Two points of attention: 1.) I'm using a very complicated model, with multiple arms/arm parts/neck parts... Is there any advice poser people can give about making my keyframing as painless as possible? 2.) I want to have a better cloth and hair dynamic in my animation... For example, say a woman with long hair in a dress spins suddenly. I'm thinking adding bones to a dress to give it the lift and rotation (the dress would continue to rotate through its stretch limit)... anyone have an easier way, or a better approach? Same for the hair? I have dabbled in this animation package and I want to make something REALLY great... test this to its limits. Any advice would be helpful. Warmest Regards, --RP

easier said then done, Joint parametes can act strange at times, But not impossible. Keyframeing is tedius work but with custom models and clothes like the one your talking about would need to be animated by key frame by frame when your doing a swirl around with the dress. Walking should be easy just make a walk path, I think motions would be good too if they were easy to make and cheapo to do, But they require sensors and stuff that must be worn on the body to record the movements.

My experience with Poser animation is largely limited to making .AVI's of my suction-dredger-submarine model aiming and untelescoping its suction tube and sucking up a scuba diver who shouldn't have been there at the time. The suction tube involves an IK-circle (= an IK-chain whose goal is IK-parented back to a part of the same model), and I remember that the flexible part of the suction tube (which is an IK-chain and of many parts with the curve property) sometimes twitched oddly or went into zigzags because of funnies in the way that Poser handles IK-circles, and I had to go through the run adding more and more keyframes to keep it in control. That, and nuisance because I can't change a model's parentage or a part's IK-parentage during the run.

I'd suggest reading Keith Lango's tut on pose-to-pose animation. It works for me. He's at www.keithlango.com.

All of what you are attempting is theoreticly possible in poser4 but it will all require tedious key framing particularly the swinging cloth and hair stuff. there is no easy way around it in poser. Wolf