously long as it is.

Attached Link: http://www.studioartfx.com/

Oh and save money wherever you can. Don't feel the need to pay for "Industry standard" software like Premiere, Unless you really love the interface, or it is the only way to get done what you want to. I use Ulead media Studio "directors cut" for my editing. It's a trimmed down version of the full media studio, but has every single feature I need. (OK a few more audio tracks would be great, but a little ingenuity allows me to work around the limited number). The point. At the time I bought it this software cost me like $200, wheras premier, or Vegas cost a lot more. (Though I'd probably have gotten Vegas for it's 5.1 capabilities if i could even remotely stand the interface :D) Personally I couldn't live without Photoshop, but maybe you can get everything you need done in PSP? see what I'm saying? Oh and BTW Mirage is a great Image editing/paint program too... so Unless you are already joined at the hip to something like PS or PSP (like me) Then Mirage can fill that role too. Check out the link: Terrence Walker has put out 2 DVDs on his own using Lightwave and Aura/Mirage. He's been a big inspiration to me.

Periodically have someone else look at what you are doing. when you are working at a scene for a long time you can lose perspective. Don't be afraid to scrap a finished shot that doesn't work. Sometimes starting from scratch is the only way to go.

Even a ancient book on home movies will tell you comething about the basics -- the core language of the people who make films, and the visual language films use to tell their story. Berserga, for instance, is talking about the same process as was done with cel animation -- multiple layers, and backgrounds larger than the camera's view.

Yep. and the fact that I started out doing my own Hand drawn animation In notebooks, and later on the Amiga computer (drawing with a mouse ouch!). Means my brain is wired that way. But 3d like Poser frees you from drawing thousands of frames of animation, so combining the 2 makes perfect sense for an indie animator. I look to Japanese animation a lot for these tricks. If you can look at something and figure out how they do it you can do it with Poser and Mirage. Often times faking things this way ends up looking better than painstakingly setting up a whole shot in camera. and you can tweak elements without having to re render the whole scene.

Oh and I have elements that were rendered in 3 different apps coexisting in some shots :D

I also reccomend looking at the special features on many of Robert Rodriguez DVDs (Spy kids 2, Once upon a time in Mexico etc...) the "10 minute film school" segments. Though he is talking about live action filmmaking. Much of what he says is very applicable to any indie filmmaker.

I have making a film in Poser and Bryce in about 4 years. One ting how makes it take more time is my own development. Then I have done about half of the materials I have learn more and think the first made are crap and start make new scenes of the first one.

Message edited on: 10/05/2004 12:41

Attached Link: http://www.filmmaking.com/main.html

There are a number of good articles at the link. Test your animations as simply as possible. If you just have two people talking to each other you probably don't need to import all your scenery elements into Poser for your test renders. If you plan your shots ahead of time you can save yourself the trouble of creating parts of rooms and props that will not be seen on camera. Just in case: http://www.filmmaking.com/main.html

whew Torulf... Now I don't feel so bad about how long it's taken me to get up to speed. ^_^ I know what you mean though. There has to be a point though where you just push forward. One thing I am doing that isn't very traditional is that I am editing my film as I make it. (I'll probably have to re edit it in the end) This gives me encourgement to see a scene all put together with voices sound and music. Makes all the hard work seem worthwhile.

SOUND EFFECTS: This is one area I don't think you can skimp on. Good sound can really help sell mediocre animation. I bit the bullet and plunked down $450 for one of The Hollywood edge's sound effects libraries. I feel it was worth it. You MUST know exactly what sound effects you need though, and be able to look ahead to future projects since this is a BIG investment. I have also bought sound effects from Sounddogs on a download bases to fill the gaps in my hollywood edge collection. They can be pretty expensive though.

Er if anyone wants me to do sound design for their movies I could probably do it for a small fee :D

MUSIC:

This has been a royal pain in my keister. Unlike Terrence Walker I am not musical so I have to rely on Royalty Free buyout music. Unfortunately 90% of the stuff out there is geared towards TV commercials, or sportscasts and the like, not SF/action/horror films like mine. Way back in the 90s when I was just starting to think I might be able to do a movie in truespace (Poser was still a toy back then)I bought my first Buyout CDs from "Music to Hues" (ugh!) Most of that stuff is pretty much useless to me now.

I've considered using NASH (a Japanese buyout music provider)as they seem to have a good variety of musical genres (They even have some Vocal J-pop!) and it sounds good based on the .ra previews they have, but they are expensive (like most buyout providers.) I'll probably use a track or 2 from them before my movie is finished.

I'm using a lot of ambient posertrax, from Silver as they suit my Genre well... but Unfortunately that is no longer an option for guys who don't already have em. You see first Silver changed the contract to have a added fee for mass distribution (over 500). This is bad because for cost reasons you are going to want a DVD run of 1000 at a replication plant. replicating 500 wouldn't be cost effective. (Luckily for me I bought the packs and downloaded the free tracks under the old license.) And now Silver has disscontinued the music tracks altogether. This is a shame as this was the cheapest way to get buyout music that I have ever found and it was often good stuff (though some of it used a lot of Acid loops) He is still making sound effects. If there are any musically talented folks with a home studio reading... THERE IS A MARKET HERE :D

Message edited on: 10/05/2004 13:53

I have edited my Movie as I was making it. I like to think of it as making the movie flow together. If you have a storyboard layed out you shouldn't get lost. But when you edit as you go. you can see any flow problems, aside from any other things you may not like. Bad editing can destroy a good piece of art. But You must get the flow of the movie form one scene to the next so you don't notice the change (That's why I like to edit as I go) unless that quick change is to be intentionaly for effect. Also I as you say, This gives me encourgement to see a scene all put together with voices sound and music. Makes all the hard work seem worthwhile. I think if your scripting the movie good in the first place, Editing as you go can save a lot of potential problems that you only see after you have it all put together. The Traditional way of editing was established becase you have one person animating, another person making backgrounds and another editing among other things. With the new features in the Animation world (with the all in one studio - YOU!) you can work with what you feel most confortable with. Another thing if you watch a movie you will notice that most of the scenes are about 5 to 8 seconds long. This keeps the movie moving. The longer scenes are usually to set up for something that is needed to expalain the next event. Also, don't be afraid to use just the head and shoulder shots, they are and can be very effective. and a big time saver. Also, Sometimes I use the head and sholder shot as a person is walking, not worrying if the feet are correct, because they don't show it that sequence. There are so many tricks, and a lot more to be developed by you the individual.

