I asked something similar in the Poser Technical forum, but the only response was rather vague. I've created a set of animated poses using Poser 4 Male (Dork-meister). They only affect arms and hands, but this doesn't matter; not even the Poser 4 Female moves exactly the same. This I put down to differing body part scales (geometry-level), variances in JPs, and, for other figures, to overall differences in geometry and JPs. It would be well beyond me (or several people) to duplicate the poses for each and every figure - Poser 4 Male, Female, Boy, Girl, Poser 5 Male, Female, Boy, Girl, V1, V2, V3, M2, M3, David, Aiko, MilB & G, YT, SP, The Girl, Ichiro, and on and on and on and on and on ... you get the point? ;) Would make for a wonderfully large market (of duplicate sales of similar material), but, alas, I don't have 500 years to tackle such a task - remember, these are ANIMATED POSES! And the end result may be several thousand of them (no exaggeration)!! Is there a way to create generic animated poses? My vague reply was something about 'correcting controllers' and initial values to 1 (?) - I'm lost. Thanks!

Just my .0000002 microcents.... Seems to me that poses fall into three categories in this connection. 1. Direct interaction with static physical objects, like playing a piano. In this case the pose would have to be done from the end, as in IK. Put the butt on the bench, put the feet on the pedals, put the hands on the keys, move the hands to the right keys. 2. Interaction with other parts of the body, as in putting on makeup or eating. In this case the two interacting parts would have to be brought to the same fixed point; pull the hand and the head to the meeting point, then retract both to original locations. 3. No interaction. Expressive gestures like a Gallic shrug or an Italian screw-you. In this case you could probably use the same joint angles universally, without worrying about the endpoint destinations. The first two types could probably be done with Python, using pre-formed motions of a guide prop, and setting the body parts to Point-At the guide props. See my "Hansel and Gretel" for a starting point. I think Bushi has made a universal pose-generator with a different method.

The first thing about generic animations, is that you must leave out certain things. I usually delete finger animations from an anim file for instance, when transferring from one character to another. It is easier to make new finger animations than to fix the ones that come across all messed up. The other problem is not so much the joints, as the addition some figures have of different body parts. The millinium figures have more bones than the Poser 4 figures, so all animations passed between them will be messed up, but if you include only the main motions, on the common elements, it is easy to add the secondary motions.

Well, ASL (spilling beans) requires finger animation. Can't be done correctly without it. I have only included the body parts inclusive to the motion (arms, hands, fingers). So, this may have some beneficence. But there are many times when the hands/fingers touch each other or other parts of the body which ends up with fingers and hands doing 'psychic surgery'. :) ockham, these definitely fall under categories 2 and 3.

If I were doing ASL in Python, I'd probably take the following approach: 1. Determine the points where hand touches (or nearly touches) head or body. There are only a small number of standardized places, and a list is most likely available. 2. When the script is started, I'd try to locate those spots (as a vertex number) on the current figure, to the extent this is possible; then place little guide-props at those vertices. I'd also determine a "close but not too close" bounding box for each hand. 3. I'd then use the Point-At method to pull the appropriate hand[s] to those locations when needed, using the hand's bounding box against the guide-prop to avoid collision. This is, of course, useless for your method, but since I continued thinking about the subject, figured I might as well record my ramblings.