Hi guys,
I'm pretty sure you can do this in Poser, but I figured I'd ask before I spend days pulling my hair out.
Is it possible to map an AVI onto a one-sided square as a reference for creating more realistic animations in Poser 6? If so, can I get the movie to play in the Poser viewport by scrubbing the animation timeline back and forth?
I've gathered a lot of reference material and I still need to capture what I need from it and convert it to AVI format. I plan on using Premier for that part. (Right?)
Anyway, I'd appreciate any tips, tricks, links to tutorials etc.
Thanks,
JT

Hop over to philc.net and check out his Rotoscoper python script; it does what you want, and creates 2 right angled offset projection planes, just in case you can find (or make)video files from two cameras at right angles. It is possible to do it yourself in with the shaders in Poser, but you would need to talk to a shader guru about the best way to hook it up yourself. Premier is a good choice for this; just do a little expeimentation first. You can get some funky pixellation effects when you start changing one compressed format to another, and some codecs simply don't like others. If you use Rotoscoper, it has some image format limitations, so your would need to take those into account...

Yes, you can map an .AVI onto a one sided square but it must be rendered to be visible.

You might try this ...

[menu] >>> "File" >>> "Import" >>> "AVI Footage..."

This maps the .AVI on the background and you can use the scrubber to move back and forth through the movie.  The background will, however, only update to the current frame when the scrubber stops moving.

You can, also,use the "Step Back" and "Step Forward" buttons ro view the frames in the movie.

cheers,
dr geep <------------------------------ now movieing on
;=]

P.S. If this is what you're looking for ... Here's how to map an .avi onto a one sided square in the Material Room.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Awesome! Thanks guys!
Bringing the clip in as a backgound like you said Dr. Geep is pretty much the best that can be done in Poser. (I didn't know I could do that!)
Hopefully this will help me make animations that don't totally look robotic :)
Thanks again guys!

another trick for animations involving alotta hip translation is to put non-overlapping still frames on the same image, then use that as background.

Yeah, I used this trick to animate the cockpit screens in the helicopters and jet planes in my Godzilla animation (posted on YouTube.com - use the search words "Poser" and "Godzilla" to find "A Tribute to Godzilla").  But oyu have to look real hard because the secens go by pretty fast.