I am contemplating trying my hand at Poser animation but I'd like to get an idea of what level of acheivment is possible. Doing an internet search and perusing some of the animation here, all I've found are clips of about 45 seconds of opening credits, 5 seconds of truly awful animation, followed by another 45 seconds of closing credits. Can someone direct me to some examples of the upper limits of Poser animation? Thanks! 

Attached Link: The Drop

if you've been around Poser a while you will recognize most of the props and characters

Quote - all I've found are clips of about 45 seconds of opening credits, 5 seconds of truly awful animation, followed by another 45 seconds of closing credits. 

LOL!!!

Try TIM VININGS STAR TREK SERIES

Cheers

Just note that Aurora is not really a 'poser' animation. It is animated using a $5000 mocap system, then worked on in DS/poser and then rendered in C4D. You'll find it quite hard to do all that in poser alone.

Not the "upper limits" of Poser animatiom (done on Poser 5 a few years ago by an untrained animationist), but at least it has some content between the opening and closing credits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJn-dmzuOpc

Just the episode 4 was done using the Arena Mocap (yes, virginia, a full body mocap and facial mocap solution for about $6,000 usd now. All you need to provide are the camera mounts and the mocap suit solution.....and they have a few places to get those, as well); he started using it in #3, but it was very, very limited. The earlier episodes were keyframed. I know Tim plans to go back and do mocap to fix certain things and re-render, but Ep 1 was all Poser and C4D render, as DS wasn't exactly animation friendly, IIRC. And make sure to read his pipeline description; you'll see that DAZ studio was used solely as a conduit to get the Arena mocap data into bvh format. He did his cleanup in Poser.

Nearly everyone who animates in Poser winds up using an external renderer of some kind; I use Vue Infinite. C4D was popular until they dropped the module structure. Those who have it still love and use it, but it has gotten harder for the hobbyist financed  individual to afford the version of Cinema that you'd need for proper story animation. However there is a slight chance that may be changing....

I'd suggest hopping over to RuntimeDNA and checking out the data there on the upcoming Poser 9/PoserPro 2012. This version is a major upgrade in a lot of ways. No, they don't have the kinds of animation updates that people like Wolf and I would love to get our sticky fingers on (hopefully next time, as they seem to be running out of simple things, and some of the updates this time are needed to make newer animation controls worthwhile), but they have implemented animated joint centers (one use would be for the slide rotating joints, like elbow or knee. Tweak the joint center in bending, and get behavior that more closely mimics the actual joint action....and deforms the mesh more accurately), animated constraint channels (the quicky example Nerd did was setting up a constraint to allow a figure to pick up a cone and carry it. Lots of other options for that feature), weightmaps (and in PPro 2012, the tools in the setup room to create, transfer, and alter same), which do -not- invalidate the old rigging methods. So you still have bones, spherical and capsule fall off zones, and now per axis weightmaps. They've added true subsurface scatter, not the fake fastscatter in P7-P8, multi threaded the whole shebang (not just the renderer), so you have multi-threaded dynamic hair and cloth (finally!). There have been images posted using SSS, fresnel blur and DOF effects that look photorealistic. BagginsBill has been tormenting people with some of the shader effects he's tweaked out, and posted the setup on a few of them (How does marble that looks like -marble- sound? But the skin......). And that's just a few of the goodies.

The make or break for animating this time will be if the queue manager and remotes work well (or at all), and the rendertime per frame. 

Anyone remember the Poser Animation Disasters someone posted on YouTube?

That was truly roll on floor funny.  Proably the best I've ever seen.

I'm not trying to trash Poser, I like it, but what I'm getting from my query is exactly what I suspected - in the animation realm, Poser is pretty much the equivalent of the two wax crayons the waitress at Denny's gave us when we were  kids and whatever art you manage to make with it, you leave at the restaurant.  It is a non-essential item in the animator's tool chest with its capabilities apparently peaking at the Poser 5 level. Which, of course, begs the question, why do they put such resources into something so god-awful? How much better (and affordable) could Poser be if they just scrapped the animation altogether?

TBH, probably not much.  If - as you say - the animation side is an afterthought, there's not really much to gain in cost or performance by removing it.  

I haven't ever used it but I may just give it a whirl and see how bad it can be. :) 

Quote - How much better (and affordable) could Poser be if they just scrapped the animation altogether?

You've answered your own question...

it all depends on how well you know your tool set and how much effort you are willing to put into it. To me Gabriel's animation is a far ways from two wax crayons on a Denny's placemat

Stallion, indeed Gabriel's is spectacular animation, and he is a very talented animator, but either he is the only person in the world who can do this or I suspect Poser was just one of the many programs he used. Poser, Daz and Cararra brag about their animation abilities, but they don't offer any samples of it.

Very true Which is part of the reason that I stopped at poser 6
any improvements in "firefly are not relevant to me as it is still not a suitable engine for rendering animation
in terms of both speed & Quality IMHO.
And not to bash the new poser
9 but those new animated constraint channels could have been easily added years ago via Python scripting.
the reason I say this is because
the poser physics plugin automaticly adds
six new  permanent animatable channels
to any item that has been run through a physics simulation
( see attached)
and how many years ago was poser physic introduced??

