Poser Debut beginner, simple(?) question: Can I add 15 seconds to the front of my animation?

As always, thanks in advance.

-Craig

15 seconds @ 30 fps = 450 frames

Open the key frame editor.

At the top where it says "Frame: 00001 of 00030" click on the second number and type in 480 i.e whatever the current total frames is plus 450.

Select all of the existing animation by clicking on the first actor/first frame then shift click on the last actor/last frame.

Left click within the selection and drag it to the far right.

You'll now have space at the front of your animation in which to work.

You may also find this animation tutorial helpful.
http://www.philc.net/animation1.php

That works.  Thx, Phil..

I couldn't get your animation to play however. 

BTW now there appear to be a bunch of shaded green tween squares.  Is there a way to erase those or write over them?

-Craig

Thanks but no, just been doing this a while :)

I couldn't get your animation to play however.

BTW now there appear to be a bunch of shaded green tween squares.  Is there a way to erase those or write over them?

You can just write over them.

RE POSER ANIMATION

The shaded green squares represent "tweens" between the keyframes.  The tweens is where animation systems stake over the heavy lifting with the animation, moving your parts around to realign from the current keyframe to the next. The interpolation method is what determines HOW that movement is made.  This hold true whether the animation is using Adobe Flash, or most any other animation system not just Poser.  Poser uses a graph to limit the motion of the tweens captive between keyframes.  The SPLINE / LINEAR / CONSTANT  (Green / brown/grey color) buttons indicate which type of curve on the graph is used for particular section of the section of the animation.  OPEN animation pallet window, Click on a node name (like HEAD) to the left of the keyframe panel, and you will open a graph that represents teh curve and keyframes for that NODE only, and a drop down on the rioght allows you to select the parameter (bend up, Y-Adjust etc). 

Hope this gets you off to a good start. 

Also... I found a possible bug in using Layers where the TOP layer exhibits some of  effects of the base layer.  Its better to make individual smaller animations, and save to  LIBRARY (PZ2) as multiple framed, poses JUST for the affected body GROUPS & layer.  Then you can reload these into a single, merged layer in SERIAL fasion.  Sel;ect entire Keyframe BEFORE next animation sequence merge and it will lay in fine.

Merging more than 2 layers with staggered stop/start times will be fustrating and have unpredictable results upon replay. Even if you get it saved off after a successful run, its merge tends to mangle the sequence or change the merge mode (ADD/REPLACE).  There is something wonky going on with respect to start-stop frames, maintaing spline and tween for whole animation that I cant seem to isolate. In most cases the top layer will be stretched to the same length as the base. Keep blank is better, but loading sequence in SERIAL on 1 layer method is best, rather than multiple staggered layers in parallel.

I can confirm the problems with animation layers, at least in 2012SR1.

The idea is very cool, but in practice very flaky, so I find it much easier to keep everything in the base layer.

A bug report has been filed with the developers via SM support on this issue. (Animation Layer Bug)

Just noticed release of SR2 patch today and it has these promising fixes :)

Animation
• Corrected preview of animation resulting from constraint channel relationship, after reloading scene
• Enabled undo for deletion of constraints
• Corrected start and end frame handling for animation layers
• Enabled undo for modifications to animated joint centers
• Improved key frame copying performance.
• Selecting top row in Animation palette now selects entire figure again