I'm about to purchase Poser 2012 and give animation a try. I'd like to pose (no pun intended) a few questions just to get an overview.

I'm assuming to get a higher quality animation I set up an animation, render each frame into png's and then purchase some sort of software that connects all the pngs into an animation. Is this correct?

Secondly, assuming weight mapping is not a road atlas that sits firmly on my dashboard, what is it?

Please reply slowly, using small words. 

Hi

For your first question you can have the textures in pretty much any format that's commonly used.  I usually use .jpgs but sometimes stick with my .psd files if I have layers in my artwork I don't want to get rid of.

Second, I know a lot of people do like to render to image files for each frame but I just output to AVI files, unless I need to do some processing of the images before they are put together.

With Poser 9 and I assume 2012 you can control the quality of the "Preview Render" a lot more then in early versions, so you can get an image that is much better quality. You can use images for textures up to 4,000 pixels wide, and set the quality in Preview to match.

Unless you have the patience of, uh, well a lot more then I do, you won't want to render your videos in Firefly, you will want to use the Preview mode when you go to Make Movie.

I.e. 1200 frames rendered in Preview on my computer about 12 minutes at 1600 by 900.

1200 frames rendered in Firefly, Well, how many days do you want to sit there.

I'm not exaggerating, you are talking many, many, many hours if it ever gets done at all.  It just isn't practical.

You will give up cast shadows and some things like that, just light your scene so it looks the way you want it to in your preview window and that's what you will see in your video.

I only started doing this about a year ago, I'm not a pro, but I got hooked and I'm having a blast.

Just dig in and go at it, keep it simple to start with and most of all, Learn how to use the Animation Palette, it's the whole secret of getting it to do what you want.

Have fun!

Mike

Hi again!

I didn't answer one of your questions.

To put the frames back together if you got with individual frames, I use a program called Virtual Dub.

It's Free! it works great and it's easy to use.

http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

I use it more for titling and things where I create the frames by hand one at a time but it works great with Poser.

Just don't screw up the frame numbering! LOL

Mike

PS.

A question that you didn't ask...

What do I do with the animations after I output them from Poser?

Your will need a video editing program to add narration, sound tracks and special effects.

I recommend Adobe Premiere Elements 10.

It's easy to use and will alow you to do a really professional looking job, and you can get it for under 100 bucks.

You can have multiple sound and video tracks, and just drag and drop the stuff where you want it.

You can get a free 30 day trial to try it out.

You can at least make sure it doesn't have any problems with your computer.

Mike

I didn't answer your question about weight mapping because I don't have a clue!

Thanks Mike!

Weight mapping is another way to rig poser figure. It's a better way to discribe how a joint should bend, which polygons go where. At the moment, only very few figures use weight maps for bending - some of the figures which come with p9/2012 do and there is already a weight mapped version of Antonia. A weight mapped V4 is in the works. 

Weight mapped figures potentially bend better as figures with the older deformation zones. As a bonus, weight mapped rigs can be tranfered very easily to new clothing and require less work, so creating conforming clothes for a weight mapped figure will be a lot easier. 

The process of creating a weight mapped rig is time consuming, though, so it will take a while until most figures are re-rigged.

Were the words slow and small enough?

Thanks, Bantha. If you had been a teacher I might have made it out of high school!

Hello! This is my first post, but I've been lurking here for a few weeks while I've been making my first steps with poser animation.

I wanted to wait until I could post my first video until posting, but I saw your question, and I have learnt such a lot here in the last few weeks, I really want to give back, and I just can't keep quiet...

I disagree with Mike 100%.

The "Preview" is just that, a prieview, the quality is awful, it's fine for sorting your scene out, but unless you want a kind of "toon" aesthetic, it's useless for renders.

Using Firefly, a typical seven second scene will render overnight (well, in about twelve hours as long as I'm not using any smoke haha!).

Yes, you have to make trade offs between render quality and render time, you have to find that for yourself.

And yes, single frames into png's (lossless)... and you can import a frame sequence into any decent video editing software. Mike's suggestion of virtualdub is an excellent freeware solution.