I still like poser Dope sheet( animation pallet)
I just wish the key display was larger ,for us over 45 bi-focal crowd
and I wish we could view the spline and keys for just ONE scene element at a time instead of the huge list on the left with nearly microscopic text.
But in defense of  poser& DAZ studio with aniMate+
there is one area were the both are nearly on par with Autodesk motion builder .

Motion retargeting!!
 I mean taking your existing character rig and simply importing  different animated motions from a generic BVH or animated pose file or DAZ studio "anibloc" file with very little adjustment needed.

this is one area where Cinema 4D is really lacking.
it is possible to retarget motion to a native C4D rig but the process takes over an hour of renaming bones resetting, manual matching  etc.
and forget about any usable Ragdoll animation!!!
even with C4DR13 's new "Character object"
That said I have set the intention to begin dabbling more with character animation in Cinema4D and our seat of Lightwave 9.6
in the future

@ the OP you are right in that poser animation tools have seen no signifigant update since version 4 to be honest
and DS animate+ is great for slapping together bits an pieces of different motions and exporting the PZ2 to poser for refinement
but DS has no actual tools to edit an animation like poser graph editor.
I dont claim to be a "top  poser animator" but you can stop by My page on VIMEO

I have  32 videos  posted , most are poser, some are native C4D .
have a look at the tutorial section I created for animating in poser for beginners and decide for yourself if animating in poser is worth your efforts or perhaps blender  etc might be better for you.

Cheers

Well, compared to something like Messiah it's a joke. That does not mean that it -is- a joke. There are lots of things I wish were in there, but the tools that are are quite useable (if not the most user friendly; legacy of the Kai Krause interface). Keyframe handles on the active points on the graph editor would be wonderful. Extending said graph editor to 3 windows would be even better. If Go Figure had followed through, and produced a version of Animate for Poser,  I suspect that Wolf would have tossed most of his DS use aside. Poser has the better hair and cloth systems, after all.

And no, there aren't a lot of Poser animators who admit it. Where do you think the joke about 'The Poser Twelve' comes from? That said, the folks who do stills are the most numerous, and that is where frankly too much attention has been over the past few versions. But the flipside is that the renderer is getting faster, the app is now fully multithreaded, the shader system is advanced enough that a guru can create some serious photorealism in certain cases (not having the app, I don't know how far that extends, but look at the images at RDNA). Basically, if they added a spherical gizmo in the viewport for manipulating (which might happen, now that they have the openGL port working like it is), a couple more windows on the graph editor and tangent handles on a keyframe for the active element in the scene, and one or two more IK/FK features, the whole basic tookit would be there.

Okay, and maybe some work on the dopesheet, as well...... 

And you would guess Correctly sir!
AsI have said  bluntly many times
  DS animate + with its NONlinear motion mixing system with export to poser animated pose files, is THE only reason I bother keeping Daz studio installed at all.

With regard to the 'Crayon" comment  I would politely suggest  that one has to be actully experienced with an app before one can dismiss it out of hand.
For the OP and others  not familiar with these esoteric terms "graph editor or "Dope sheet"
below this post you can examine posers compared to "hi end" programs"
and you can see poser has ALOT of their same  functionality just a very old &less powerful implementation thereof

Graph editor: top half
Dope sheet: bottom half of each image
( Click each for larger view)

Cheers

BTW to Dale B ,
Notice how in the Lightwave Dopesheet you see the keys for that one null item in   left upper column
although there are many other items present  I can hide thier keys when not editing them specifically
My biggest grip  this is
that and the lack of bezier handles in the spline graph  and a pathetic excuse for IK.
 
But Oh well
hope this helps

Cheers

That's pretty much the only reason I have DS on my CG box, as well..... 

And oh yes, I would love to hide the item keys not being edited myself. Ghu knows I've had trouble finding the right item myself in the dopesheet at times (tri-focals here.... :P. Well, nice computer glasses now, but only having a vision range that reaches 6' can be aggravating at times).

With the move to Python 2.7, I hope that enough functions get exposed to allow a python geek to implement some of the animation improvements. I'd also love for someone to create an up to date version of Metaform. I miss my fluid sims....and since it could be written for multithreading now, it would create and simulate a lot faster.

I have Messiah on my system and am learning it very, very slowly (more time constraints than difficulty), and if I ever get to where I;m competent, I'll probably move to it for animation (Vue Infinite now supports .mdd import, so that would be no issue). But I would still love to see more animating in Poser. You don't need a bloody modeller to animate a mesh, after all.  

I started this discussion when I began thinking about getting into animation and noticed that though both SmithMicro and Daz make big claims about animation capabilities, neither post any examples. Stallion posted a link to a work by Gabriel which I honestly doubt is Poser, otherwise, SmithMicro would spare no expense using it as a selling tool.  I am happy to believe Poser has lots of neat features, but it is the output I am interested in and so far no one has stepped up with a sample of good animation and by good I mean not jerky, washed-out and too tiresome to sit through, even for a few seconds. I am not blaming the people who made this animations, you can't spin gold out of straw.

