Hi,
     Trying to make a little animation with the RoBotiX: Onslaught from Daz, I've had similar problems before and am wondering if there is a poser fix for this..

Anyway, I set up IK chains with arms (collar- shoulder- elbow- forearm-  hand) and legs (thigh- shin- foot), from the hierarchy window. Just makes a mess when I move anything, I uncheck 'use limits' in the figure menu, everything looks great, moving perfectly all the joints look right and so I start animating..

I use key frames every 20 frames or so on Onslaught, expecting (foolishly) that at least every 20th frame will be right, but when I scroll back through the frames, god it looks terrible.  Looking at the graph for hand and foot position there is no linear warps, its just recorded hand and leg placements that I didn't enter at each key frame.  Now I'm not even sure if its recorded the position minus the limits its such a mess, but since limits mess up the IK chain in real time I'm assuming that is what is happening.

any suggestions?

Two quick things to note: for arms and legs to behave anywhere near predictably with IK, you want to try to limit the number of joints in the IK chain to three whenever possible. For instance, if you look at a lot of human figures you'll find the IK chains look like shldr>forearm>hand and thigh>shin>foot.  From time to time I've built figures with ankles or wrists and added those in, but the most successful instances of that are when the figure's default shape is designed with a little bit of a bend in those joints already in place.  Also, when animating with IK, I've found that you have to be extremely careful about whether you turn it off and on while working. If you move down the timeline in an empty scene, move something with IK and then turn IK off, when you look in the keyframe editor, you'll see that keys were created for EVERYTHING on that chain.  Think of it this way: when you move an arm based with IK, the hand controls all the arm's parts; what you have then set a keyframe for is not only the rotations of the hand, but it's translations. If you animate without IK, or turn IK off while animating, then you're animating strictly via rotations and since no translational keys are set for the ik handle when you animate that way, you can run into problems.

Another thing to consider, though it's only in newer versions of Poser, is to use animation layers. With these you can blend clips of animation together and make a lot of broad sweeping adjustments pretty easily. One major user I've found for animation layers is to animate a pass of movement using IK, then add a layer on top of that without IK, animate secondary animation there and then adjust the blending of the two.

Hopfeully some of that might help. -Les

I think you caould set keyframes with IK off. Then keyframes on x y z positions are added by poser.
Was it possible?
One more misstake which you could make is loading animation instead of 1 frame pose from library.

that's why bvh files are so much smoother and more realistic than pz2 files.  everything is keyframed in every frame. having one every 20 frames would make me nervous, anyway. is the robotix/onslaught a free unrigged obj file?  if so, I could try it in carrara.

Actually, having keys at every frame doesn't really guarantee the smoothness of movement at all: if the source of the bvh data was jerky or had spikes in the function curves, then you would have popping and weirdness just the same. The best bvh data comes from a good mocap system and in that case, yes, you'll most likely have keys at every frame. Something to consider about bvh, though, is that in many studios doing mocap, they still have animators go over the data, analyzing the function curves from it and reducing it to keyframes because the mathematical calculation of curves is actually much smoother than having keys at every frame.  So while it's totally true that a lot of bvh packages you might buy are going to be smooth and yet have keys at every frame, it's not necessarily a phenomen inherrent to bvh in itself. An animated Pose file is totally capable of exactly the same smoothness of motion, regardless of whether it's using keys at every frame or not: it's all about the quality of the origin of the data, whether that origin is mocap, hand animation or a combination of both. For the record, often times when I release an animated Pose I will go ahead and "bake" the animation by selecting all my frames for all parts in the keyframe window and setting them all to be keyframes. This essentially takes whatever position the function curve is in at each frame and keys that so the hand animated, f-curve based movement is there, but it's "baked" in to garauntee that the movement won't be effected by poses applied before or after the particular clip. I've long been an advocate of Poser for animation and still think that it has a really solid little toolkit that can be used to do far better work than the app gets credit for. -Les

sixus1 - The legs only have three joints and they are acting in the same weird way as the arms, i have poser 7, not sure if it has animation layers, but I will look into it.

**drapak12 - **  If you mean to animation without IK, then its 5 times the work, if you mean to position the arms with IK then remove IK then the positions are messed up for some reason.

**Miss Nancy - **   I've animated before and find 20 - 40 frames between key frames adequate to create the animation, usually needs correcting and examination of the graphs to the joints but I've always felt it was a good start to set out an animation.  The problem here is that even on the key frames the position of the hands / feet are not saved as I have positioned them.  onslaught is not a free character, bought it from Daz.

Took IK off to examine the joints more closely and have discovered a few bits I did not notice before.  Say I grab the right shin and 'bend' it, there are 3 little objects called the 'kneeTrans', 'KneeCrank' and 'KneeCCrank' that rotate when I move the shin, to give the impression of gears turning.  Similar objects in the arms.  Since I have not put these in the IK and there does not seem to be any controls for them could they be messing up the movement of the arms / legs?  I mean they must be a part of the thigh and hooked into the movement of the shin...

I have wrestled enough with IK bugs when working on models with IK-chains 8 or 10 or more segments long (scuba gear breathing tubes, flamethrower fuel hoses, etc) that I made.