I was curious if Poser or Poser/Daz models have ever been used to make a full length animated movie.

If not, then what short films of significant length length have been made using it? By significant length I mean something more than just a minute or two long. The only one I know of is Star Trek Aurora but I'm sure there must be others.

Hi Wizardkiss,

Don't know about full lenght movies with Poser, but I know of a lot of good movies  that run about 5-15 minutes. My favorit flick is Crunk Wars by RedMonkey Pictures.
Here are a few Poser movies:
http://www.e-frontier.com/article/archive/388/

Best,
Laslo

Attached Link: http://noescape.rateofinjury.com/main.htm

Check out Peacer's movie if you aren't faint of heart or squeamish!!

Later!!

Gerard

Violence tag added as link is to a scary, freaky experience that is entirely Silent Hill!!!!

I think a key question is why none of the zillions of Poser users have produced anything longer, or more in number than they probably have. I think the answer to THAT question is four-fold: 1. A one-hour, smooth-playing animation would require between 50,000 and 100,000 frames. Assuming that each 720 x 480 (Quicktime format, at a minimum) medium-content frame would require, say, 5 minutes to render in decent quality, it would take about A YEAR just for the rendering (assuming you were doing it on a single computer). 2. In my view, Poser has a relatively crude and cumbersome animation interface -- nothing like a good 2D video editor -- you cannot see all of the important editing functions at the same time and in the same control window, nor can you easily animate (let alone your result) in the animation editing windows. Some of this is by necessity, since the computing power required to model, control, edit, affect and view real-time, frame-by-frame movement in three dimensions in the same fashion as a non-linear video editor, is simply beyond most Poser-host PCs right now. This adds enormously to the time it takes to produce and edit. Faster processors and the ability to use multiple processors and large blocks of RAM (coming in Poser 7) is a must. 3. Currently, the first two problems cause most people (including myself) to have to arrange, set, test, edit, render and export each frame individually (usually as a TIFF), and then combine them all in a video editor, such as Final Cut Pro or Avid Express. Tedious doesn't begin to describe it. It just wears you out after the first 5,000 (!) frames, no matter what kind of time-saving tricks you use. 4. Let's be honest: Poser is used almost entirely by people who have day jobs. Those for whom 3D animation movies is a full-time job might -- might -- use Poser as an adjunct tool, but not as the primary production vehicle. It also takes an incredible amount of time to do everything associated with making a movie, from scriptwriting, scene planning, sound recording, editing, and production. The moviemakers listed in this thread are truly dedicated pioneers, no doubt with a few arrows in the back to prove it. To all of the above, Poser 7 may change things. Somewhat. It will supposedly run several times faster than Poser 6 on higher-end, multi-processor machines, and is obviously designed to better serve animators. As someone who would like to squeeze in more Poser movie-making out of the free time available, I sure hope so. SS

FYI there is an animator who created two full length animations with Poser.  The first was "Raven" and then "Raven2".  Here's the link--http://www.daredevilfilms.net/

Work was started on the third animation "Frankenstein vs. The Wolfman" but there's been no update on this one for almost 2 years now.  When it was first announced the filmmaker stated on his website that it would take a year to complete.  the first two films as I recall took about a year to make.  You can definitely see improvement in R2 from R1.

Anyway, its nice to see a post about Poser animation instead of the new V4 figure.  Improved figures like V4 make animating in Poser a moving target.

Hey look, my movie's been plugged!  What's up Ghelmer?  It's been, what, like a year since we last talked?

But yeah, my Silent Hill fanfic is definitely a full-length film (although without voices)... the animation and technique is very crude at first, but it keeps improving as you get further into the "film" (or episodes if you prefer).  I am also currently working on a horror short film created entirely in Poser, along with voice dubs, custom music, and ES mo-cap.  This should hopefully be done in a few months, in which case I will immediately work on another and open a site that hosts independent horror films and screenplays.

Hey Peacer!  Yeah it's been ages!!  Was awesome seeing No Escape in it's entirety!!  Looking forward to your next one!!  So what did you think of the Silent Hill movie??  I especially loved the fact that the music from the games were used throughout the whole movie, also I loved seeing Pyramid Head even though it was too short with his appearances!!  I've kinda given up on Poser for now and am focusing on modeling in Max as my 3D priority!! 

