I've been asked to make a sticky thread on this topic as a place for those using Poser for animation to have a central location for help. While I have no expertise in animation myself, I'm glad to host this thread. I hope it will be of some use.

Once again tyvm Basicwiz, I've messaged thinkcooper following yesterdays post and asked if it is possible for the animators at SM or thier freinds to create a webinar or similar to show folks how to get the best from Poser animation. Whether it will happen remains to be seen given the time restraints and resources involved, in the meeanwhile if anyone has any good links to Poser animation tutorials, tips tricks and hints, this would be a good place to post them............

Some resources for Poser animators:

(mods feel free to delete anything not allowed)

Renderocity Store - animated poses, utilities**
**

Ockhams python scripts, jiggles, naturalizer etc

• http://www.ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/

• http://www.vanishingpoint.biz/freestuff.asp?ClassificationID=21

there may be  more up to date versions in freestuff.

carnegie mellon BVH (motion capture) files converted for poser. user MogoDallas.  - http://www.sharecg.com/mojodallas

There are some scripts in the poser python forum for various keyframing tasks. Most of these are fixes though.  Feel free to post and ask for anything you need.

PHILC has some utilities for BVH files and other tasks. Check the store and his site.

Tips - set preview as the render type when creating an animation

it wont give you all the lighting but is great for getting the motions correct and is very fast.

I render selected frames for a lighting check using the single frames option , than I combine the frame series in a video editor.

Hey Doug,

Would it be possible to link some of the videos (all, actually) from thinkcooper's thread?

I think it would help people to see what is possible.

Attached Link: A (very) old Animation Tutorial ... ;=]

Enjoy.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Quote - Hey Doug,

Would it be possible to link some of the videos (all, actually) from thinkcooper's thread?

I think it would help people to see what is possible.

Someone would need to repost the links here. Not hard to do... just copy the link from where it is and post it to a new message here. Feel free to do so.

Links from the thinkcooper thread "Poser can't do animation" said no-one at Rooster Teeth

RWBY White Trailer

RWBY Red

S8 Tex fights Red and Blue

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.

Here's a question; do we want to stick with the down and dirty aspects of animating, or get into the topics of composition, staging, post, etc? In one respect none of the other has anything to do with keyframing and rig tweaking, but in another if you blow any of those other 'things', the best keyframing in the world will look like hack work.

I think every aspect can be covered Dale B, but as the sticky is about Poser animation rather than animation per se, we should stick to workflow that Poser users can do. What I would like to see happen is people post progress movies of their projects, maybe with a brief explanation of what render settings they used, how they put it together,etc etc etc that's my 2 pence worth anyway

I think a few comments on overall work flow would be good.

Pointing out that postwork is a real pain if you have say 1200 images and you get flicker when the touch ups are a bit different would be good also.

I mainly composite backgrounds and only animate the figures.

Some comments on styles would also be good. I have seen stuff done with preview render and some very basic textures and some things that took a few hours per frame. 

I would suggest that any posts likely to go more than a couple of posts be put into the Poser forum as a seperate thread.

Hi here are some video tutorials I did back in 2010 for complete beginners

intro to the poser graph editor
http://vimeo.com/4933364

intro to poser IK
http://vimeo.com/4935659

the different kinds of interpolation
http://vimeo.com/5003015

Climbing Stairs using "pose to pose"
http://vimeo.com/5045617

Cheers

My clip here uses many animated scenes using Poser. Those scenes were rendered as PNG files and imported into a video editor (where additional effects and scenes were added). The Poser sections should be pretty obvious (as I am not a Poser expert!), and some may enjoy the 'crowds' which start around 04:30 , or the 'clocks' around 06:05

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKIDR7njbXQ

A number of my other clips at http://www.youtube.com/timand2222 also use Poser for the animation.

VHS machines allow for Play + Fast Forward to speed ahead until you get to the part you want to see.  DVD machines will let you select scenes/chapters if the product being viewed has them.  My PS2 plays DVD content like an actual DVD machine:  It does not let me Play + Fast Forward to speed ahead at all.

Once we have a collection of animations we really like, what is a good program for putting them on a DVD with chapter select so the disc will also run, as a DVD, on a game console being used as a DVD player?

There are a number of dvd authoring applications. Try www.videohelp.com the tools section for listings and reviews.  My dvd player has a fast forward and reverse on a control dial, anything from 16x reverse to 16x forward in 1/2 step increments. I think they call it the shuttle dial.

Quote - There are a number of dvd authoring applications. Try www.videohelp.com the tools section for listings and reviews.

Thanks for that - I will give it a good look.  I am nowhere near ready to use anything, I just need to plan my project workload and set a proposed budget, and that includes getting/learning stuff I do not already have.

Quote - My dvd player has a fast forward and reverse on a control dial, anything from 16x reverse to 16x forward in 1/2 step increments. I think they call it the shuttle dial.

