I use poser 5 and i cant get anything to animate correctly. Does anyone know of any good tut's i could use?

There are plenty of tutorials by Dr. Geep in the Poser forum that might be of help. I had a link on the poser backroom during my "poser modding days" but it seems that somebody has removed them _

BTW animating is more than just moving bones. Maybe you should be more specific about what you need?

sorry about that. when i animate a character, all the poses get mashed together so the character moves around really wierd and moves thru the floor and such. hope that was a little bit more specific.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1866413&Reply=1866843

First the obvious... Individual poses are based on having elements keyframed over time. A turning head, for example, might have 0 degrees rotation on it's Y axis at the first frame and then be rotated 50 degrees on the 30th frame. If you wanted it to hold that position for a second and then return to facing forward, you'd set a keyframe - still at 50 degrees on the Y axis - again on the 60th frame and then one for 0 Degrees at the 90th frame. That's relatively simple. However, there are different kinds of keyframes. The spline ones try to draw a curve from keyframe to keyframe. They are extremely useful when you understand them but can really confuse you if you don't. If you used spline keyframe in the above example the head would actually go past 50 degrees between frame 30 and 60 and then come back. This is called overshoot. Linear Kayframes (the red ones) go exactly straight from keyframe to keyframe. The head would turn perfectly - but it's movement would be so perfect it would appear robotic and unnatural. The Constant keyframes (white) hold and exact position until the next one. The item doesn't move. The Break Spline Keyframes are spline keyframes but they break from what was before them and ignore it. By default, Poser uses Spline keyframes. If you select them and hit the Linear Keyframe button it will convert them to something more predicatable. As an addendum if you're setting up keyframes for multiple elements it's easy to forget about one's you've set. If I had forgotten to set the "stay at 50 degrees until now" keyframe on frame 60 in the example, the head would have continued moving until the 90th frame and it propossibly would have not moved the way you expected or wanted. What you are describing sounds like a combination of uncontrolled Spline keyframes and not having keyframes in place to keep elements from moving until you want them to move. As Nemirc suggested, Geep's tutorials are a great way to go beyond what's in the manual. Some of them can be found via the link but these are not all of them. Key words to look for are "animation" and "Graph Editor"

maybe Lez could get a jumpstart just by loading one of the animation Pose sets that come with Poser, and see how it works. but there will be problems if lez tries to apply a pose set to the wrong character.

Attached Link: http://www.jefflew.com/

I can highly recommend this DVD. I got my son interested in animation by watching this on my TV. This isn't a DVD ROM so you can play it on your home DVD player.

You might try to switch off IK for all body parts.
Even high end applications like Maya start messing up animations using IK: most professional 3D animators I know prefer the FK method.
Apart from that: get yourself the book 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by Richard Williams to learn about the fundamentals of character animation: mindlessly moving about body parts will rarely turn into great animations...

The ideal character rigs use a hybrid of IK/FK blending, which I don't believe Poser has. IK is almost always necessary when animating a walk cycle or footsteps.

Message edited on: 01/28/2006 03:27

If you turn on/off the IKs during the animation, you will get anything but IK/FK blending...

I don't understand why Poser has IK on/off switch. I thought IK/FK blending was industry standard by now, but I guess not. When I worked with the 3dsmax demo, that's the one thing I loved about Character Stuido. I could grab a body part from the top of the heiarchy or the bottom, it didn't matter. The skeleton moved as expected. No switching IK on or off. I'm sure Maya and other apps are the same in this aspect, so why not Poser?? Can you tell I'm frustrated with Poser's (lack of) intuitive animation tools? hahaha I can only hope Carrara is better.

Because Poser's animation side is one of the less developed areas. Poser 6 has nice materials, it has cloth simulation and hair simulation, and even a nice renderer, but the animation tools remain unchanged. Well...