ok what is the reason there are no poser made movies( in tv or the theatlres) when poser is cheap and affordable and given the right animators they could accomplish a l ot with poser. If the story was good i would watch. it's not about the software, it's about the story. i've seen some claymation in tv and its pretty cheap sometimes. yet i've never seen anything with poser aside from little supportive animation for medical shows or whatever. come on people we're now up to Poser 7 and still no full feature show or movie? Are makers of high end 3d software discouraging animators from using Poser ON PURPOSE so that they buy the expensive 3d max etc?

Poser has been used in many commercials (both directly and indirectly) and less theatrical venues (science and such).  I just think that the overall flexibility of the figures isn't up to expensive, custom rigged figures in other packages.  That's not an idictment of Poser, but just that other packages provide more delicate control over their CA solutions - puppetry with actors in controller suits or more options for inverse kinematic riggings, more sufficient dynamic simulations.  It's more about going for the more expensive solution for better results.

On the other hand, as you mention, some go for the truly inexpensive solution.  It all depends on many factors.  Who is in charge?  Who knows whom?  Who bids for contracts and shows their portfolio?  If competent Poser artists aren't there then it won't happen.  If they are but bigger companies using more 'professional' applications (note the quotes) provide more tantalizing examples, then the Poser option will lose.

It is hard to beat Maya with its worldwide and extremely vast community of professionals (many thousands) and its neverending accolations in movie, TV, and other venues.  Any studio could put two people on a contractual project with only slight profit margins and succeed.  Any individual Poser user would be hard-pressed to compete in such an arena.

One day maybe.  But with the current situation, we'll have to see what road Poser takes.

IMVHO FFRender can't produce animations of sufficient quality (and low cost) even for the demographic which is willing to view 3d-rendered animations, and it's difficult to underestimate what said demographic will accept in games and films (e.g. appleseed). I was appalled at the toon renders in one of the appleseed films, but anime fans went nuts over it, as usual. poser toon renders are far superior IMVHO, but no studio can afford to finance such a project, due to minor tech difficulties and the learning curve involved. yes, poser users can produce retouched single-frame renders of impressive quality, but that method can't be used to produce an entire film, even with a staff of several hundred korean or chinese techs IMVHO. nobody is eager to be the first one to throw the necessary money at such a project using poser, as long as cheaper renderers are currently available at the chinese and korean studios.

Poser has a good render engine, rather dated figure rigging, and no support for network rendering. Worse, it doesn't hook in to other tools used in animation. With Poser, I could render a virtual set pretty easily, but I've never heard of tools that could let me easily animate the virtual camera to track the motions of a studio camera. I can, sort of, see how it could be done, but I'd have to put things together myself. Do it in Maya or a similar widely used pro program, and it's a solved problem. The initial software cost is higher, but expensive staff time is less.

Another factor is render times. If you want a good-qulaity render for your frames, then Firefly is quite slow when rendering - and unti lthe upcoming PoserPro, we haven't had the ability to network render, so it's all had to be done on one computer, which means a LONG time for any decent animation.

It was mentioned in the recent lightwave thread that Beowulf's textures and models are much lower res than Poser's ones, and I think this is another reason. Poser is resource hungry, which is one thing you don't really want when creating a feature-length animation. The lighter your resources, then the faaster your render times, and the easier it is to 'reshoot' problem shots.

JonTheCelt

The Sun newspaper uses Poser figures to create one of it's cartoons every day, I've seen poser used on the News on tv, poser has been used a lot in films to previsualise scenes, the movie The One used Poser heavily to set up the most complicated & dangerous stunts. Poser was used during a court case I was in the Jury for to demonstrate to us what might have happened.

So although you don't always see Poser on screen it's been used to help create what you're seeing.

Several factors are in play here. A good story and poser lighting is all thats really needed. Look at the movie Ice Age. That didn't use high end hdri lighting. Our character development is sufficently high enought to make great movies too.

The poser community is diverse and fractured. Few have the modeling skills to make and rig quality characters. Think about it- NO STORY has a complete set of characters. 
Little red ridding hood for example. Sure, you could search for months and maby find "some' of what you need. (at great cost) But it'll be unlikely that you'll find everything you need (characters).

