In the next release I hope a major source of fustration is addressed. BVH's. It would appear that the posers XYZ is in relation to itself rather than the world space. For example apply a BVH and you will see that no matter where the poser figure moves to, the xyz trans coordinates mean nothing when looking at "body". There by making it impossible to correct the appearance of sliding on ice rather than staying glued to the floor. Sure you can see the coordinates of individual parts but they are in the right places. Its just the "body" portion that needs a leash to keep it from sliding and having XYZ veiwable cordinates should help solve this. ALso, the BVH's supplied by DAZ are pure fakery. FOr exanple the BVH for the woman. "Walk abd sit at desk" She appears to sit in a chair and rest her elbows on a desk. In all likely hood the actor just sat on a box and there was no desk really there. I say this because if you set up props for where the would be a chair and a desk, the to objects a physically too far apart. And the is no action of her pulling the chair under her. Rather, she just braces herself as she sits. The walk up and walkdown stairs is also fakery because the step at the bottom of the stair case is super large(in height) compared to the rest of the steps. No staircase exists like that as far as I am aware of. I realize that BVH's by their nature are no 100% accurate but I ahve seen several BVH's that were several times more accurate than any of the BVH's sold by DAZ. They where no further edited either other than that wich is required during the BVH creation process. I know Pro pack offers scaling but I would bet that it can only go so far. What poser needs is a utility that actually allows the user to tune the BVH for a specific figure. I'm told Pro PAck does this a little but its still far from accurate.

I think maybe what you are looking for is more along the line of Credo's Lifeforms. Have you looked into that?

Actually, not for a looooong time. I'll check it out but in what way does it handle BVH's better that you know of?

It has tools that will allow you transfer motion data between different models and different programs. You import a motion (several different types including BVH), apply it to a character bone structure (Dork, Mike, Vicki, Posette, etc) then I think you have some ability to tweak it and then you can export it (in several different formats, including BVH) to work with that character in Poser or other programs that can import motion data.

That's about as far as I understand it...I haven't touched BVH's in years. I don't own Lifeforms, so I couldn't tell you how well it actually works. To step up on my soapbox for a second, if you don't mind, I'd rather make movies that show off my animation skills than someone else's. I've personally found it's easier and more rewarding to keyframe animate my characters from scratch myself than deal with the frustrating task of tweaking pre-existing motion capture or walk designs.

Plus, if I'm creating sets and scenes specifically built to fit an animation someone else created or acted out, who's really directing this movie?

Okay, sorry... back off my soapbox.

Thanks for the info. Yeah I'd like to actually animate my own movement too. But first of all the Linear motion setting is too un natuaral and the non linear setting always ends up cauing the poser character to twist into pretzels. The Graph editor is a best, very weak. Oh, also, the walk designer is very weak. Because its always hard to guess at howmany frames does the walk need to be set at to minimize its sliding the character as well. I was think about buying Poseanimation because thats created by a former Disney animator that now works for Curious Labs. Lastly I'm not very good at animating natural movement because its just haard to emulate real movement. But, if it were, then I guess the career of 3D aniomator wqould be a dime a dozen. JanP

ChrisD's animations are great. One thing I like about his stuff is that each animation file is pretty much just one action. Throwing, running, jumping, etc...which is a lot easier to work into your own work or sets than BVH's which are are a long series of several actions in one file.

ChrisD's stuff is also great to learn from. After you load up one of his animations, study it, maybe start cutting out some of the keyframes and try to reverse engineer it. Load an identicle character next to it and try to reproduce the action yourself. It can teach you a lot about good human and animal movement.

Oh and you mentioned non linear setting turning your characters into prezels... the key to working with spline animation is to keep your keyframes nice and spread out. I like to keep a minimum of 4 frames between spline keyframes, but it's all relative to the overall length of the motion. Also, try to throw in a spline break from time to time when things get really twisty...those will break the curve of the motion. A spline break is good to put in at the actual impact of a punch or the landing of a jump.

Hope this helps.

I take it ChrisD is the Disney animator that I was refering to. I also take it that these videos are on his CD's right? Hey maybe those breaksplines would do some good for the feet to stop sliding some.

Yes, that's him. You can find out more about his CD's at http://www.the-forge.ie/ if you haven't been there already. He also posts in the 2D/3D Animation Forum here from time to time.

Breaksplines could help with feet sliding. If you apply them to a keyframe in your Graph editor, it's easy to see exactly what they do to the arc of the movement.