I'm not convinced that "a whole lot of people" are doing much animation with Poser, but... I could be wrong about that; holler out and educate me if need be!

Anyhoo, I'd love to have a script that would be sort of like a "seamless looping tool". Here's how it would work: it captures your timeline scrub (the act of scrubbing through the animation), and creates new keyframed animation based on them, in a "record mode" type function. This would be what ever back and forth movement (or stillness) you might want to make, from the point of pushing RECORD to the point of pushing STOP. It could be used on elements, objects, figures, scenes, cameras, etc.

It would work in real time record, on a fps presumption.

Man, I do alot of tedious keyframing in Poser, and I would LOVE to have such a tool!   

Dude, that would totally rule. I actually do a ton of animating inside Poser and something like that would really kick ass. -Les

check out ockhams bungalow. He has a number of scripts for repeating actions from existing keyframes.

I dont offhand know of any way to capture the timeline control , but there may be a way .

I'm throwing together a quickie right now to do this job, using the "bones"
from Hansel and Gretel.  In fact H&G evolved from an early attempt to do
exactly this job, but for some reason it wouldn't work in P4.  I don't know if
it was a P4 limitation or my inadequate programming.... at any rate, I've
got the recorder side working already in P7.  Give me an hour or so, and
I'll have the player side working for an initial try.

Dude! No way! OMG!

Markschum, thank you, I totally agree, I had indeed already snapped up (some time ago, now) all of Ockham's cool stuff  that I can get from the Bungalow, and was indeed wondering if there might not be such a wonder in that collection, but sneaky me, I knew the question could be raised and answered much better -as in, more lazily-  here.
looks like I was right   :)

Man, I'm excited! if this dream comes true, I'm gonna use the shoot outta that thing!
da-VID, da-VID, go go go! let those programming tasks zip! The carpal tunnel you prevent may just be mine...and sounds like some others here, like sixus1 !

Attached Link: Recorder-Player 1

Now if we could get a script that displays multiple graphs..... or some other enhancements to the dopesheet and workflow........  8D 

Can't WAIT to try this out!!! -les

I think the  OP lucked out on his timing for this :woot:

Okay, mind you I haven't tried this script yet, and it looks very useful in and of itself...

but what I was talking about is totally different.  My idea is to make a scenewide capture based on the movement of the timeline scrubber. You know, kinda like a DJ's turntable, dig?  And it could save each recording session as a new poser scene. 

Unless I'm wrong from what I read, when you talk about moving things, this script is designed to create "records" (keyframes) of realtime movements of a selected actor. Also cool, but, wah! I want a scrubber recorder too wah!  

heh heh, thanks so much, Ockham!  I'm sure lot's of us 'll be playin' and giving feedback on the other! 

to clarify:

see? You're essentially just juggling existing global keyframes, in back and forth "scrubbing" action.  It's really like a time stretcher, if you see what I mean.

The tool you just unleashed is going to be awesome, too. I can already see some cool stuff to use it for...does it work on cameras? Nevermind, I'll be looking at it soon so I'll find out soon enuf.

Sort of like "flanging" or whatever it's called?

Well, it's the same WYSIWYG concept as the actor movement recording you are doing now, except treats the global animation and goes by the movement of the scrubber, for as long as the person decides to move the scrubber, in whatever manner they choose to move the scrubbber.

After a quick try, the scrubbing doesn't seem to work.  The script will let
you grab things in the scene with the mouse, but it won't let go of the
focus to let the scrubber move.   This may be a good excuse for me to
try the new wxPython system in P8, which supposedly allows scripts
to run more independently. 

There's also a trick for making a script get shy (minimize its window).  I'll
try that later tonight and see if it works.

Yeah, that's what I would have thought, since the scrubber itself is really just a preview scrub.  Gotta turn that info into something that churns out frames.  As long as I can see it happen in preview, know what I mean? It's just a real-time "looper", where you can go back and forth as much as you want, in any speeds or increments you want.  Like, lets say you are animating a waterbuffalo humping another water buffalo.   You could animate a single, full range of motion thrust, complete with flexing taut muscles and curling "toes?"...heh heh. Then, with the  scrubber capture I would love to pay for, it would be easy to create a sequence where the humping goes through all kinds of natural humping actions (changing thrust durations and frequencies and range of motion...all by dj -ing the scrubber).

Oh, and BTW, this is just an example, and I am NOT going to use this to animate humping...not that there's anything inherently wrong with that...     

The problem isn't that deep ... it's just a conflict between the script's window and
the scrubber's window.   The TKinter GUI on Python is very selfish about its focus.

I'll try a few other options, including the "self-minimize" that I mentioned, and the SimpleDialog
that doesn't use TK.   One of them is likely to work.

First off, let me say this is a really impressive thing you're coming up with Ockham. I just tested it out and really like where it's heading. One quick thing, though: it's creating keys at every frame. Would it be possible for the script to contain some kind of system for averaging out where the actual pose keys should be so that it's all interpolated? Oh, and in trying to work out a "scrubber" system, how might you go about thinking through the issue of frame rates? -Les

"Would it be possible for the script to contain some kind of system for averaging out where the actual pose keys should be so that it's all interpolated? "

Yes.  That will have to happen on the player end, because the recorder needs to
be simple.  The player could do a first run through the data to eliminate everything
that doesn't move, and to do an arbitrary sort of keyframing.   That is, it doesn't put
any frames into this body part unless this body part is moving right now.

On frame rates:  The recorder has to trigger at a fixed rate, which can't be terribly fast. 
I've got it running at 10 FPS now, and I'll bet that's about the limit.
The player can stretch or contract the record into your chosen set of frames.

Would it be possible for the script to contain some kind of system for averaging out where the actual pose keys should be so that it's all interpolated?

Sixus1, that sounds an awful lot like Animation > Resample keyframes.

Puppeteer  Free

....and then get aniMate+( $100) plus  to Mix your recorded clip like editing video
and use the Free animated pose exporter to send animation back to poser From DAZ Studio.

Cheers

Poser 7 with animation layers with some copy/paste of keyframes can do a lot.  Not quite what OP is after though .

Attached Link: Recorder-Player and Flanger

See how it goes.....

I googled 'flanging' and apparently it's not the right term for this.... If somebody
knows the proper term, tell me quick so I can rename this thing in a more
meaningful way!

Thanks for this! Too Burnt now, back at it tomorrow, can't wait to try these!

I love making animations!  I spend a lot of time getting cyclic motions to seamlessly loop, so I'll try this out.  Thank you for your work, ockham!

I'd like to learn how to compose Python utilities for Poser, myself.

After a very brief pass this am, these scripts appear to work just fine! Good work!
I think putting the word scrubber in the title would be the most informative. Actually, would Rubber Scrubber Dubber be too whimsical? 

ha ha ha! That name has it all!  Only thing missing is 3 men in a tub!  

rubber signifies the time stretch function, scrubber indicates the mode of action, dubber indicates the recording function.

thanks! This is great!

Yes, Scrubber is a better term.  I'll revise the ZIP.
Glad you like it!

My imagination is not working right now. Can anyone post an animation of the results using this script?