e-frontier is either ignoring or is oblivious to a massive chunk of the 3D market, and here’s how. Millions of people get a lot of pleasure out of Pixar movies and are rightly inspired by the animation – you can’t say Pixar animation is bad (didn’t go to see Cars however). Granted folk go to see anime or other forms of 3D animation and they are inspired by that, but that’s another argument and one for them to pursue. Getting back to my slice of the cake – a large percentage of the folk inspired by the Pixar movies are trying to pursue a career in animation and one day want to work for Pixar. These people use generic rigs to practise animating to short sound clips usually from a movie. Lowman and Generi Rig are two popular rigs - Generi Rig being more popular because it’s well made, is fully articulated and can express a full range of emotions. And because of the generic nature of these rigs you can use them for male or female characters – Lowman even allows you to modify body proportions.

 

Ok so let’s look at Poser 6 – we have Alpha Man – not too much wrong with this character but what can you use him for. Yes exactly you can use him as Alpha Man. So long as I want to animate super heroes I should be happy (and I have to say nowhere near as much attention has gone into Alpha Man as James or Jessie).  All I’m asking for here is for a well crafted generic rig with top notch facial expressions and joints that bend as they should. If you go to the theatre and someone steps onto the stage in a policeman’s uniform then you assume he’s a policeman. If someone stepped on to the stage wearing a black all in one cat suit then with good body language that person could be anyone, a doctor, a builder, a traffic warden.

 

Xenophonz, so are these future animated characters going to think for themselves and if they do would we want to listen to them. Anything worth listening to has got to be related to the human condition. Half of the appeal of the Pixar animations is the voice talent. So would that be synthesized in the future too? So someone types in to a computer “…but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world" (Casablanca). And it will come out of the mouth of a perfecly animated synthetic Bogart and we’ll all wipe a tear from our eyes. Why bother lets watch real actors bring their own life experiences to unique and living characters.