Attached Link: http://www.belino.net/

Yeah totally! Don't animate any more than you have to. A little can go a long way. and a Moving camera (either 3d or faked in 2d) can add a lot of interest to what otherwise might be a boring shot.

Some day I hope to be half as good with camera work as Phoul.

Message edited on: 10/05/2004 14:01

Cuts within scens are often ever 2-3 seconds but it really depends on how much energy the scene has. As far as editing as I progress... I usually do my test renders small (240 x 280 or 320 x 240). While I've got the files that small I will sometimes edit them together to check my flow. Using the smaller dimensions keeps things moving quickly. I don't usually render full size until I know for sure I've got everything worked out. That saves a lot of render time.

Bauhaus Mirage, that sound like a great product, I've never heard of it before, I looked over the info, It looks like it does what After Effects only a lot more simple to use with more effects. Will it Editing a movie from start to finish? or just copositioning spectial effects. The info I couldn't find anything spicific on Editing. It sounds like if it does Editing along with everything else it does. It can't be touched as far as an all in one package.

It's not really well suited for editing, but pair it with an inexpensive editor like Ulead Media studio directors cut. and your all set. since a lot of the text editing, FX, and compositing features in higher end editors would be redundant with mirage. and ya don't need a zillion cheezy transitions. I've never used after effects, but I don't think it has particles out of the box. I think You need other expensive softs like Particle illusion, to go with it. Also Mirage is a full featured paint program, it's really a jack of all trades and quite masterful at most of them. Oh and Mirage has fake volumetrics which work really well. The render time saved using that VS the atmospheres in Poser 5 is unimaginible :D

OK I should shut up about Mirage. I sound like a salesman. :D One more thing though. You know those cool HP commercials with the Photographs. Where people repeatedly hold up a frame to something which instantly becomes a photo. (Not a good description but it's a strikingly cool effect.) anyway This effect fascinated me enough that I thought about how they did it... and after some thought I am sure I could duplicate that effect in mirage! The program really inspires you to come up with ways to achieve effects.

I don't have the exact URL to hand, but Google for "Prometheus Music" and "Hope Eyrie". Also, possibly not strictly legal, there's interesting stuff found under "anime music video". You might be surprised how little lip sync is really needed. Not all music is locked up by the big companies, and a music video is a lot less intimidating a project. It might also be possible to record a performance of out-of-copyright music -- talk to music teachers.

Actually, the Pro version of After Effects -does- have a particle generator. As for sound...check out Magix for an inexpensive start. Their Music Studio package does wave editing and multi track controlling, and they have a nice DVD of soundloops (4.7gigs of wav files from all kinds of music formats). Or if you need more power, then go with Adobe Audition. The features shoved in there pretty much make it the Photoshop of sound. You can even generate 5:1 soundtrack data. It also comes with a CD of music loops, but these are .cel files....basically MP3's, but with the .cel extension and the Audition decoder, you don't get the pausefade at beginning and end that an actual .mp3 has. So you don't get delays that screw up your timing.

Attached Link: http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=533 http://mediasoftware.son

For background music and effects try these. You can even download tons of samples. Each week you can download a 8pack also

Just to throw my 2 cent's in .Mimic is definatly a bonus when making a movie in poser. I have Mimic 2 pro& poser 5. But thats only for your chracter sounds. Ocklam has a very handy script called sound scape (its in the free area). this allows you to add little sound effect to obj& props. when a certain action performed such as setting lets say gunfire to a shotgun with the soundscape script you can parent the sound to parts of the weapon, like the sound of the pump on the shotgun every timed its pumped that sound effect will be implemented every time that action of the pump is used . Also you can parent the shotgun blast to the trigger every time its pulled. this is just one example it can used on instruments , vehicles, stepping on dried leaf on ground , cracking knuckles and so on. Plus you can layer as many sounds as you want. And still use mimic and also inport background sounds. this helped me alot hope it help someone ps if you export your movie in sequenced frames do you have to edit sounds in in your movie editor or is there a way to export sound profile or something with the sequence frames file?

You just hit on the problem of using Poser's sound abilities :D I simply resync the audio file with the mimic generated animation in my video editor. Mimic 2 pro is definately a must. (If you have that, I think Mimic 3 is just a fluff upgrade... not worth the cash)

Oh and sound editing. I'd say Soundforge is the best... equivilent to photoshop of sound, but with a photoshop price. :D There is a light version though (Screenblast) That is probably good enough for most uses. I've also gotten by with just the audio editing tools that came with my Audigy 2 sound card, though you have to be creative to do that and might have to jump between multiple apps (Wav editor, EAX sound recorder etc...)to get a particular effect. EDIT: It appears they changed the name of their "Screenblast" line to "Studio". Good decision :)

Message edited on: 10/06/2004 08:53

Hmmm. I'm surprised no one has mentioned VirtualDub for editing videos. Very powerful, with tons of plugins and filters, and best of all it's FREE. At least it was when I last checked. :-)

Actually I think XP comes with a basic video editor also. Dunno if it handles stills though... probably not.