I seem to remember mine did also, now that you mentioned the dial.  My machine broke years ago, so it has been the PS2 since.  It has a [>>] option, but it just skips to the next scene/chapter instead of increasing the frame rate, whereas >| skips to the end, as if I let the credits roll and it wants to return to the main menue screen.

If you can afford it I suggest looking at the Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 12.0

around $100.

Here is a free one http://www.dvdstyler.org/en/ but I dont know anything about it yet.

My essential tips for anyone new to Poser animation;

1. Learn to use the animation palette and graph editor, underlined in capitals. Unless you understand these, you'll be fighting phantoms in the fog.

2. Don't confuse your .pz3 with your movie. Think in terms of creating a sequence of film clips to be assembled in a video editor. ( my favorite free one, VirtualDub)

To create a continuation scene, save your file, then save again under a new name, in the animation palette go to the last frame, make everything a keyframe, select all the preceeding frames, delete them, then drag all the last frame keys back to frame 1, continue your animation and render from frame 2, you already have frame1 rendered as the last frame of the previous segment.

Lastly, a quick tip for the perennial slidey feet issue, don't look at them! Move the camera closer or tip it up a few degrees...."b, but, that's cheating!"... yep, in time you will hopefully learn how to correct such issues, animating in Poser, especially when starting out can often be a compromise between what you want and what you can achieve. Creative solutions to problems will be necessary. Posting them here might help us all.

 Heh. If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying hard enough. For that matter, you aren't trying. In animation, -all- we do is cheat. At its basic level, we are trying to fool others into beleiving that this bunch of numbers and stand alone frame renders is reality of some sort. Another way to look at it is that if it =works=, it wasn't cheating.

 Another tip:

1. Get a book and learn about cinematography. Specifically, the kinds of cameras that actually exist, and then go find examples of them in videos and study them. Each and every one of them have different behaviors; some are rock steady, some have slight movement no matter what you do (like a hand held travel cam, or a halo frame cam like tends to get used a lot in porn.). Some are always trailing the action somewhat. A good example of this is an arm mounted aerial cam. No matter what you do, there is a delay between what your eyes see and how your hands move the camera, so it always seems as if you are 'catching up' to the action, instead of having it perfectly centered. That is actually one of the telltales of a CG sequence....if the camera is too perfect in its motion, it obviously wasn't done by a human hand. In some cases this works for you, in others it blows suspension of disbelief out of the water (For those who work in Vue, this is one of the tricks Philippe Bouyer used in his animation work; he used the function editor to simulate the behavior of real world cameras....which clicked with what the viewer expected).  

If anyone is up for a small challenge that will highlight the different ways people approach animation, here's an idea.

I reckon pretty much everyone has V4 in their runtime. Create a 30 second animation of V4 interacting with a primitive prop from the props library. Add your fx p/w etc and let's see what comes out of the mix. No prizes, but we can discuss how "a" viewed better than "b" etc.

Just n idea

@saxon3d

That could be an interesting challange. 30 seconds is a long time though . I assume G rated ?

Quote - @saxon3d

That could be an interesting challange. 30 seconds is a long time though . I assume G rated ?

If you want to post it here. 

:thumbupboth: :woot:

G rated souds like a plan. I  suggested 30 seconds to allow for camera angle changes, and the plot. being realistic for first time animators it is a long time but i think rendered at reasonably low settings it should produce some interesting results...

On another note, i have heard back from thinkcooper following a request I made, SM will be putting together an animation webinar in a few months, to help users get the best out of Poser animation. quote...........

"It's an awesome idea. I'll get one set-up. For the time being we have a tight calendar for webinars and my video expert is on a side project. It will likely take a couple of months before we can fit an animation webinar in.

Just for reference, there is a collection of free tutorial videos that do cover some aspects of animation on our website. In the advanced section there are several that feature animation technique.

http://poser.smithmicro.com/tutorials.html

Also, there's a book called "Secrets of Poser Experts" that has a section written by Gabe Sabloff who created "the Drop", less about the fine points of keyframing and more about the cinematogrphy angle, but well worth checking out. We just added it to Content Paradise system, but you might be able to find it at a local book store if you want to check it out."

i've just started to render the first 400 frames, i decided to go the whole hog, dynamic hair and cloth, it's taken me the best part of 4 days to a) find a good dynamic hair that didn't kill my machine in the simulation b) adjust the number of hairs and colours etc to make it look decent in the render. I'll post all settings as screen prints with the part one.

I have used Poser for nearly 14 years now and I use it for animation mostly.  I recomend unique threads for each major subject, like one for assistant labs(walk designer, talk designer). Freeform animation(key lab, drag and pose, so on).  One for animating off video, (backgrounding the video to pose wireframe figures over it). And one for dynamic animation, (hair, clothing, foilage, and Physics).  There's just so many attributes to animating that it could create a messy thread putting them all into one.

The question on how to approach animating a project is directly related to the project itself.  I found that my personal preferences on how to approach a project are pointless.  IK are manditory for some projects, and unusable for others.  It's the same with dynamic vrs conforming.  As is walk in place vrs a walk path and so on. (I'm sure you can all relate.)  For nearly every major project I had to dive in deeper to learn new (new to me) techniques for real success.  I will never master all of it completely.

