Can anyone assist me with how many still poses would be required to animated a figure falling to the ground with a smooth motion? Every time I try it my figures are too jerky! Presently I am using six still poses,the major problem being the legs and feet bending smoothly!In the Poser timeline I am presently using 30 frames per second over 30 frames and set in the spline section.is this correct? I have a lot of trouble reading and understanding tutorials,so any explanations would need to be very simple. Any help would be appreciated.arrow1

A 30-frame animation at 30fps is only going to be one second in length. I'd lengthen it to at least two or three seconds, personally.

Yes, spline interpolation should allow for smooth motion between keyframes.

Bear in mind that, depending upon your system and the complexity of the scene, Poser might not be able to play back every frame of the animation in the real-time preview. By default, Poser skips frames if it can't keep up, which can make the motion seem jerky.

Disable "Skip Frames" from the animation controls or the Animation menu to force Poser to play them all. Box tracking can speed things up, if necessary.

Many thanks Little Dragon! I will give your suggestions a try. arrow1

"Can anyone assist me with how many still poses would be required to animated a figure falling to the ground with a smooth motion" What you're calling "still frames" are called "key frames" in animation, just so we don't lose each other in lingo ;) To paraphrase Martin Hash of Animation Master fame: 'The fewer keys an animation has the more elegant it is'. There is practical merit in that statement as well. If you have 6 keys ("still frames") over 1 second of animation then each of those keys has to be pretty precise since they only span a sixth of a second each on average. Basically, you're forcing yourself into a degree of precision that you don't really need. That's an invitation to "too jerky" results. Try, for example, using only 2 keys...one for the very start of the fall, and the other for the very end. It will probably look smooth compared to 6 keys over the same time span. You may need to add a key a few frames before the final pose at the end of the fall. Think how you would move if you jumped off a 5 story building. You might look relatively static through most of the fall, but make some kind of reflex movement just before you splattered to the ground ;)

Tunesy,Thats an interesting thought.I will give your suggestion a try! arrow1

...hmm. The animated gif above doesn't work when I come back to this page. lol. Don't know why. Never had that problem before. Sorry ;)

Poser cannot play an animation "smoothly" unless you have the computer power to do it. Even when the "SKIP FRAMES" button is off ones computer might slow down to accomodate an animations complexity. To see it correctly in "real-time" ...Export your animation (to QT -I'm a MAC guy...) and make sure that the frame-rate set for the QT movie is also at 30 fps, otherwise your movie will skip frames as well. Make your animations conform to 720x480 px, if you want to make it DV compliant for your editing app of choice (like FCP-HD) and also make sure you use the "animation" codec when you create the QT movie and set the export to "Millions of colors+" if you want to preserve the Alpha channel so you can comp it easily in your editing app. But before I do all of that, I export my animations in the "Preview" mode at low rez and only "1000 colors" (still at 720x480 px). It's super fast and when you play the resulting QT movie-- you can see all the "timing" issues that might need adjusting. Once satisfied-- then I go for the full render.