Note: I'm using Poser 4.

Alright, so here's what I'm doing: A person is walking down the street, and I have the camera parented to this person's chest, so as to simulate the camera movement effect used in movies like Requiem for a Dream and Pi (where the camera is mounted on the actor's body).

It looks fine, but the problem is that the shot is somewhat complicated for my crappy computer, so I always render my shots in two different passes: first the background without the character, then the character without the background (speeds up rendering time and keeps my PC from freezing).

So, of course, when rendering the background alone, I need to hide the foreground figure. Unfortunately, when I do this, the camera obviously is hidden with the figure it's parented to, and therefore it doesn't retain it's movement. The problem seems to be that the camera, even though the animation button is on, doesn't actually animate, it just moves with the figure (I need a predetermined animation so it can move w/o the figure).

I've tried resampling keyframes for it (Poser throws in keyframes every 4 frames or so) while it's parented to the figure, then I parent the camera to the universe with the keyframes still intact. When I do that, the camera seems to move, but it's in a totally different place than I want it, so it doesn't work either.

I know that there MUST be a way to work around this. Any ideas or suggestions would be great. Thanks.

some will probably tell you to leave the camera and model transit-stationary, have the character walk in place, attach your backdrop to a primitive and animate the movement of the primitive. That could be a great strategy and might open up other flexibilities for you. Otherwise...any chance of cutting and pasting the keyframes of the character onto the camera after unparenting? ::::: Opera ::::

Simple. hide each body part of the character seperately instead of hiding the whole thing. That way you can leave the camera visible. Why do you need to hide it at all though if it's not in the shot? If poser is still calculating the figure even off camera why not,like, substitute your chara for something really low res like dork , or the Poser 3 people? maybe that will do it for you

Berserga seems to have it sussed but here's an alternative. Create a simple prop which you position on the chest, parent it and scale it down so that it's effectively invisible. Use this to parent the camera to instead of the figure. Alternatively, you could animate the prop to follow the persons path and delete the figure entirely from your background render.

The problem with the path idea is you lose the up and down movement of the walk cycle, at least I assume so. Anyway this is an interesting topic for me as I LOVE (and way overuse) the first person perspective.

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.

First off, I think some of you may have misunderstood me. The shot I'm looking for actually has the character in the frame (right up close to the camera). If you've ever seen the movies Requiem for a Dream or Pi (it was also used in the MTV show called Fear or something like that), basically imagine a camera rig that attaches to the actor's body, and the camera is aimed at the actor's face. It gives a very interesting effect where it almost seems as though the actor isn't moving, but rather the background is... kinda hard to explain, but anyway.

With that in mind, I couldn't just hide parts of the actor because unless the full figure is hidden, Poser still calculates the figure, and therefore it still takes forever to render.

But, I found a way around it, and stupid me couldn't figure it out earlier. Instead of attaching the camera to the character's chest, I attached it to his shirt's chest. This gave me identical results, but allowed me to hide the figure, then I could just make the shirt invisible (since the character is what made the rendering time so long in the first place).

And that's that. Problem solved. Thanks for the all replies though, I really appreciate them!

Oooh interesting idea. No I havn't seen those movies, I'll have to just borrow that idea. :D

lol ::::: Opera :::::