Later!!

Gerard

Cool, glad you liked it!  I separated the SH movie into two halves -- first halve is absolutely brilliant and couldn't have been done better... second half was not.  As a whole, I'd give the movie a B-.  It was very enjoyable and, for the most part, loyal to the series; but that second half and the witch cult was just BLAH!  I really hope Christophe Gans does a sequel since he now know what works and what doesn't.

Hey, I'm also focusing on Max modeling now!  I'm in an intro modeling class currently, but I'm quickly getting the hang of things.  Right now I'm almost finished with modeling my apartment (95% kitchen due to time constraints) for my class, and I'll be posting that on the Max forums (do you hang out there at all?).  But yeah, I've got a Materials and Lighting class next quarter, followed by either animation or advanced modeling.  It's fun stuff, but very hard!

Here's another one I found doing some searches. Looks fairly impressive:

Godspeed
http://www.demianfox.net/godspeed/

the ones I've seen have been largely derivative and unwatchable, usually with very poor voice work. however, once somebody gets a sizeable staff (e.g. 120 workers) and a big render farm, I think some good work will be possible. if they want a realistic deadline (their brand-new hardware and software will be obsolete in 9 months), then they need to keep it down to 10 minutes per frame for each 5-minute segment of a 90-minute film. with 20 teams in parallel, that should allow them to get it done in 6 months, having produced and edited about 240 minutes of footage, most of which will be unuseable. it will be mind-numbingly confusing and chaotic in the extreme, but there are many folks here who are capable of directing and producing such an effort.

Quote - Silent Hill No Escape by 'rosity member Peacer!!!  All Poser!!  I know it's episodic but when watching all together seems like a full length movie!!   For those not in the know...  Silent Hill started as a  Playstation  1 game then  with  3  sequels  on the  PS2, XBOX & PC then the somewhat creepy, very disturbing movie that came out on DVD earlier this year!!!  The movie was pretty good, stayed somewhat true to the games...  best game to movie I've ever seen!

Check out Peacer's movie if you aren't faint of heart or squeamish!!

Later!!

Gerard

Violence tag added as link is to a scary, freaky experience that is entirely Silent Hill!!!!

HOLY SCHMITT! Silent Hill was the most scary video game that I ever played, and the movie made by this author is nothing short of ASTOUNDING! DL it NOW!! Highly recomended!!

Don't forget Star Trek Aurora

http://www.auroratrek.com/

Thanks for the plug, Casette ; ) Just from my own experience, Poser isn't great to animate in, but it's not too terrible, either. As a renderer it totally stinks-way too slow, and the lighting controls and shadows etc. are really pretty bad. I animate in Poser (using Daz models) but render in Cinema 4D, which is much faster (it's usually around 45 seconds to 1min30sec per frame) so you can usually render a scene overnight. It really helps a lot to have a real 3D app anyway to model scenes and props. I understand Wizardkiss's puzzlement about why it seems like there aren't many examples of longer Poser-based animations--when I thought about starting Aurora I thought the same thing: there must be other people doing longer works with Poser, but from what I have seen, there really aren't too many. After going at it for almost 2 years, I kind of understand why, but at the same time, I have to think that there are people out there with a lot more talent and free time than I have, so I'm still kind of surprised that there aren't a few more people doing this. I see a lot of really nice still Poser renders, but I can't help thinking that since pretty much any image you can render once, you can render into an animation, that not animating a cool Poser image is almost like having a cool sports car that you look at, but never drive. I think that rendering in another, faster app like Cinema 4D answers Skeetshooter's first 3 points to some extent, but #4 is right on the money--compared to the "big" apps like Maya, Poser is barely above a hobby-level app, and its users have day jobs, so you only get as much done as your free time allows. That said, what you can do with Poser-based workflow borders on the miraculous compared to traditional animation, so as hard as it is, it's still the only game in town for us regular folks, and you can do some fun stuff if you stick with it. --Tim http://www.auroratrek.com

I did the voice for a character in Harry's Heroines which was a full length movie featuring Posette, the Dork and a slew of Vicky 1/2 characters.  It wasn't terribly bad though the voice work could have been more professional grins  Still, was kind of impressive to see it all put together at the end.

tvining, Star Trek Aurora is amazing. In fact it was seeing Star Trek Aurora that inspired me to get into Poser. The emotion and realism you were able achieve in the facial expressions had my jaw on the floor in disbelief. I thought only big studios with proprietary software could get those kinds of results.