I don't like his Adobe Premiere idea at all though. It's just my personal opinion, but I think it's overpriced trash. Try any flavour of Sony Vegas, it's really cool (PC only) software, that was once written by a cool US company until Sony bought them, easy to learn and absolute professional quality. And yes, it imports a frame sequence.

I must apologise for a first post that sounds so "know it all", but I couldn't shut up. Hopefully my first animation short will be finished in a day or two so I can back my wild claims up somewhat.

Oh, and weight mapping... I agree with Mike...  (I have absolutely no idea!).

My compliments,

TheCaptain.

Welcome to the forum, Marc. 

Now, the quality of the preview renderer isn't really comparable to Firefly. You won't get good lights, reflection, refraction or reasonable shaders. I would use Firefly for the final render for any real animation, although I would make sure that the render settings are as low as possible, for the quality I want to archive.

If time is really an issue, I would try not to use ray tracing. This would mean no IDL and no AO, no real reflections too (but reflection maps are possible), so lighting a scene can be problematic, but you will have very short render times with a much higher quality than with the preview renderer. If you are interested, here is a nice presentation from Pixar in which they explain the use of Ray Tracing in the "Cars" movie - Pixar did not use Ray Tracing in earlier movies.

Movies have long render times, if you want quality. If possible, use a couple of computers for rendering, all pro versions can do that. 

Welcome Marc
You do not say what version of Poser you are using but:

If Poser9 or PP2012, the preview can be made VERY good and MORE then acceptable for an animation reducing render times a lot. (Depends on what you render and what output you desire)
Mike renders at 1600x900, that is quite large for an animation.

Goto Render settings
Enable hardware shadows, and Enable AO (ambient occlusion@optimize AO)
AND ; ; ; ; ; Set texture display  : Preview Texture resolution at 4096 (default is 512)

Also; use as little lights as possible, and for every light that makes a shadow ?

Goto the light paramerets properties palette and increase Preview Shadow map size to 1024 or 2048 or max at 4096 to get quality shadows.
Or use raytraced shadows.

All this is very nice and well, but know that it comes at a cost.
Increasing quality will slow down your méachine.

Have a nice day

Quote - Welcome to the forum, Marc.

Thank you sir. It is an honour and a pleasure to be here.

Quote - Now, the quality of the preview renderer isn't really comparable to Firefly. You won't get good lights, reflection, refraction or reasonable shaders. I would use Firefly for the final render for any real animation, although I would make sure that the render settings are as low as possible, for the quality I want to archive.

I agree entirely. I'm coming from video editing (well, actually, in real life I'm a working musician, but that's another story...), and I'm used to working with a preview that is good enough to get the job done, with the quality coming in the final render, so I'm not complaining about the preview quality at all.

Quote - If time is really an issue, I would try not to use ray tracing. This would mean no IDL and no AO, no real reflections too (but reflection maps are possible), so lighting a scene can be problematic, but you will have very short render times with a much higher quality than with the preview renderer. If you are interested, here is a nice presentation from Pixar in which they explain the use of Ray Tracing in the "Cars" movie - Pixar did not use Ray Tracing in earlier movies. Movies have long render times, if you want quality. If possible, use a couple of computers for rendering, all pro versions can do that.

Hey, first of all, thank you so much for the link. I love stuff like that, and I need it, because I have so much to learn!

I have already learnt to judge on a scene by scene basis if I need raytracing or not. A few test renders will usually sort things out. Unfortunately, for the look I am going for (and, by golly, I have a long way to go to get there!), for most scenes, I need raytracing.

Oh, and well done to 96 for the win against Bayern!

My compliments...

Quote - Welcome Marc
You do not say what version of Poser you are using but:

If Poser9 or PP2012, the preview can be made VERY good and MORE then acceptable for an animation reducing render times a lot. (Depends on what you render and what output you desire)
Mike renders at 1600x900, that is quite large for an animation.

Goto Render settings
Enable hardware shadows, and Enable AO (ambient occlusion@optimize AO)
AND ; ; ; ; ; Set texture display  : Preview Texture resolution at 4096 (default is 512)

Also; use as little lights as possible, and for every light that makes a shadow ?

