I have done animation in more than a few programs. Poser can do very nice animations if you put your mind to it. It does have some quirks thou.

Some words of wisdom.

One thing that you need before you even start, is a script of what you want to do in the animation.

I know, that sounds to obvious, but you need to know right off the bat how long each scene is going to be, and what it is supposed to actually look like. Changing your mind and having to add frames then modify tons of animation layers is no picnic in Poser.

Unless you have a decent workstation, use Stree display and don't bother with complex shader sets. A white character will play back far faster than one with EzSkin on it. The key to animating is being able to play it back in real time without rendering it out. If you have to render it out all the time, it will just frustrate you to death. You may have to turn a lot of stuff down, or off, in the preview render settings, and possibly undock the preview pane and make it smaller if your system can't play back the animation fast enough.

Now with that said, how do you animate a character to do "X"?

The best way to learn is to find a video that does something very similar and take it into a video program look at the frames in incremental timed steps. You can also cut and paste them into the background of Poser, which may also require you to undock the preview to get the aspect ratio to match the video.

Depending on what you are trying to do will depend on how far you can skip thru the frames to key it. There is not a set number of keys to skip, it all depends on what the character is doing to determine the amount of frames that each joint has to be keyed at. When you are starting out to ruff it in, you can use the frames at an interval about a second or two that matches something in the action of the scene.

The graph editor is your friend, and the animation palette is its best friend. You will see trends in the graph editor on how joints flow if the action is repetative. There will be peaks and valley's in the curve within the graph editor. You can use that as a guide for tweaking the keys after you get it ruffed it. Do that before you add more keys to get them at peaks in the curve. The fewer keys you have in the beginning, the better. Adding keys is easy, removing them later is not.

There is also the issue of IK, should you use it or not. I recommned that you turn it off. Poser has a fit if you turn it off later so turning it off right off the bat will get around that. IK has it usage, but not at the beginning of animating it.

Another word of wisdom, incremental saves are your friend. There is nothing worse that realizing that you did something really dumb and just trashed weeks worth of work. Having lots of saves makes going back easy and you don't loose that much work.

After you get comfortable with animating, you will need to reuse things a lot. The best way to describe that is to use a video game as an example. The average video game character has about 100-200 different animations that define how the character moves and reacts to things. You do not have to go that far at first, but you will want to save certain things like how the character walks, stands, looks around, etc. The more you use the character, the more actions you are going to have to save out so you can reuse them. Saving them out gives each character you do it for, a distinct personality. That goes a long way to making the animation better.

With that said, learn how the animation layers and animation sets work right off the bat. Saving all of those actions is fine, but you are going to have to know how to string them together so it looks right as well.

Im may be running out of words that the box will take.... (what is the limit?)

I am no expert, but more than will to answer questions on how I animate things.

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