Hopefully this doesn't appear twice. Hard typing with a two year old wiggling in your lap, turn your back and he hits enter. Anyway, didn't see the post show up so I'll type this out again. My husband and I have been discussing a possiblity and we wanted the poser community's input on the innitial design phase. Mostly to see how many would welcome such an advancement and what would other people want it to do. Anyway, get to the point, Cia... yeah I know.... Here's the idea. A Manikin.... something between say 16 to 30 inches in height that has all the basic joints (knees, waist, abdomen, chest, feet, toes (as a collective unit) and so forth (minus the articulated fingers)), and when you move an arm into a position, the model within poser does the same thing. Move the spine and so forth..... Personally I think something like this would make animation sequencing far more intuitive and allow for a more rapid grasp of the entire Poser world, but it would have its own draw backs. Fine tuning and the like would still have to be done and allowances for models that don't exactly match the manikin..... But here's the main question.... or rather questions. What sort of features would have to be a must! Like for instance, how many degrees of accuracy would you positively need? Is 3-5 degrees enough? Considering it is only an innitial model, how uniform would it have to be? Would you want telescoping limbs and such so that you could modify it? How limiting is the sensing equipment allowed to be? For instance, a single wire that attaches to the model's back being the only output? Or is just molding the model into the appropriate shape and putting it into a box to take a quick snap shot not all that bad if it causes the whole system to be 1/10th the cost? How about having to touch every joint with a posing pen? Is that so bad? And Cost? How much would you be willing to pay for such a device? These are all very real questions I'm asking of you, the poser community as a whole. Is it even worth the trouble to go through the proposal to have such an innitially expensive project researched and developed into a device that could be accessable to us, the end users? Or is it so totally pointless or impossibly expensive in its accuracy that no one would be able to buy it in the end? My husband actually works for a company that might be intrested in researching it with some great technicians, though footing a proposal to the actual production company would require an innitial idea of the market's expectations and their willingness to buy such a device and at what cost. Any thoughs and ideas out there? Give a buzz.

I've acutally gave that idea some thought too, why not take it a step further and create a telemitry suit? Just put the thing on and act out the scenes yourself, it would be less time consuming for someone that's not fimilar with animating, like me. And yet, a manikin would still be faster than posing it with the dials, that's my 2 cents.

Bushi is working on a similar idea using the Pro Pack. You can find posts in the Pose Python Scripting Forum.

Well there are commercial ones that are already on the market that can do that now.... unfortunately the starting price is around $25,000..... Personally, I'd love it, would make everything that much easier in the non-animator stuff, but very rarely does the hobbist have enough money to throw around 25K on a whim.... That and with a telemitry suit you couldn't pose things like flight or falling very well without some interesting use of peterpan wires. At any rate was thinking of something more along the line of what a graphics tablet is to a mouse, rather than what a vertual reality system is to a mouse.

As someone who is strictly an untalented hobbyist, I tend to do only what I have time and money for. That means I don't do animations because I don't have the time to pose the scenes or the money for BHV. If you're proposing an alternative... The snapshots you talk of could be converted to BHV files, posing will generally be quicker and more fool-proof. Personally something like that would interest me as soon as it hits the $200 gadget mark. Even rough and ready posing would be a plus and the ease of use is secondary. If it's $2000, I'm sticking with dials no matter how sophisticated the mannikin is.