Goto the light paramerets properties palette and increase Preview Shadow map size to 1024 or 2048 or max at 4096 to get quality shadows.
Or use raytraced shadows.

All this is very nice and well, but know that it comes at a cost.
Increasing quality will slow down your méachine.

Have a nice day

Thanks for the welcome!

I'm trying PP2012 at the moment, and unfortunately, there is no way to tweak the settings to provide a preview output I could live with. But it's fine, as a preview.

And, by the way, I don't understand why Mike renders at 1600x900 if he's using the preview engine. Perhaps if he tried Firefly without raytracing at 800x450...

And indeed, finding a compromise between quality and render time is essential for animation. I'm gradually getting there...

My compliments...

Attached Link: Render Test...

The "Preview" is just that, a prieview, the quality is awful, it's fine for sorting your scene out, but unless you want a kind of "toon" aesthetic, it's useless for renders.

Using Firefly, a typical seven second scene will render overnight (well, in about twelve hours as long as I'm not using any smoke haha!)."

I Guess if you only want to do 7 second videos and you have all night... 

But, I'm not making 7 second videos, some of my individual clips are up to 4,000 frames.

Then they get combined with others to make a longer video.

Let's see 7 seconds is 210 frames that takes you 12 hours to produce.

So 4,000 frames would take, 228.5 hours. That's 9.5 days.

So if this is one of 3 clips that comprise the video I've got about a month of rendering time, and I can't use my computer while I'm doing it! 

I'm 73 years old, I'd like to finish these things before I die. LOL

Premiere Elements 10 costs about $90 from Amazon, and at least for me does everything I need and it's stable, not something I can say about other video editors I've tried. Other editors that I've used often froze or refused to import AVI files from Poser.

And as I said you can try it for 30 days for free and make up your own mind.

Well, they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Attached is a video that gives an idea at least of the quality you can get from a Preview Render, ( what you see, isn't the same as I do on my computer before uploading to PhotoBucket, but it will give you an idea) I did this video start to finish in about an hour this morning after reading this post. 

That includes, creating the voice file, running it through Mimic, doing the animation in Poser 9, exporting the video from Poser, editing it in Premiere Elements 10 to add the titles and sound track and exporting it from Premiere Elements.

It's uploading to PhotoBucket as I type this.

Sure I'd like to be able to render all my video, but like I said, it just isn't practical.

You also have to consider what you are going to do with your video, my short videos still end up being around 70 gigabytes in size, to use it I have to reduce the size so that the quality is never what I see on my computer, so there goes a lot of the sharpness that I'm trying to get in my finished product anyway.

I'm doing over the videos I did in Poser 6 because I can get better quality with the new render system now, and I am getting better at doing it, once I do that I will continue my Lucy series from where I left off.

Mike

Hi CaptainMark

Thanks for the hint about Shadow Map Size, I didn't know that.  I'll go and try that out right now!

And I render at 1600 by 900, sometimes bigger, because after experimenting with it, I found that is was the best trade off for getting quality and rendering speed.

Firefly is still too slow even at the smaller size and when shown full screen on my computer the small rendered videos don't look as good as the preview videos rendered at a larger size.

I some times output the video from poser at full HD, 1920 by 1080 and then produce the finished video from Primiere at the same quality.

They really looks fantastic when I show them on my HD TV, just as good as the commercial stuff.

Now I'm experimenting with 3D video as well, and even there the Preview Render does a good job.

It all really comes down to personal taste and what you are after, I'm trying to produce some funny (in my opinion) videos that I can show my friends and eventually post on YouTube.

I except the limitations of Poser's Preview Render as the price I have to pay for not having a main frame computer the size of my garage. LOL

Anyway thanks again for the shadows tip.

Mike

Hey Mike!

I really didn't mean to dig you out, sincere apologies if it came across that way.

What I meant to say is that the quality of the preview render is not good enough for what I want to do.

An analogy: you see, I'm a musician. I know other guitarists, I don't like their guitar sound, but hey, they make great art with it, they might play a song I really enjoy. But it isn't what I want to do.

