This is a repost of features I'd like from Rosity (to RDNA and now back), with some editing and additions:

There is more than a little frustration amongst the animators, though. With an exception or two, the controls we have are -exactly- the same as we had in P4. It is way, way past time there was some attention paid to those who make things move. A better workflow and more capable tools would increase Poser's usage as an animation tool considerably.

1. Poser's current 'all or nothing' coding for the IK system is trouble. A lot of newbies use it, switch it in the middle of an animation, and the results pretty much destroys all the work they did unitl that moment. If they didn't back up the file before, then they lose their work. The ability to toggle IK without damaging interpolation and keyframing would make it =far= more useful.

1a) If they got the IK toggle working properly, then they could add IK pinning. This would let you add a 'pin' to an IK chain, doing a runtime redesignation of just where a particular chain ends. What good is that? Example. You run a ragdoll sim, and set it up where the figure is thrown. Floppy doll, so what? You step through the sim, choose a point, stick a 'pin' into the right elbow. That 'pin' becomes the temporary end of the right arm IK chain; set a flag for stationary, and the ragdoll's motion modifies depending of the force of its action, around the stationary 'pin'. The body pivots, a few frames later you remove the 'pin' or disable the stationary flag, and let the sim run. What you wind up with is a body thrown, which pivots around the right elbow and off into another direction. Insert a stretched cylinder into the place where the elbow is being pinned and wa-la. You have a figure being thrown by something, who snags a pole and swings away to safety. Such a full IK/FK system would permit a lot of things to be done that people think require collision detection, and if the system permitted you to toggle IK anywhere on the dopesheet, you would have the tools to shape chaotic events into seemingly planned actions without destroying the work done before. This is a long overdue feature upgrade. (edit#2: Oh. And with IK pinning in this example, the right forearm and hand would not be affected in any way by whatever motion the figure IK chains imposed. So this could also permit you to set a hand pose (say around a weapon of some sort) and not have to worry about kinematics destroying it, forcing frame by frame correction of the issue).

2. Dopesheet improvements. The animation pallette (hence called dopesheet, as this is what the industry calls it) is hard to read, lacking in customization options, home to all of 2 forms of interpolation, and kind of touchy. There really needs to be an 'animation room' where the motion-specific features actually live. Keep it for the Poser Pro users if you must; most of us making animation have at least dual monitors, so having a discreet 'room' that we could open in a second monitor, leaving viewport, dials, camera and lighting controls on the other would be excellent. Being able to 'lock out' all but the highlighted bodypart from manipulation would solve a lot of issues people have with the dopesheet (a row of buttons with a top mounted 'clear all' that enables the whole pallette, and a button or box by each named animateable part, so that if you click it, only that part is adjustable. All others are locked, preventing accidents). Adjusting the size of the font in the dopesheet, so that you can clearly see what you are messing with (mostly on bodyparts listing window). More interpolation types.

 3) Multiple Animation Graph Windows. This would be wonderful. Say 3 windows; you select a bodypart, and you get the X,Y,Z translations for that part. Each would have the pulldown list, so you could get into the morph controls and rotations, but being able to see how the position relates to the other involved axis', makes things easier to diagnose when you have a mesh tie itself into knots. Another option is to expand the current graph window and color code the XYZ timelines. Then you would still have the one window, but the X,Y, &Z lines would be, say, red, blue, green. Heck, you could also make it so that the colors used are user definable in the setup options; that would cover anyone with issues with certain colors.

3a) Possibly combining the dopesheet and graph editor. You start with the dopesheet, choose a bodypart, then toggle over to the graph (This one is a 'maybe'. If we got better dopesheet function and a more capable graph, it might be best to keep them separate).

3b) Manipulation gizmos in the viewport. The ability to choose translate/rotate, and have the gizmo beside the body part to make it easier to handle things grossly without the dials. You would also then be able to color code the vectors to match what you see on the graph editor, making the association easier. I personally like the scheme that Vue uses. The gizmo has small square icons associated with it. Click one, and you get the translation controls; click another, and the rotation sphere comes up. And =only= the selected function is enabled. So when you are translating, no rotation is permitted. Likewise with rotation; you can spin things to your heart's content, but can't translate it so much as a nanometer. That would eliminate the issues we have with current gross figure manipulation: namely, everything can move, and one twitchy mouse signal can send a limb into chaos.

 4) A quaterion correction toggle. This is a nifty thing that Messiah has. Quats do not run from 0 to 360 degrees; they run -180 to +180 degrees (the traditional sine wave). THE most common cause of animation chaos is when you exceed those values. The algorithm tries to correct by interpolating to the nearest value (and there is no automatic order to that; the algorithm picks the -closest- value, not the most logical value). Depending on the keyframes, this might cause a limb to twist around itself multiple times to reach a point the algorithm accepts is proper. The toggle in Messiah looks at the quaterion values, and resets them to the proper numerical range (at least so long as you don't try and force the interpolation curve back with keyframes. That can create more damage than good). It's not a one size fit all solution, but it does fix about 80% of the mesh crunches with one click of a button.

 5) A clamping function. Another issue is that there is no way to restrict the spline curves. One missplaced keyframe and a tame, simple curve that never strays above or below say .8 in value suddenly shoots to 20 or more. And if you do it just wrong, there can be multiples. A way to set a clamp value on the graph editor, so that your splines are forced to remain within your set limits would be valuable. Particularly when dealing with mocap data that doesn't quite behave itself. This would also cut down the need to use break splines to control spline curves.

6. The option to bake cloth sims to PLA (point level animation) data. Poser's cloth engine is amazing, flexible, and can and has produced better results than MAXON's current offering. If we could bake a successful sim, that would make it FAAAAAAAAR easier and faster to correct errors in uninvolved body parts. And if the saving of that data were possible, it would open up a =potential= area in the marketplace. The dataset could be sold with or as an add on to a certain clothing object, any you wouldn't need to rerun the sim, and the user would get a nice, swishy dress on their figure.

Poser is never going to be Messiah, or Houdini, or any other higher end app. But it is used for much, much more than NVIATWAS. And its ease of use in animation is pretty impressive in that field. But there are lots of things that could be done to enhance the power and capability in making things move.

MKIII. ;)