If I could ask you a question: Since you have Cinema 4D why do you not import your models into it with one of the utilities available and animate there? Doesn't Cinema 4D have a more robust animation system?

The Silent Hill No Escape film was good too. It actually made me jump in my seat a few times!

Here's another poser movie I learned about. This one was released on DVD:

Dominator
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0135991/

Thanks, Wizardkiss! I was actually very pleased with the expressions in Poser--it was one of the first things I checked when I was test-rendering for Aurora, since in a story like this, you really need to convey the emotions. Oddly, it's really one of the easier things to do in Poser (unlike walking, which is a pain even with the walk designer--it's really hard to keep the feet from "skating".) I'd like to work in just Cinema 4D, but I don't think there really is a robust import solution that would allow you to easily import and use Poser/Daz figures using the C4D animation controls--I may be wrong, but it seems like there are limitations on what is out there such that it might be just as easy to stick with Poser, at least for now. If you know of one, please let me know! Silent Hill was quite cool--great editing and effects, and very creepy! I'd like to know more how they went about producing it. MoxieGraphix, I couldn't find "Harry's Heroines" is there a link to it somewhere? I hope others do give Poser movies a try--I think there's great potential, and I'm not sure it would really take 120 people--at the rate I'm working, if there were 4 of me I'd be done with Aurora by now, but even as one lone guy, I'm having fun, and I'm pleased with the results. Plus, with Poser 7 there may be new efficiencies, not to mention that there may be cheap motion capture on the horizon--there's a guy who built a system for under $2000, and it works with Poser (but he's not selling it yet), and Naturalpoint/Optitrack is supposedly working on their own system, so I think the power of even one person on their own is just going to grow. We'll see! --Tim

Hey Tim,

I don't think it's available anymore.  I have a DVD copy of it.  It was sold on a 'fetish video' site (in spite of the lack of sex or nudity) because of the whole "knock out" scenario.  My character was forever being knocked out with ether or whatever it was they were using grins.  I'll do some digging and see if I can't find a link.

Actually, I'm working on the script and storyboarding of a couple of story concepts at the moment; whichever one bites harder gets the first stab at it. You can save a lot of time if you get your script right and lay your shots out far in advance; even stick figures and hand drawn scenery of the 3 year old quality is better than nothing. It is a lot easier to write yourself out of a corner than it is to suddenly decide to trash 9000 frames because the story was stalling on you..... It actually isn't terribly hard or expensive to assemble a good quality pipeline over time, with a lot of careful shopping. Animating figures with Poser, of course. Vue 6 Infinite is the renderer as well as the environment generator. Premiere Pro for finished footage editing. After Effects 7 Pro for postwork. Audition for audio editing and Encore for authoring (and through the magic of ebay and careful shopping...and getting a version a couple of releases back that was legal and unregistered, making it eligible for the upgrade pricing at Adobe....you can assemble the equivalent of the production studio for far less than retail). PSP 8 instead of Photoshop, but it does what I need at the moment, and learning AE is bear enough.... :P Sonic Fire Pro 4 for the scoring (the SmartSound multilayer music tracks are wonderful to work with; If, say, you like the drum rythym in a selection, you can disable the other layers and just use the drum...or other instument groups. And the avialable disks span a wide range of music...and more come out fairly regularly). Rendergarden/farms aren't that hard to assemble, either. Just let your friends and neighbors know that you'll take that older computer off their hands, and you have a start. Just strip the audio and other useless bits out, and you have a free node to add. With the current price wars, you can -buy- the parts at Newegg for a considerable system (Asus A8V-VM microATX with onboard video, a gig of Kingston DDR-400 Valueram, and Athlon 64-3200+ socket 939, and a pair of 80gig SATA 3.0 WD drives for a RAID 0 array) for about $300. Add WinXP, and you can use the renderfarm to run the AE render engines for distributed rendering of your postwork. tvining: Have you checked out the features in Vue 6 Infinite? Among them is the ability to adjust the pose of a Poser character from within Vue. As well as support for the shader tree in P6-7. It is still in a pre-release state, so bugs and issues are being found and addressed, so it isn't ready for prime time. But you may want to experiment with whatever demo they release.Might be what you are looking for... -Has- anyone heard how yoshi mo-cap is doing on that project? The videos of the app are incredible...

