Hi all, I finally got my grubby little paws on a copy of MetaCreations Dance Studio. I know the main attraction here is to output motion files for use in Poser, but I'm wondering whether things can be done the other way... Specifically, is it possible to create characters in Poser and import them into Dance Studio? Any help and guidance would be appreciated! Thanks in advance, Pete

MetaCreations Dance Studio? Where is this?

I bought it on eBay. I had to persuade the seller to ship to the UK, as he's normally US-only, but it arrived safe, new and sealed this morning. :)

Estruch... http://www.metacreations.com/press/dance_release.shtml Not sure if it's still sold.

Thanks

bookmark

Not sure if it's still sold.

It isn't. MetaCreations (or Metastream, or Viewpoint, or whatever the #@%& they call themselves now) no longer produces it. Most of their assets were sold off to other companies (Poser --> CL, Bryce and Painter --> Corel, etc.) when they switched focus to interactive 3D, but no one snatched up Dance Studio.

The only way to acquire Dance Studio now is through second-hand sources. As PunkyMonkey says, it occasionally turns up on eBay. redsapphire still has a couple left in his eBay store.

What is dance Studio?

It's an application that lets you create your own animated music videos.

You choose a stage, 3D character, and outfit from those provided, import your music, then control the character's dance via keyboard commands. All the basic moves were motion-captured from real performers, and can be combined in various ways. The dance sequence can be recorded and edited for later playback, and there's an option for export to BVH format (which Poser can read).

I thought you couldnt export the BVH to poser unless you have the patch for Dance Studio, otherwise the BVH is unuseable

Without the update, the motions come out too fast, but I think you can retime them in Poser. Or manually edit the BVH file.

Zenware has a free BVH-fixer utility which Dance Studio users might find helpful:
http://www.zenwareonline.com/free/freeapps.html

Thanks for the replies so far - but does anyone know of a way to get Poser models into Dance Studio? Or is that just asking for the moon? Cheers, Pete

Well, the bad news is that I just can't get DanceStudio to run on Windows XP. I've set compatibility to Windows XP/ME, and even tried it as Windows 95, but the app just crashes after going through the load screen. I even tried it on another system, and got the same result. :( If anyone has any experience in getting this program to run under XP, I'd appreciate the info. Thanks again, Pete

Punky monkey, I have had luck with dance studio by loading the program in WinXP , even though it says that the program will not run, it will load. After it is on the program menue (list) right click and tell it to run in windows 98 mode. You will still need the patch to get it to export the motion files. The patch that I finally found will only export the first 10 frames. I'm still working on finding the origal patch. skee

Is there no way Skee to contact the creator of the patch you own to see if he has the original patch?

shedofjoy, I did contact him and he said that he had let the program go and was not interested in renewing it. The patch I got came from him. I think that when it runs in XP it loses some of it's properities. I have not work with it in a while, if I get some time maybe I can work it out. skee