Poser is an animators tool. So it's an end user tool. No story 'groups' of charactors and props, limited motion files, no  music and background sounds and no specific stories for the existing characters. And it's all done by individuales

Does this make sence?

@geo:  Interesting point about no character groups.  But not all stories
require a set of recognizable characters.  Many 'serious' plays could be done
by two or three different Vicky-based chars and two or three Apollo-based chars.

As for music and background sounds, ahem:

http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=57986

I'd say the most serious problem is with basic moves: walking, picking things up,
opening doors, lighting a cigarette.   Especially walking and the transitions to and from.
The new animation layers were supposed to solve this problem, but failed.

This won't be popular to say, but maybe the problem is that facial expressions on Poser models haven't recieved a scintilla the attention of the nuanced hyper-breasts :)

You could do a whole film without textures and as a z-toon. Almost all my commercial work with Poser was done that way. It may not be a powerfull enough app for CGI realism but look at South Park! That was done with construction paper cut outs!

I wish I could find footage I have read about that recorded this upstate New York classic professor who used to stage the Greek tragedies single handedly using ragdoll marionets. He thought that on an intimate scale it was more faithfull to the original ampitheatre productions then using live actors. I love that kind of chutzpah. I have a whole VHS of this guy who shot films on a Fisher Price toy cam in the 90's that recorded in black and white on those old audio tapes!!! Good stuff.

I think low tech rules. But Poser would need lower resolution characters maybe with swapable hands and heads for "insert" shots :)

Attached Link: Star Trek Aurora (fully-3D animated)

I think Poser (with help) can get pretty decent results, but it is a lot of work. I've put nearly 3 years into my present project (that includes almost 8 months of development time) using a number of apps--Daz characters, Poser for animation setup, Mimic for lip sync, Cinema 4D for rendering, FinalCut Pro for editing, plus Photoshop for textures etc.--but overall I'm pleased with the results, even if I've gotten only about 20 minutes of footage (I mean, I am doing it all myself--I even had to write and compose the theme song!). It's far from perfect, but--to use the South Park example--I think the look/movement of the characters is sufficient to carry the story. I think with even a small crew of reasonably talented people could produce something of commercial quality using Poser and other apps, so I share tebop's frustration wondering why Poser hasn't gone "pro". Personally, I think the real reason is that that E-Frontier, and all previous Poser owners, have continually shot themselves in the foot by not making Poser compatible with other 3D apps--it's like having a manufacturer of trains producing trains that don't fit on any standard rails: it doesn't matter how nice the trains are, if they aren't compatible with the rest of the world, what good are they? Since the beginning of 3D, there has been a need to populate the 3D world, whether you're an architect or an animator, but the inability to integrate Poser with other apps has kept it from getting into any serious production pipelines. I was very excited when I first read about "Poser Pro" and its proposed greater integration with other apps, but it's starting to look like they simply bought a few existing 3rd party plugins that give it marginally more integration rather than making a serious effort to make it widely compatible, which is really irritating after years of jumping through flaming hoops hoping they'll wake up and smell the possibilities. --Tim

Quote -
You could do a whole film without textures and as a z-toon. Almost all my commercial work with Poser was done that way. It may not be a powerfull enough app for CGI realism but look at South Park! That was done with construction paper cut outs!

Well, to be fair, only the pilot episode and some of the earlier stuff, before it actually became the South Park we know today,  was done that way. All other episodes, including those produced up to this point, were done using Autodesk (formerly Alias) Maya, and Corel software.

http://www.gazette.uwo.ca/article.cfm?section=Arts&articleID=1811

"Parker and Stone abandoned their cutouts and replaced them with industry-standard animation tools, most notably CorelDraw and Maya. The change in technique allowed for quicker production of episodes, to which Stone likened the process as “building a sandcastle with a bulldozer.”"

isn't the Daz gecko and toon frog the ones that are in the US insurance co. Geiko commericals? Sure looks like it.

Drifter, the Gecko in the commercials was created and animated using proprietary software at Rythm and Hues studios. I believe R & H Studios makes use of Maya in their pipeline also, so it's likely that's where the character was originally modeled.   This guy was lead animator for the commercials from 2001 to 2004.

No network rendering capabilities. Do not underestimate how important that is in the production pipeline.

