Anyone willing to make or teach me how to make animated poses of a figure V4 and M3 falling to ground after being shot? Cheers

Those are on my To Do list atm, I'll get back to you. If you want, I can assemble a tutorial on basic Poser animation as well.

If you want to see an example of what you're asking for, look in the thread here for The Action Pose Pack, and download Hiro's. 

There's a 30-frame animation of him falling on his face from a trip.

Many Thanks I would like to learn.I have a lot of trouble getting a realistic motion.Cheers

Then I will do both of the above. Realistic motion for something like that will probably mean setting up a few 'in-between' poses, and using them for keyframes. for an exsample of that, pick up the Kururu pack as well. All of the TAPP files have at least two animations on board. 

My way of learning the procedures myself. Sara jumps up on a wall and pulls herself up, Hiro falls on his nose. Kururu walks around with her rifle in hand and checks around.

V3 is going to get knocked back and out, methinks. But I'm not yet sure.

I'll have to look at my existing poses and see what I have.

When you download your poses  and put them into Poser what folder name are they under? I cannot seem to find them.Cheers

Unzip them to your Poser directory. You'll find them in Poses->Spartanworks->(character name here). There may be subfolders from there, but at the moment, you should only have one in each category.

I'll remember to make sure that's in the readme files. If I neglected to do that, then I apologize.

Oh, fun extra note: I have a V3 animation of her drawing twin pistols from the hip, and running down along blasting away. I think what I'll do is assemble another one you can attach to the first of her getting hit and going down.

One suggestion for getting realistic walks: Use four keyframes and not two to do the leg movements. You'll spend less time trying to find a way around the "Zombie Shuffle." When you run the animation, turn off the IK. It helps when positioning for still frames, but it's hard on motion, since it wants to keep your character's feet stable on one axis if it can at all times.

Nine times out of ten, that's the 'y' axis, so she won't pick up her feet.

Whatever you do, don't try and repose her for every frame. it's only going to drive you batty.

Also, since Poser's animations can animate a camera(sometimes without you realizing you've asked it to), use the posing cam to do your posing. Eliminates camera "jitter" and accidental orbitsTrust me, you don't want to build a 2 minute seg, only to find that somewhere in the first ten seconds you moved the Main camera, and you have to go frame by frame and zero the camera. For reference, a second of theater-quality film is 30 frames. Mulitply by 120 seconds, and you can see what kind of job that would be.

An animation tutorial would be great, Black Spartan! I started doing M3 going through a Tai Chi sequence a long time ago, his arms worked but his feet just shuffled! :D

I'm not the best there is by any stretch, but I can hold me own. Just finished up the last of the still poses for the V3 pack, to try and show how a 1-hit kill of knockdown would work. I'm just going to do the animation now, and I can assemble the obligatory three-pose promo image and post. 

This particular animation works from about seven still poses, and should come out pretty smooth. Probably the easiest-looking animation to try, is the hardest to actually get right: Walking.

I will see what I can do about getting an entirely correct walk in for the next pack, which should be tomorrow night sometime. The ones I have have run into a few of the same problems you had in your Tai-Chi demo.

Also note: V3's rigging is enough similiar to M3's that you may be able to use the Vicki animation on him. No bets on V4, however, since her joints aren't set up the same way.

Additional note: Remember, IK is everything. Knowing when not to use it will save you much hair and sleep loss.

TTFN :)

Okay, folks. I'm putting poor Sadie off one more day, and working to put the tutorial up tonight. For to do the tutorial, you'll need V3, and the posekit I'm putting up in the next about three minutes. Having ArtemisX for V3 is helpful, but not required. The poses will still work without, but it won't render looking nearly as cool.

All the basic poses you'll need for this are in the TAPP V3 posepack, and I'll be covering all the basics you'll need to make the same things happen to nearly anybody...

Please note: There will be a quiz at the end.

Thanks :D

Okay, the animation is done, and the final video is rendering. That might take a little while, though.

Time to type it all up and put it in a .pdf for posting. In the meantime, I'll post the posepack.

Enjoy!

Still working on the typing part... Proper art takes time :)

Although I wonder if anyone's still watching this thread...

Still watching!  And thanks very much for all the work you're putting into this :)  I'll certainly be interested in learning more about IK, I tend to take it off and leave it off - sometimes I'll leave it on to do the larger movements of a pose but then I remove it to refine where I want everything. I don't use limits either, I tend to rely on my reasonably good knowledge of human physiology - and postwork :D Which, of course, is no use for an animation....

Quote - ...and postwork :D Which, of course, is no use for an animation....