I love the power of Poser and its ability to generate powerfull animations.  I linked to an example of my work. (sorry to change the rating on this thread, the link contains slight nudity.)

"The question on how to approach animating a project is directly related to the project itself.  I found that my personal preferences on how to approach a project are pointless."

Thank you I could'nt agree more  with this.

Cheers

let's just quit then :)

Yes, there are a great many factors to consider when animating and building a video. The first issue is that many beginners are not aware of the problems.

There is also the issue of image quality and render time  and things like the use of antialiasing (isnt the flicker lovely? ).

If this stickey gets used, then we can ask for another. If that gets used as well we can ask for a seperate forum. One step at a time.

I gave up Poser animation because of 2+ hour render times per frame on 640 x 480 images.

"let's just quit then :)"

Why Quit??
there are different kinds of character animation projects
that require Different approaches
to get the desired results.
To use only one way of creating character animation in poser because its your "personal preference" will be very limiting.  

Trust me.

Cheers

I'm confused, nowhere did I say that my ways were the best, or even good or even to be suggested as a method. I proposed an idea of the sample animation and a number of people submitting workflow and explanation of how they achieved said animation (if anyone has read that post instead of just jumping in with the usual negativity) to show just how many ways there were of doing things for guys that were new to animation and for old dogs that want to learn new tricks.

It seemed like a good idea at the time..............

ps "Let's just quit then" was my poor northern attempt at sarcasm :)

It is a good idea, there are many "styles" of presenting an idea.

 I am working on something although it may be much shorter.   

Attached Link: Queen's Ballad

I know this video isn't JUST Poser, but what Poser it does have isn't too horrible.  Also the video is in "revamp mode" so the link might vanish in a couple weeks.  I'll repost the new one at that time.

re: "Queen's Ballad"

VERY impressive !!! :thumbupboth:

cheers
dr geep
;=]

Thanks geep, I am working on some tutorials for animation techniques I've learned.  The first will be "Pulling off Dynamic Clothing".  I'll post them here on this thread.

loved the animation in Queens ballad phive05, it sort of felt a mix of some of my favourite movies, I felt some bladerunner, 5th element, riddick, gamer and a few others lol. looking forward to your input :)

I've always had fast rendering animations times in Poser. Then again, I dont bog down my scenes. I do a little each time.

www.es3d.com/index2.html

hello Saxon3d, This is for an animated graphic novel series.  It's a scifi adventure based on the FICTION novel The Conundrum.  I wish I could say when its release date is but we're still casting for the parts so it could be another year even.  I will post it when it happens, the project is done so far entirely by me.  I spent the last ten years building the content up and waiting for more funding.  Since I use Poser, Bryce, DAZ3D, Blender  and the content sold by artists in this community I'm compelled to share everything.  Watch for tutorials, models and the like once the series releases. 

I would also like to see how to animate objects such as using the hair room for growing and animating grass and trees moving in a gentle breeze. Cheers

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/search.php?query=hair+grass&forum_id=&sort=relevancy&use_age

Animating trees is dependent on the tree model, props or figures may need to be treated differently. Leaves are frequently trans mapped planes, sometimes branches too, so deforming them may be problematic. The simplest way to bend a tree prop would be to use a magnet or two.

Fluttering  leaves, again depend on the model but I'm wondering if this could be achieved using animated materials, high/low specular light or adding black or dark green at low levels in the ambent channel. I'll give that a try next time I've got a tree in the scene.

Searching the marketplace for morphing trees might give you some ideas too

Attached Link: The Legend of the Alewives Dagger

Attached Link: Ivy Summers Animations

2 hour render times for 640 x 480 ???  . all animation even those created with Maya take time to render,  all my animations I create with Poser are all in 1080 hd

I render 4 light shadow maps with a adverage of 300 key-frames or about 10 seconds I render at 1920 x 1080 @120 dpi at 30 kfps

which usually takes about 2 hours to render on a I7 4.2 ghz system. with 24 megs of ram  the secret is you cameras POV.. before you render remove all things that won;t be seen in the scene  this will greatly help speed up your render times,

 you can check out all my 3d animations work on my youtube channel all videos created with Poser & Daz Studio and edited in Adboe Premiere pro its not as hard as you think :)

Enjoyed your animation poisinivy very well done.....great minds....:)

I just remembered I done a pirate animation a while back.....have a peek and any questions don't hesitate.

Dave

https://vimeo.com/40537686

wow  thats is awesome.. my animation could be the sequal to yours..lol

nice work :)

Quote - Enjoyed your animation poisinivy very well done.....great minds....:)

 

 

I just remembered I done a pirate animation a while back.....have a peek and any questions don't hesitate.

Dave

 

https://vimeo.com/40537686

Thanks PI...I've subbed your utube and will be staying in contact and shall be going through your work....well done.

Dave