In a production studio, it is ideal to have artists working on a scene submit their scene to the render queue which will then churn away 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, rendering frame by frame and sending those completed frames to a server for the compositors to access them. Meanwhile, the animators' workstations are left free to continue to develop new scenes and add them to the queue.

In my work on a Battlestar Galactica fanfilm with Lightwave, a render farm is essential to get renders of a TV-quality level without tying up my computer for weeks rendering out a single scene. I would be using Poser in that fanfilm right now if it had network render capabilities. As it is, I'm looking at adding Carrara into the production pipeline just to access some Poser characters.

Quote - Drifter, the Gecko in the commercials was created and animated using proprietary software at Rythm and Hues studios. I believe R & H Studios makes use of Maya in their pipeline also, so it's likely that's where the character was originally modeled.   This guy was lead animator for the commercials from 2001 to 2004.

Heh.  I don't think Angie would be all too happy if she knew you just called her a "guy".

:rolleyes:

OUchie..... Poser animators have been asking for weightmapping for years to enable stepping up a notch. If P7Pro's network renderer plays nicely with other background renderers like Vue's, PI's, AE Pro, etc, then it will be one step closer to being capable of use in more professional settings. But it is going to be up to the actual animators to make sure that Poser's owners know how it works, and if it works that we are happy with it....and that weightmaps and sub-D would be -reaaaaal- nice additions (although that -might- be one of the reasons they have dragged on weightmaps; who's format do you use, or do you build your own? And does that format lock you out of the current level of interaction you have with other packages?). And I hear you, Tim, as I'm in the early stages of my own little project (scripting and hacking said lovely script to pieces to kill the dross, deadwood, and really cool visuals that would take a one man band eternity to put together). If Pro's network rendering is stable and plays nice, that would be the potential to parallel render a scene is Poser and a scene in Vue Infinite (at least after I upgrade the main box to handle what would have to be an insane memory load....). Frankly, I think what it will take is someone pulling off a short, and being able to say they animated/rendered it with Poser, and none of the visual cues that betray poserness are there...

rjandron: Your BStar site looks pretty cool--good luck on that! I think Poser has great potential for fanfilms (or any SF-Fanasy film) if only because it gives the producers more latitude for actors since pretty much anyone who can act and looks like a movie star is a movie star, or at the least doesn't tend to hang out on the set of a fanfilm. Animated characters look however you want, and then if you get a good voice, it can carry the story. And you need people, really, for a compelling story. I've seen some great space battle animations online, but without characters in peril or triumph, they're kind of cold.

Ockham: totally true about simple moves--animating a character floating in space is a breeze compared to having one convincingly stand up and turn around. NaturalPoint has finally come out with its $5k mocap system, which, if it works well, could open up all kinds of possibilities--mocap is really the last piece of 3D animation production that's been completely unattainable to the hobby market, but $5k certainly gets it closer. Ironically, if you saw Ratatouille, they proudly point out in the credits that it was done with no mocap, which sounds kind of odd, but if you saw "Monster House" it makes sense, since the character movements in that were actually too realistic for the cartoony-looking characters, so that in some shots  it looked almost like real people walking around in big-headed character suits.

DaleB: good idea cutting down on those impossible shots--do it now! It's worth the time, especially to do a storyboard to visualize the shots--that, almost more than the script itself, has been critical to knowing what sets/items need to be fully built, and what can simply be suggested with a bit of smoke and mirrors.

God save me from anyone who -doesn't- think storyboarding is crucial...even if it is only stick figures. That's like a fanfic writer submitting a manuscript without shoeboxing it and having a 3rd party edit. The results are Not Nice. The part that gets hard is trying to balance out good camera work with reasonable render demands. The real killer being the long, overarcing shot of a scene that you can use to cut closeups into and frame your dramatic flow with. Too many fanfilms seem to miss the balance; the ones that do the long, long scenes rarely get finished. The ones that do the shortscene/shortscene etc ad nauseum feel more like an arcade game (another reason I hope P Pro's nodes play nice with Vue; with some careful light matching, Poser could handle the closeups, and Vue the extended shots. Maybe. Light matching would be the make or break, and that might be beyond the apps or my abilities. But hope.....).