By the way, I'm not making seven second videos, seven seconds may be one scene, some may be only three or four. The finished article comes in at three or four minutes, and isn't entirely animation. But still I admit, I can't do that in an hour or so (hahaha!).

So yes, I have to render, render and render, but in the meantime I can go down the pub, be romantic with a delightful young lady, or even shoot some more footage. I can even render in the background while I do some video editing.

Or I can even render whilst I read this forum, I have so much to learn, so render-render-render-read-read-read!

And if Adobe Premiere works for you, that's great! But I've spent a lot of time editing videos, and I honestly think it's trash, and yes, it's just my very humble opinion. But I would urgently recommend anybody wanting to get into video editing to look at Sony Vegas, which also has a demo version.

I have one more scene to shoot for my first Poser video, I'll be doing that tomorrow, so I should be ready to upload at the weekend, then you can all have a laugh at my rubbish art!!!

My compliments...

Hi 

Don't worry about offending me, I love to discuss this stuff!

Well since I've not really done this since I moved up to Poser 9 here is a comparison that may be helpful to someone, myself included.

All of these are rendered from the same Poser window with no tweaking.

All are at 1600 by 1000 originally but have been reduced to fit in here.

The background image is on a cloth pane so that it will move with the camera not a imported background.

Image One.....

Preview Render high settings, render time almost instantaneous.

Image Two Firefly render low setting but with cast shadows...Render time about a minute or so.

Image 3 Firefly max settings, Long render time. 

I did try and make the video at the low Firefly settings it did 65 frames in about an hour, (at that point I gave up) so it was pretty consistent with my one minute per frame figure. But the frames it did do looked just like the seconen image from the top.

Like I said everyone has their own uses for the end product.

I like to show them on my HD TV at home, (so I can bore all of our company to death) or e-mail them to friends, and the way I do it works fine for that.

I would still recommend that anyone just starting use the preview render technique.

You will learn more spending your time animating, then waiting for it to render, and you always have the option to render it however you want in the end.

As for me, I'm never going to have the patience to wait until the next day to see my output. LOL

Mike

Poser firefly is not suitable for any serious animation project IMHO ....just too SLOW!!!
unless you have  alot of patience
if short films using poser figures is your long term goal
I advise you start seriously looking at alternative render engines before  even being concerned about what video editing program you will be using.

if posers internal fire fly is all you can afford you have my sympathies.

but preview  mode is not suitable for final animations that will be shown to anyone out side supportive friends& family

Cheers

Where do you get an external render engine, and how do you use it.

I looked online for a half hour and I couldn't find anything about external rendering or alternate render engines that made sense.

I found something that's called Pose2Lux but it seems to just be a script to export to another program, I'm not sure what that is.

What renderer would do a professional job and still be fast enough to be practical for animation i.e seconds per frame instead of minutes?

Hi
I was referring to investing in another program
that can import animated poser figures for  rendering animation ( like vue,Maxon Cinema4D)

none of them are cheap I warn you
but if you can afford them you will get much better results without haveing to settle for flat, no shadow preview renders or trying to render scenes in firefly and waiting several days to get decent quality renders
particulary for outdoor lighting situations

You are not going to get seconds per frame
but 3-7 minutes is acceptable as long as you can use nice shadows and nice out door sunlight etc

I personally render in Maxon Cinema4D R11 studio.

here are some of my  animation renders in other programs in HD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHi6b2G-Kco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ92UXsZpow

** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuLRcPq1dfA&feature=related**

Cheers

I tried Vue, but couldn't get it to import anything. And fortunately PP2012 has cut down render times a lot, but I have already been looking at C4D but it's a big investment.

How would C4D render times compare with Firefly for comparible quality?

Honestly by the time you crank up all the setting ups in firefly to get close to a C4D quality render your render times in poser per frame would be astronomical.

This is why if you search on youtube you never see any high quality poser animation renders  that were actually rendered in poser
particularly for outdoor Daylight scenes.

Cheers

That seems to be a very common opinion, and is indeed the reason behind my consideration of Vue and C4D.

