Hi, i am a poser and character studio noob but i would like to know if you guys think this is possible.

I am looking to creating dancing characters and then sillouette them with an alpha channel to use as general stock footage for clients (like the ipod adverts). I originally had the idea of film live dancers in front of a green screen but then this turned out to be too expensive (dancers, studio, lighting etc).

So this is where i came up with the idea of using artifical characters. But due to having little or no experience of programs such as poser or daz i wasn't sure of the extent to which i could make these characters dancing look life like enough to pass as human when silloutted.

So i have experimented with this a little with mixed results using poser. I simply imported a motion capture file and then rendered the animation and took it into after effects and applied the sillouette and it could quite easily pass as a real human to the untrained eye. However its not quite there. And i this is where i need your advice.....

Is it possible to apply clothes and hair to a male or female character and get these items to move and flow dynamically as the character animates?

How time consuming would this be to do and is it very intensive computational task for lets say a 30 second animation?

What would be the best way to go about this for a newbie such as myself? Is poser the right package for this task do you think?

Fit and flow are two different problems.  Fit is really not a problem, though.  If you use
standard characters and their standard "conforming" clothes, the fit will automatically
be good enough for silhouette.  That's easy. 

Flow is not so easy; it requires using the cloth room to set up the "dynamic
cloth".  This doesn't take an enormous amount of time, but the clothing must
be either entirely or partly designed for dynamic use, and it does take a fair
amount of fiddling and setup.  The standard characters
for Poser 5,6,7 include a number of dynamic clothing items, so again you
could probably get by with minimum cost. 

LittleDragon over at Daz3d forums had a avatar he made.

was his feline charater with a bvh file of a dancer.  Looked like those ipod commercials.  was small and siloetted but it's certainly posible.

He did it all in poser, though I'm not sure exactly how.

if your looking for flowwing hair, like a siloetted women and her hair flying out as she dances that might be problimatic, though poser hair might be able to do it, it's kinda memory intensive but that's to get a real look and you wouldn't need that just the hair flowing and then darkend.

You can always render against a green screen background and then use after effects to replace the green background.  tricky but completly possible.

Quote - tricky but completly possible.

Yes, its the hair and clothes which i think would tip the balance between life like movement and something that looks computer generated. The silouette already deals with covering up the obvious cg model, its the intricate details of the cloth and hair flowing which i am wondering about.

Could anyone direct me to a place where i can buy clothes which are fully dynamic ready that i can just apply? Also which model would i need to apply this on? would it be something that i also need to buy?

Many thanks.

You can find lots of dynamic clothing in the freestuff area. Most are designed for V3 or V4, but since they're dynamic, you can fit them to practically any figure.

the only part of the OP that I read was about doing ipod-style anims. 
yes, that is very easy in poser IMVHO. export uncompressed animation
to video editor of choice to add background and/or foreground trax.

where do you get the dancing bvh's?

There are some free bvh sites around - samples etc.  I have some links at home if I can dig them up I will post some.  I think I have a kungfu link with some cool bvh's and a hiphop one too.  can't remember.

The various motion capture files floating around the net are pretty good but the ones i have seen don't include any hand or finger movement.

Nor will they (at least fingers and toes. there should be actual wrist and ankle tracking, though). It's only been -very- recently that mocap systems have obtained the sensitivity needed to even detect that amount of close quarter fine motion...and even now, you still have the issue of sensor occlusion, which makes it far easier to keyframe the digits that try and track them (ever watched a capture session where you have marker occlusion and tracking failure? The Gong Show has nothing on the comedy of that....).