Attached Link: Weinbergs Poser 1/2 Gallery

I saw a Special Features for some movie Hollywood feature flm (about a ghost on a WW2 submarine?) and the direct if I recall had done very comprehensive story boards all with Poser and was so happy about that in terms of his workflow. Is my memory remotely correct?

I really think the problem is that creativity can get bottle necked when you push against the technical limits... pro animations are done with huge render farms... why not use LoRes figures and no textures and see what the app can do? Probably the best use would be to export preview frames and paint over them the way "classical animators" paint over rotoscoping.

The key I think is not to try to chalenge commercial platforms but  to expoit a consumer app for all it is worth. Use the youtube epidode format... subtitle if you have no voice actors... etc. etc. Look at the early Poser art on Larry Weinberg's site... better art with Poser 1 through 4 than most people working with Poser 7. It is because they took the tool at hand for what it was and then forced it as far as it could creatively rather than technically.

http://www.larryweinberg.com/gallery2/v/PoserHistory/Poser_1_and_2/?g2_GALLERYSID=69fc2cce985cc3d56327ef11711a0233

Working on it. A full length project about 90 minutes currently in production. I'm trying to keep it all Poser. I've only stopped to work on other projects (will brake for money), but I'm back on it. I have a few friends to help with the voice overs. Other than that, I've done just about everything: script, storyboards, animations, music. Whew! Still a long way til done, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It started out just wanting to learn animation. Poser fit my budget at the time. Now I'm hooked. I 'm using 6 but 4 is still on my hard drive. Just don't have the heart to delete it.

Oh, well.

Nolos
'I think there is a point to all of this.'

The thing I have found going back to Poser 4 from time to time is that the posing and renders that once took ages now are like butter... sometimes I can get things done so much faster.

I have to admit though, I de-installed Painter 8 and use Painter 5 with a 2GB memory patch :)

@tvining: wow, I thought that was an amazing animation you made. Frankly I didn't think you could get anything close to that level with Poser.

That nobody else commented on it makes me think that I'm the only one surprised :)

I really need to check out making animations in Poser!

• Rick

Well, to be fair, he rendered in Cinema; probably did the figure import with Interposer, used Mimic for lipsyncing (and probably some additional facial animation), and just did the keyframing in Poser....

momodot the film wasn't called "Below" by any chance was it? made in 2002 directed by David Twohy? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276816/

**Lucifer_The_Dark

Yeah, that was the movie. The guy showed off hundreds if not thousands of story board frames done with poser on his laptop.**

There are two feature length films I know of made with Poser:

Dominator was shown in theaters and released on DVD:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0135991/

Monsters of the Id is an amateur film available from the author:
http://www.monstersmovie.com/

I guess there aren't more because for an amateur a feature length film is a fairly daunting undertaking. That's a seriously large amount of animation for one person to do.

Profesional studios on the other hand need more robust rendering for high resolution output and would have little need for the features of a application like Poser with apps like Maya at their disposal.

Attached Link: http://www.monstersmovie.com/howmade.htm

Monsters of the Id guy has interesting comments:

Comparisons

So I am one man, one PC working for about 3 years. Stylised CGI. My first film 'The War of the Starfighters' will be similar in statistics to 'Monsters of the Id'. It cost about £3000, and was 1,350 shots long, 2,500 hours work, on average over 2 hours work a day saw 4 seconds of finished movie per day.

*This is how it compares to other more visually complex CGIs. 'Captain Scarlet' TV CGI series cost £23 million, 140 computers, 280 people, 2 years to make. 'Toy Story' cost $30 million and used 110 animators. 'Shrek' used 500 computers, used 300 animators, took 4 years to make 1000 shots. A good CGI animator can make 4 seconds of finished footage a week. Not sure what we can make of all that but it is interesting.

*He then goes on to talk about the issue of "snobbery".

hmmmmm....  just amongst us here, the power of thousands of Poser platforms sitting around every night doing nothing...

It'd be fun trying to do it wouldn't it? make up a set of rendering preferences, lighting & a list of models, textures & scenery to use, also make up tons of animated poses & farm them out, each person sets up & renders their small section & sends the footage back to the originator for compositing, not only that but we'd never run short of interesting voices to use for the characters. one "professional" movie coming up in weeks or months.

I think it would be great to have some kind of DAZ/Poser community animation project.