I had to ask this because i have looked all over the net and have found very little in the way of help for making animations with Poser. Anything i am missing?

Animation kind of woks the same from application to application. What do you need help with as far as poser? The manual explains it pretty well. Many, many people make animations with poser.

i wasn't looking for help on anything specific.....this time. but its nice to know that if i do need help, i can find it here. one thing i was wondering, however, is there any sort of collision detection?

No collision detection - yet. And I think that a lot of people make animations using Poser, although many of'em export to other apps (Bryce, Truespace, LW, 3DSmax) for rendering. I guess the reason you don't see so many of'em on the net is that anything bigger than a stamp-sized animation is murder to d/l - and if you've worked hard to create an animation in the first place you'd want people to be able to SEE your hard work. Check out http://www.datamike.com/susu2.htm and http://innuendo.ev.ca/NatPose/gallery.htm for some nice examples of animations.

I truely think that, for it's price, Poser offers a very good animation process. However, this software is not the handiest one when you deal with more than two characters ! That's the reason why you NEED to export to a 3d program. For Truespace, Bryce and Max you have MaximumPose as an export tool. Charly

I do animations all the time, I just use another program to either convert them to flash for the web, or to take down the size of the avi or quicktime for use on CD...there are a few decent ones out there but be prepared to pay for them. I just took down a Vickie animation from 8 megs to under 200k and was complimented on the fact that there was no major loss of quality due to the compression. Just play with the codec selection in the animation settings in Poser and you can get it down quite a bit. Marque

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For codec be sure to look at the MPEG-4 codec from DIVX http://www.divx.com/. I used it to make my PUFF animations in POSER. It really does a good job of compression. You can view the videos in the spotlight section of my affiliated artist site.

I am primarily an animator and i use media cleaner5 to compress my animation down to a managable sized mpeg or .mov for the web i just upgraded to adobe premeire 6 which will give me more web ready compression options also

My animation work comes hand in hand with my previsualization services to directors and stage designers. You'll find a short clip at http://hometown.aol.com/atthisstage/bow.html, which was developed by using stock Poser poses and doing pose-to-pose animation. On the same site, you'll find four frames from a much more exhaustive animation for The Fantasticks (http://hometown.aol.com/atthisstage/previz.html) which was animated in Poser with a Bryce movie as an imported background.

A few hints: if you're going to do animations, you should definitely get -- and learn -- the Pro Pack with Python scripting. Python enables you to do a whole lot of things, including collision detection and repeated or mathematically-controlled moves. Also, start out immediately using the keyframe graph. At first it may not seem like the easiest way to go, but it's the only way to get realistic moves. Positioning the figures directly (by eyeball) is only good for the raw first approximation. I agree that DIVX is a good (and free) compressor. In the "make movie" steps, when Poser gives you a choice of compression styles, it depends on what compression codecs you have installed. EG, if you haven't installed DIVX, Poser won't give you that choice. For speed, set your Display setting to "textured shaded" and make the movie in "current display" rather than "current render", until the very last draft. Making a movie in full render takes MONSTROUS amounts of time. The "current display" will be adequate for many purposes. For some uses (such as multimedia presentations or "interactive textbooks", which is my specialty) you can get by with a flip-card style of animation. (Make a series of single JPGs and let each show for about 1/3 second.) This works surprisingly well for short simulations, and is easier to do than a true animation. ....ockham

Thanks for sharing the info ockham, I intend to follow up on some of your tips. Marque

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Try this thread...

Great advice Okham!! I would also suggest doing small almost thumbnail sized animationrenders in black and white to check for obvious mistakes and also playing back your animation in bounding box mode within the poser workspace. to check progress. I dont use posers graph editor except for lipsynching I do all of my character animation in Lifeforms after importing the bones of my poser michael or vic2 I recently began using imported quicktime footage to rotoscope my poser skeleton's motion to the footage. the completed animation can then be exported as a custom joint mapped BVH file for use in poser.

is there anywhere i can post my animations for review? if not can someone please take a look at: http://www.geocities.com/shortyseanbo/movie1.htm tell me what you think. I know they are far from perfect but this is what i have doen with my small, insignificant bit of knowledge.

This is getting very interesting. Wolf - do you make your own footage for rotoscoping, or are there some good sources on the net?

Sometime i film my self for subtle movement like gesturing during a conversation. but for choregraphed action motion i pop in a video tape and capture the action footage with adobe premeire this footage can be added to the background stage of the lifeforms character studio where I can advance it 30 frames at a time and set the keyframed pose of the figure and let the program interploate the in beween motion this work for biped animals also here is an example of something i have in the works

I really need to plug that in and start working with it. That's a good idea to plug in the video using Premiere. Marque