Nevertheless, I've managed some decent stuff in Poser (perhaps it's only OK because I do a lot of post work in Vegas), and render times have come down with PP2012 from 20 minutes per frame to four or five, which I agree is a tolerable order of magnitude. (Previously raytracing with transmapped hair was simply impossible!)

I would be very interested if anybody could quantify the actual time savings from using an alternative renderer to Firefly.

And what is there to look out for when importing a Poser animation? I can't get Vue to do it at all, and there seem to be plenty of other users with the same problem. How does it work out with C4D?

I use an older version of Maxon Cinema4D with a third party poser content import plugin $100 USD
INTERPOSER PRO

As I said the cheapest version of Maxon C4DR13 Assuming you want GI rendering
** Cinema4D R13**

is $2300 USD!!!!

Anyway here are some still frames with render times from my older vue  and Cinema4D both GI  HDRI renders  HD 1440x720
rendered on an old 2007 Macbook with a 2.16 MHZ core2 Duo and two GIGS of RAM
these render times are in minutes per frame

I did not bother trying render this quality with poser& IBL as I knew it would take hours with firefly for my set up but you can extrapolate based on your hardware specs and version of poser  creating renders of similar quality.

Cheers

Thanks for the info! That's very helpful.

I tried the Personal Learning Edition of Vue 9.5 Infinite. It is supposed to import Poser files, but just produces error messages. Perhaps they'll have that sorted in 10.0?

I think I'll give the demos of C4D and InterPoser a go. That should keep me out of trouble for a while!

I had a copy of Vue given to me free when I purchased Lightwave a few versions ago but now I can't find it.  I think it was Infinite.  Hummm...I wonder what ever happened to that disk!

I also have an older version of C4D around here somewhere.  I never upgraded it at its just way too expensive.  I think I stopped at 9.5

Is the Luxrender any faster than using Firefly?  The Luxrender uses GPU to speed things up doesn't it?

Well, I suppose it depends on how many top notch graphic adapters you have. But Luxrender is much slower than Firefly. It's a renderer which tries to be physically correct, this does not come cheap in terms of render time.

Fist things first. If you want to start animating, Poser isn't half bad for the price. The hardest thing in animation is just that - the animation bit. i.e getting your characters to move in a lifelike and natural way.

You really don't care what the quality of the render is like for this stage. You will want to be able to repeat and correct your work frequently, so Mike is 100% correct in suggesting using a low grade output like preview mode for this purpose.

Once you have your animation sorted, THEN you can start to worry about how it looks in a final render. Its a real pity that Poser only has the Firefly renderer, but again, for the money its OK, and reasonably fast if you keep the qualtiy at reasonable level. Animation will tolerate a lower quality of output than still shots anyway, because the eye is not dwelling on minute detail for any length of time.

The basic technique is the same we have always used, get it right in low res, then crank up the settings for the final output.

Cinema 4D appear to have changed their marketing strategy of late, and the current pricing structure (which was never cheap) is no longer attractive to the non professional.

As others have pointed out, if you need more grunt to process your final work, think about a render garden, as the management software is built into the last couple of Poser versions.

Does Poser Pro 2012 come with any stock scene animation?  I'd like to use it as a benchmark to run some rendering comparisons.

I dont have poser pro
but  I guess you can import a Bvh & throw in
some background props and to some test renders.

Cheers

If there were a standard benchmark it would be very useful. There are a lot of people who would like to know if their rig was performing up to scratch. There is cinebench (from the C4D stable) but nothing for Poser afaik.

IIRC there was a benchmark scene going around back in the P5 or P6 Days.
But IMHO its not really a matter of a generic scene testing your rig
but each individual has to make his own determination of what is an acceptable time per frame for a quality animation renders with real lighting with shadows enabled& ray traced reflections etc.

Yes the preview renderer is fine for running tests and such but for final animation renders for paid jobs it is not acceptable to me at least. particulary since I render at HD resolution
And posers Firely has no true GI &just takes too long for quality renders for my needs and apparently many others needs as you never see any high quality HD animation renders done in poser firefly anywhere  
online.

Cheers