Lies! You can actually export the frames one at a time as stills, and assemble them in MotionArtist or MovieMaker :)

I'm not going to get deep into IK, just tell you when you need to turn it off: from what you said, you have a pretty fair idea of what to do with it anyway :)

I Am still watching the forum.Have been busy with house renovations.Keep up the good work.Cheers

Tutorial's about half done. Sorry about the delay, but I've been tied up in about ten other projects. I've been working on them steadily, and I have this one top of the queue now, so I'll be finishing it probably first thing in the morning. I'll have to post it somewhere, as the file is likely going to be too large to pass off to the Forums.

I'll let you guys know :)

Black Spartan wrote

Also, since Poser's animations can animate a camera(sometimes without you realizing you've asked it to), use the posing cam to do your posing. Eliminates camera "jitter" and accidental orbitsTrust me, you don't want to build a 2 minute seg, only to find that somewhere in the first ten seconds you moved the Main camera, and you have to go frame by frame and zero the camera. For reference, a second of theater-quality film is 30 frames. Mulitply by 120 seconds, and you can see what kind of job that would be.

I've found the same can happen with lights too, keyframes seem to appear out of nowhere, the solution is to check the Animation Palette before rendering, errant keyframes are easy to spot and eliminate. 
It wasn't until I got to grips with this palette and the graph editors that I felt I was starting to get a handle on animation. Use it to choose between curved and straight tweens so that something, a foot for example will stay in place rather than wandering about between keyframes.

some of my animations can be found amongst other videos here

www.youtube.com/vjflickeringlight

I have a pair of ten-second animatios of any real value to my credit(as of right now, lol). Not planning to put them up for public viewing any century soon.

The tutorial covers extremely basic keyframe animation, so I'm not touching the lights or any of the animating cameras. I value very highly what little is left of my sanity ;) I haven't seen a light  animate on it's own yet, but I can think of cases where I've touched a light to change it's color, and changed it's position just slightly while selecting it. Then run the animation and watched the light do fun things. Alway in Poser 6 and 7, I run an animation after changing a light or animating camera in any way. If I catch it right away, then I can undo the damage readily :)

Here's the critter you've all been waiting for: 

http://www.sharecg.com/v/22541/pdf/word-doc-tutorial/Gunbunny-V3-Gets-Knocked-on-Her-Butt

The techniques are applicable to all characters, even if the poses aren't ;)

I had a go at your tutorial.Couple things.I do have much in the way of clothing for V3 so I tried the base unclothed figure. The ground plane moves up and down when I play the animation.
Any suggestions? Cheers

Couple of things come to mind. 

1. Check the Body Y-coordinate data. It should read 0.000 at all times. If it doesn't, then there's your problem. 

2. Try a different camera. If you changed the orientation of the Main camera at any time, and you use it to view your animation, that'll cause it, too.

3. Depending on where it is, even out either the Y or Z levels in the Hip. That's where all your up and down movement should be anyway. If she's on her back, it'll be the Z axis, if upright, the Y-axis. Only adujst this in small increments, though.

4. Zero your figure before starting. This is something I should have put in the tutorial, but didn't think of at the time. Window->Joint Editor. There's a button that says Zero figure. Hit that with the IK off, and she'll drop to the floor with her feet flat.

In the Tutorial, I Y-translated her at the hip so her boots wouldn't poke through. Everything went smoothly for me, but that doesn't mean the poses match up exactly, either, since they were actually made for two different animations.

If you save the animation and pack up either a .pz2 file of your .pz3 (unclothed, untextured figures only, please), I can have a look.

The only other thing I can think of would be during the running phase, you picked up her whole body rather than just her trailing foot. I can't be certain without some more details, though.

That's just the things that come to mind. If you decide to pack up the .pz2(just like saving a pose, except you do it as a multi-frame animation), you can email me at the address at the very end, after my Be Nice rant.

:lol:

I have made a PZ2.Where shall I send it? Cheers

email is at the very end of the document, after the copyright rant :)

arrow1 wrote
"The ground plane moves up and down when I play the animation.
Any suggestions? "

Are you using the Posing Camera? This is parented to the figures hip (moves with it) so background etc will appear to move in this view. If for some reason your figure is actually moving up and down there is a Python script which will "drop figure to floor all frames"

Just to add to the point I made earlier about the animation palette and graph editor, found this brief but very helpful tutorial on the subject from PhilC

http://www.philc.net/animation1.htm

Some of the points made in this video may also explain what seems like unwanted or unexpected movements occuring in animations