*Silent Hill was quite cool--great editing and effects, and very creepy! I'd like to know more how they went about producing it.

*Almost every day in 2005 was spent on animation and rendering...  I pretty much had my computer running 24 hours a day, and it was a one-man project.  The majority of it was created in P4, and I finally upgraded both my RAM and to P6 around the sixth and final episode.  I really don't know how I was able to do it -- especially considering I tried cranking out at least 2 shots a day (which obviously couldn't happen all the time), and this was all while attending school full-time and dealing with a part-time job.  I always consider doing another one since I've come a long way since No Escape, but right now I'm focusing on original horror work in Poser.

I'm surprised no one has ripped on my animation in the first few episodes yet :-D

The main problem I see with a lot of the amateur animated films?

Voice work.

Sadly most people aren't Jeff Bennett or Mark Hamill or Lisa Ann Beley or the Dobsons (father and the two sons).  Voice acting is as much of a skill as acting visually and most people don't have the range to convincingly pull off two or more characters.  Even most voice actors don't (Gary Chalk, who's main role recently  was playing Optimus Prime/Primal almost always sounds like like himself) while those who do, like Hamill and Bennett, get lots of work.

My hat's off to you, Peacer, that's a lot of work!

Yes, good voice work seems to be hard to find. I was just reading an article in Student Filmmaker that suggested finding actors at your local amateur theater group--every town seems to have one. The one nice thing about voice actors is that they don't have to look the part, too.

I'm working on a full length feature film using Poser. I have just over 1/2 hour of it complete, but I'm currently taking a break for a year or two while my kids are little (yes yes, I know that a year or two is an eternity in the 3d world - but it's what life demands at the moment). I actually can't wait to get back to it...but right now getting 5 minutes in front of the computer is an accomplishment, let alone the hours I need to work with Poser.

This project has actually been a huge undertaking. It took about 3 or 4 months to get the script right, and then casting took a while. Getting the voices truly is one of the greater challenges. People from all over the US have been working on this with me. Right now, I have about 80% of the voices recorded. All of the main characters are taken care of, with the exception of one character that I think I'm going to have to re-record because the audio quality is lousy. Luckily, the bulk of that character's lines occur in the second half of the film. The rest we're recording as we go.

Anyway, you can download an excerpt from it in DIVX format (14mb) here: KitchenScene.avi

Hope you like it

Looks great, Sbertram! Your piece contains something even rarer than good voice talent in Poser animations: decent lighting! Maybe it's me, but one of my biggest peeves in 3D animations is flat (or no) lighting--to borrow from Tigger, lighting & shadows is what 3D does best! I hope you get the chance to get back to this at some point, it looks intriguing! --Tim

hey sbertram I like your clip, it reminds me of I Robot. not the movie. I would like to see more of it.

Animation will get faster and faster as hardware gets better and more cores are added to cpus.  Moreover rendering software  will continue to improve giving bettrer results in less time.  So things are looking up.

I know Fredric gets some great results using poser and then importing to Vue.   I wonder why he uses vue instead of Carrara.  Skinvue seems to be a nice product with no counterpart in Carrara.  That is why I was thinking of using vue in my workflow.

In the book listed below "character animation with poser 7" Larry Mitchell talks of going Poser to vue to Cinema 4d.  I wonder if he loses his skin shaders in the process.  If he does I wonder what he does if anythign about that.    

http://www.amazon.com/Character-Animation-Poser-Larry-Mitchell/dp/1584505176/sr=8-8/qid=1166137343/ref=pd_bbs_sr_8/103-3323461-6743801?ie=UTF8&s=books

Well, watching those trailers made me feel like a POS.  Awesome stuff.  I am think I am going to stop posting all together now :D -G