I am happy to believe Poser has lots of neat features, but it is the output I am interested in and so far no one has stepped up with a sample of good animation and by good I mean not jerky, washed-out and too tiresome to sit through, even for a few seconds. I am not blaming the people who made this animations",

So you are not Blaming the people who import a Canned "sexy dance" BVH file to DAZ V-chick.
render it.
add some excruciating music in "windows movie maker" and post it on youtube??
It must be posers fault

" you can't spin gold out of straw."
How can you acknowledge that poser has fairly decent animation tools ( although rather aged)
but still insist nothing worth your time can come of it??

because we have failed to google you some amazing cinematic piece that impresses you..

understood...

OK it seems you have made up your mind
hope you find  the app that fits your CA needs
there are MANY MANY options these days for sure.

Cheers

I did this in Poser Pro - http://youtu.be/A93N0GST4zE. Not great by any means, but not awful. I've done similar videos in the past

oldgreycat, that's not bad, especially when your character is not against a background.

Thanks. I enjoy making music videos for songs I like. Don't claim they're great - I am an amateur, after all, and don't have ample amounts of free time. in some instances, like the one for Rumer, I switched to sketch mode due to the amount of time it was taking to render. That's also why I used the backdrops, which I agree aren't the best moments.

I have some others - one for the Bangles' Manic Monday that I did in 2005 that, because of the song, I can't upload to Youtube (it got nixed once for a copyright violation). But here's one from 2006 that I did for "Girls Like Me" by Bonnie Hayes and the Wild Combo - http://youtu.be/fBoODgKd2KU.

I have more that I'll have to dig out of my external hard drives and/or DVD backups. I usually create one or two a year - they take so long to render, that's my main complaint. 

Quote - because we have failed to google you some amazing cinematic piece that impresses you..

The question is, are the cinematic pieces impressive as Poser works or are they impressive as CG works in general ? If you posted any of these clips in other (non Poser) CG forums, would people there applaud them or laugh at them ? And just where are the top end Poser clips that can stand toe to toe with anything from Maya or Softimage or heck even blender ?

One of my epics:  Just having some, fun mind you:

http://www.ranquist.net/animation/TheGame.htm

Rªnce

Quote:  "...so far no one has stepped up with a sample of good animation and by good I mean not jerky, washed-out and too tiresome to sit through, even for a few seconds."

Does that include mine?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJn-dmzuOpc

Terry, this was not intended to be an exercise in slamming someone's work, but rather finding an example of remarkable Poser or Daz or Carrara animation that really wowed me and gave me something I could aspire to. Way back when Poser came out we were proud of the art we churned out, but as the software and techniques improved, that original stull looks pretty silly and my fear - based on the samples I had seen, was that animation was still essentially in the Poser 3 level. Actually, I was hoping to make a series of 30 to 45 second clips to accompany a Sci-Fi novel I am writing and I wanted to achieve something impressive and professional looking - eventually. Referring back to my original comment, you had 52 seconds of opening credits and over a minute in closing credits in a 7 minute clip. The idea, execution and creativity were all good. The character movements were very natrual and fluid and I shudder to think of the effort that went into this. But I think yours is the perfect example of my concerns - that no matter how much talent and effort one puts into the work, it is not going to look as impressive as I had hoped. 

Shorterbus, can you point to an example of what you would consider adequate quality for your needs? Perhaps that would help define your expectations.

Tvining, it was not intended as a quest to find what is best, but rather, given enough learning and effort, how much I could expect from Poser/DAZ/Carrara because I own them. Smith-Micro and DAZ show lots of examples of what is possible in static art, but in animation, its all sales pitch and in our times it ain't true until you show me the video. The only animation examples I've seen of these three are in my opinion very rudimentary and I did not want to invest the time and effort if those examples are the best you can squeeze from them. If I had a wish list, it would be something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=nX8KitVCcZM

Attached Link: Star trek: Aurora part 2

Tvining,  this is good!

Thanks! And there's nothing that fancy going on in that scene, animation-wise, just Poser, Mimic.

Wow, I have a looong way to go... hehehe

Most of my stuff is just trial and error things. All the animation is done in poser, but most of the post work is other programs.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrEstorey

It's not up to the star trek animations level, and I wouldn't be insulted if you didn't even look...

Rokket, you may have set a record there on credits to animations ratio. I'm guessing you animated over a movie, and I liked the results and the animation, but the animated character was very unrealistic, which is my whole gripe against poser.

Quote - Rokket, you may have set a record there on credits to animations ratio. I'm guessing you animated over a movie, and I liked the results and the animation, but the animated character was very unrealistic, which is my whole gripe against poser.

Yeah, and that's all my fault. I was trying to see what it would look like to animate against a video background, and wasn't too concerned with getting everything right. I deleted about 12 animations off YouTube which I did that were much better than what I have there now. I was experimenting, and posting them there just so I could free up space on my harddrive for future projects.

I will put something up there in a day or two which I believe will better demonstrate what poser can do, and get to where you are looking. Thanks for the look, I appreciate your candor.