Hi to everyone on the forum,

I hope I have come to the right place as I am becoming frustrated with a project I thought would be easier than it has turned out.

I am currently doing an animation for a martial arts site. It requires two figures. They wrestle and one leaps to end up with his hips on the others shoulders ending up in a position called a triangle. If you have watched UFC you may know the position. Anyway this is for a website I designed.

My problem is I am fairly new to poser but know most of the basics I think. I have played with simple animation in it before but never this complex.  I will list the issues I am having.

I cant save double figure poses for keyframe saving
when animating a later keyframe I find it moves earlier frames to the point I am back and forth. ( for example. keyframe 60 I move arm to shoulder of his opponent. I go back to keyframe  50 and the pose it was set in now does not look correct with other character.

I seem to be on a never ending back and forth battle!! Also the positions require that I turn off USE LIMITS as the limits do not allow the movement.

I could attach a file if nessesary.  Any help would be greatly appreciated

Do you have Poser 7 or Poser 7 Pro? If that is the case, you can use animation layers. Animate the arm in a separate layer, and it won't affect the other parts of the animation.

I'm not an animator myself, so I don't know much about it, but this is what animation layers are for.

Quote - Do you have Poser 7 or Poser 7 Pro? If that is the case, you can use animation layers. Animate the arm in a separate layer, and it won't affect the other parts of the animation.

I'm not an animator myself, so I don't know much about it, but this is what animation layers are for.

I have never used Poser for animation so mucked around with it a bit yesterday.  I ended up downloading quite a few of the Carnegie Mellon BVH files on Sharecg and checking out the uploader's site, installing bvhhacker and some other apps and dove right in.

Since it is considered a blasphemous offense to man's spirit of freedom, I don't usually RTFM...  ;) So, I had no idea what the animation layers were used for.  Thanks!  Now, I know.  I probably would have spent the day happily chopping up characters with swords and spears, feeding them to monsters and generally causing animation mayhem.  My ignorance of animation layers prevented this and, saved their pitiful lives then.  But, now they're doomed!

PS - Just a note:  I'm inexperienced in the ways of Poser animation.  However, for getting BVH files to work properly with any boned figured, BVH Hacker is an essential tool.  (Free)  You can rename the bones in the bvh, strip frames, alter fps, etc..  It's primarily made for Second Life but, it works great as a little tool for imported bvh files in Poser.  The CMU bvh files on ShareCG aren't boned for V4 so renaming those bones are essential to get them to work properly. 

Quote - ...I am currently doing an animation for a martial arts site.

I can't help you solve the current dilemma.  However, you may want to take a look at ShareCG and do a search on "bvh" in the Poser section.  This will pull up a huge assortment of Carnegie Mellon BVH files.  Download one of those (around 7-11meg) and open up the text file.  It is a complete listing of all bvh file descriptions the uploader put on ShareCG.  There are many fight-scene type bvh files and many martial-arts specific files there as well.  Go to the author's site (addy in the text file) and you'll get more info and a better formatted file listing.  Then, you can download the exact archive of bvh's you want and strip whatever moves and holds you want out of them.  Use "BVH Hacker" (do a search on it) to rename the bones in the bvh files so they match whatever character's you are using if they don't match up already.  The author made a python script to convert these original files to something Poser friendly and has included it on his blog/website.  If you know Python, you may be able to automate the bone-renaming to suit your needs.

Just a resouce you may be interested in.  I don't know enough about Poser's animation to help you though.  Sorry, :(

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h06YB4JqOwg

If you can spare some funds... for my services.

Thank you so much. I am looking into all the advise given so far. So please don't think I am ignoring your great replies or not listening. Thank you so much! I will be back to pest er you when I get stuck on what you have suggested so far :)

Ohh and to answer the question I am using poser pro

Back soon LMAO

Sawman:

Keyframes are specific to objects, so if you set a keyframe for figure 1 it will not automatically appy to figure 2 (or for any props, lights or cameras in the scene).  Are you sure you are setting keyframes for both your figures? 

Quote - Sawman:

Keyframes are specific to objects, so if you set a keyframe for figure 1 it will not automatically appy to figure 2 (or for any props, lights or cameras in the scene).  Are you sure you are setting keyframes for both your figures? 

Thanks I didnt know that I will check to see if that was my problem.

By Default Poser uses Spline interpolation, I find this almost impossible to handle in most situations. The first thing I do when making an animation is to select all the frames and set them to Linear interpolation. I suspect that using Linear interpolation may solve some of your problems.