Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Want to make comics with poser, how to create sense of animation through sound a

tebop opened this issue on Mar 21, 2007 · 15 posts


tekmonk posted Wed, 21 March 2007 at 3:08 AM

Quote - So i think this plan i have is great. So here's my question. Should i vary the time that each frame stays on the screen AND to make it more like a continous animation...Should i make one image at the just the main points of the story or could i do some variations. like if there's a fight, a coupld of fast changing( 4 seconds each) pictures of the fight.

This kinda depends on what you are actually making. ie are you doing an animation that happens to be told with still frames, or are you doing a comic with special effects. If you are doing a comic, then the timing doesnt matter much IMO, just make sure each page stays long enough for the reader to take everything in (or better yet add a button to flip the page)

If you are going for an animation, then that is a whole different ball game. The key here is to use smart camera moves to cover for the 'missing frames'. ie say you want to make a character walk from his bed to the window. You would start with a keyframe of him at the bed (and secondary keyframes for yawning, getting up and so on) and then do a cut to the keyframe of him standing at the window. And you time the various frames according to how much time it would take in real life. Like go lie down on a bed and time yourself getting up. Use a stopwatch if necessary. That is the timing you want in the anim. You can also fill in gaps with 2D pans and zooms that dont need to be rendered out.

If you do it well enough, the viewer's imagination will fill in all the rest. Many low budget TV toons and anime use this limited motion technique and it works very well. In fact i would say go rent a few anime shows and watch them for reference. These guys put out 20-30 mins of entertaining animation on a shoestring budget.  You can learn a lot of tricks by studying them.

Anyways best of luck and keep us posted :)