I would suggest that first you make a walk cycle, using Walk Designer, with a standard figure (not the dino) since that exercise in itself will clear up several points for you better than I could explain them ;)

A 'walk cycle' is an animation (or 'animated pose' in Poser) representing one 'cycle' of a walk, e.g. left foot forward, right foot forward. You could think of it as an animation version of 'loops' in computer music or 'seamless textures' in 2d painting. It can be repeated as long as necessary to get your figure to where you want it to go, but you only need to actually create one cycle and then just repeat it. The Walk Designer in Poser will create them for you, basically, or you can create them manually. 'Walk Designer' is a feature specific to Poser. 'Walk cycle' is a generic term that applies to any 3d animation app capable of animating a figure walking.

Most (all?) Poser humanoid figures use the hip as the root bone. If you move (translate or 'trans' for short) the hip all other body parts follow. This is true only of the hip. You can use 'body' trans as well in a lot of cases, but if you're new to Poser I wouldn't worry about that for the moment. You must move the hip (or body) if you want your figure to do anything other than walk in place.

If you create a walk cycle via Walk Designer with a standard figure and then take a look at the hip x/y/z trans values as well as the hip x/y/z rot (rotation) values using the graph you'll probably stumble into a few 'ah-ha!' moments. (My walk cycles looked stale/robotic for a while because I was neglecting the importance of the hip rots involved.)

You mentioned that you're new to Poser. You might want to do a search on this forum for Dr. Geep tutorials as well as anything you can find on animation in Poser.

Message edited on: 05/29/2005 00:51