A while back DaleB pointed me to a rotoscoping solution for animation. He wrote: As for rotoscoping over a character's face; if you have P5 you can do it easily. It supports .avi files as textures on alpha planes. Just plop a plane in front of your character and run the avi on it (maybe with a script that puts a GUI slider on your desktop that alters the transparency of the plane in realtime, so you can set the level of visibility of the model, or do the 'reference on-model invisible, reference off-model only' check for accuracy). Well, I am ready to try, but I am floundering. I can't find "alpha plane" in the manual, in the tutorials or in a search of the forum. Is that the same as putting a rectangle primitive prop in the scene? And as for attaching the .avi, well i created a 'rectangle' prop, went into the materials room and WAS able to get a the movie attached to the 'difuse color' node for the rectangle....but nothing resulted. I hope dale sees this or if anyone else can help, much appreciated. ::::: Opera :::::

It's a good idea, but Poser 5's real-time display modes can't display movie textures. They have to be rendered.

I see. I can put a movie on the background, and scrub back and forth and the movie advances with the timeline. Is that different? I guess it's not a texture. Well how about this...movie applied to background, make parts of my character's head invisible until only the mouth is displayed to rotoscope lip-sync? (see where I'm going with that?) Just a note...I AM using Mimic. This is post-mimic, fine tuning the lips themselves and also rotoscoping against head movments in my reference video. ::::: Opera :::::

"Is that the same as putting a rectangle primitive prop in the scene? And as for attaching the .avi, well i created a 'rectangle' prop, went into the materials room and WAS able to get a the movie attached to the 'difuse color' node for the rectangle....but nothing resulted." Yes, it's the same as a rectangle primitive prop. As for viewing the results, have you tried to render it as LD has suggested? You could also do the rotoscoping in a video editor in post. What kinds of post applications do you have access to? There's different ways to do it depending, of course, on the editor.

Ooops. Cross-posted with you I see. ;-P

Max...no post software for animation has been chosen yet. Are you saying that if I get Mimic to place the facial animation "close" I can fine tune it in After Effects or some such? ::::: Opera :::::

Well how about this...movie applied to background, make parts of my character's head invisible until only the mouth is displayed to rotoscope lip-sync?

That's do-able. Set all materials to transparent except lips.

You might play around with Poser's wireframe and outline display modes, also; you can see the background through them. Adjust foreground colour to improve contrast.

"Max...no post software for animation has been chosen yet. Are you saying that if I get Mimic to place the facial animation "close" I can fine tune it in After Effects or some such?" Well, what I'm saying is, you can render your face animation in Poser as per normal, with no video overlay at all. Then, bring the rendered video into a capable post editor (like AfterEffects) and overlay the second video track on the face in there, just like you can overlay a still image over another still image in Photoshop... using blend, transparency, difference, etc. The result would be easier to come by, and would probably look better than struggling to achieve the effect from the renderer alone.

But I don't want to blend the filmed footage with my rendered animation. The filmed image is reference only. I grok that I could overlay, but in after effects I can't make the lips move differently..... I realize I may be completely missing the boat on what you are saying. Anyway.... I spent the last few hours with an alternative idea. I am 'projecting' my reference video on the background of the poser scene. I moved the head of my model until it is the same size and placed adjacent. Then, I ran from frame 1 to frame 900 moving the head as movie/head moved, placing keyframes where appropriate. This results in a quite good imitation of the head bobbing and weaving just like in the playing video. I then want back and began animating the lips and mouth, using as few different morphs as possible. I got about half-way thru before I ran out of steam. Test renders look pretty decent. This facial hand-animation and lip-sync is a skill, if not an art, so I am patient and respectful. I have to move away from Poser for 36 hours or so...but will resume this project during the week. I am determined to see if I can get good at hand animating facial phonemes and emotions and gestures, with the reference file of the video tape next to the head of the model. If nothing else, this is a good education. As a production method....welll...some of the other 'more official' methods at http://www.metamotion.com are looking less and less pricey every day! ::::: Opera :::::

"But I don't want to blend the filmed footage with my rendered animation" Whoops. I misinterpreted what your ultimate objective was here. Sorry.