Hello folks,

Right, I'm having my first proper go at animating in PP 2014 and I'm a bit stuck. I'd like my character's hands to stay on her thighs as she's standing for the first half of the animation, where she's moving her chest and shoulders slightly. I've tried turnng IK on and that's all well and good for that part of it, but I then want her to move, which messes her arms up if IK is on. Is there a way of telling Poser when to turn IK on and off for certain limbs during the render? If not, is there another way to do this besides the oh so painful 'by hand' method, which has taken me an hour and a half for just two seconds of animation for one hand?

Many thanks all!

Glen.

If you are trying to make all the motion in one go, then no there is not a way to do it.  If you look up animation in the forums you will find a lot of advise to render to frames.  One of the prime reasons to do this is that after all the frames are made you assembly them in a movie editing program.

The reason you want to do this is so that you can break your animation into scenes.  In your case the first half would have the IK on which you say you like.  Then you capture the last frame of the scene with the IK on and make a new scene and paste that frame in at frame one.  In the new scene you remove the IK and hand key what ever motions you wish.

You then render each scene to frames and piece it all together in the movie editing program.  It is a little bit of work to start learning however in the long run you will be able to make 3-5 second scenes in minutes and piece them all together instead of trying to make a single 5 mintue scene and fight each small change that effects other parts of the scene.

Thank you for the reply Richard, I'd never thought of doing animated scenes like this... It seems less daunting then the other ways.

 Atm, Poser's IK is an all or nothing proposition, and unfortunately is kind of on the primitive side as well. That's one of the things that hopefully will get addressed in the future, as it seems more and more animators are coming out of the woodwork finally. And Rooster Teeth's use of Poser to animate RWBY.

Breaking an animation into discreet scenes is ultimately the most flexible way, as Richard said. Look at just about any movie, TV show, anime, etc, and time scenes with a stopwatch. 30 seconds is a long scene is CG or real life. You have to do a little planning beforehand, of course. The whole idea is to work out the flow on paper, decide what scenes you need, and only animate them, saving you a lot of time doing things you have to toss out in final editing for one reason or another. Once you have the scene list (just a table of seqential scenes and what is happening in them), if you have a clear vision of everything you want you can start keyframing. But professional practice is to do storyboards from that. Poser can and is used for that purpose. It lets you create a rough image or animatic of your story.....and if you build your sets for the purpose, just save the pz3's and you have your set ready for final animation and render.

The importance of a lot of these steps grow the longer your animation is, or how complex it is. You can easily get by with few or none of those steps if the animation is simple and short. The more complex, the longer it gets, the easier it is in the long run to devote a couple weeks to preplanning than waste 3 months keyframing and rendering scenes you never use.  

Thanks for the replies folks.

Yes, my current animation is just a few seconds long; it's basically Annie jumping up and down three times on the spot. I've managed to fiddle like heck with the arms and get them looking ok without using IK and I think I'll continue without it altogether in animations. I don't tend to use it much in still renders either, only on occasion.

I am working on many props for an incredibly... stupidly ambitious animation in the future though, but goodness knows how that will pan out. Right now, I doubt I'll be able to do it all in Poser, it's just too finicky, it really is. This took me an absolute age of fiddling and that graph editor has been a nightmare; tiny little black pixels to spend twenty minutes trying to line the cursor up with in order to move them (exaggeration) and they're as twitchy as heck, as are the dials. Bearing in mind this big animation is expected to be around three to five minutes in length and have a LOT of effects and physics involved, I'd say just the animating alone would take me well over a year and that's without me having any kind of life or down time.

Anyway, this animation of Annie is quite cute, I'm satisfied with it the way it is, for a first attempt. I'll render it out and post it on my DA page later.

Thanks again folks!

Glen.

Constraints can be used to override the ik system. It takes some work but you can do what the op wants to do in one animation.

Experiment with the constraints to see how you can leave ik on, and animate constraints to make changes to the IK goal positions. With the constraint set to 1, it will override the ik goal posistion. Setting it to zero will return control to the hand values. In between will blend it.

Very clever, I'll try it next time I have the chance to animate again. It's funny really, because I just tried constraints on a hair prop last night for the first time, never used constraints before. Thank you! :)

1. Rough pose your animated figure, to get the hips, abs and chest to the final positions without regard to IK for the hands. You can turn it off or on.

2. To keep the parts of the animation where the hands are positioned right, lock them in place by adding keyframes for the entire hand sequence, then turn on IK... Poser will add keys to the collar, sholder and forearm of the respective arm.

3. With IK on, pose the hand to the object you want the hand to stick to at the start of the respective sequence (as where you want the hand to start holding the hip or broom or whatever...) This is a good saving spot.

4. Useing the Hierarchy window, re-parent the hand from the Body to the object you want the hand to stick to. The hip, in this case, but it can be another actors hip, or other body part, or a table or broom handle, ect. The trouble is that if the other object is a different scale, the hand will blow up, so you cant' use the file again. You can save it to a new name, then copy the non-IK keys to the good file like in step 9 below. If you arn't doing that much, you can do steps 4 to 9 without saving in between. If the other object is the same scale, you can usually reparent without damaging the figure. Just remember to put the hand (or foot) back onto the figure before you add the figure to the library, or it won't have that part.

5. Remove all the hand and arm keys from the begining of where you want  the hand locked to the object, to the end of the 'holding object' frames. Now when the other object moves, the hand will follow. Ignore the arms for now, and pose the other object over the course of the sequence. The hand and arm might blow up, and they won't be exactly right, but don't wory about that just yet. Just pose the object, and you can fix the hand/arm later.

6. Fill all the key frames for the hand, but leave the arm keys empty. (except for the parts you already like, because they were fixed in place in step 2)

7. Turn off IK for the hand... Poser will fill all the empty arm keys where you set the hand keys.

8. This is the tricky part, and you may need to save the sean under a new name to copy the frames from. If it's not too complicated, you can do this part without changing to a new file, but if you do a lot of work, you will want to save it in case Poser crashes. ---- With IK off, copy all the hand and arm keys for the portion of the animation you are working on. It doesn't hurt to copy the hand/arm frames for the full amimation if the animation isn't too long or you have enough system resourses. (PP 2010, with only 12gb memory on a i7, crashed a lot when it had to re-parent to another actor- especially when the scales were different, but 2014 with 32GB works better)

9. OK, the tricky part... With the arm/hand keys in your clipboard, (Ctl C, for windows) turn IK back on for the hand. Use the Hierarchy window to reparent the hand back to the Body, turn IK back off, and delete all the arm/hand keys (for the portion you have in the clipboard, or all if you saved them all to the clipboard) The white selection icon will still suround the part you saved, so you can hit delete, or use the - button to remove all the keys that were set when you coppied the keys, but you need to reselect the frames to past the non-IK keys back in. Sometimes yoiu can paste the keys without re-selecting, but if it doesn't paste, then reselect.

At this point you should have the hands stuck to the hips, or whatever animated object, but the arms will be messed up. This is a good saving spot.

1. Turn IK back on for the hand. Go to the last spot the arms are posed right (if any), and set the keys for the collar, shoulder, and forarm to linear. Remove 10 or so keys from the 3 arm parts from the good spot into the bad, then go to the next spot the arms are good again. Set the arm parts to linear, and erase all the keys between the two good spots in the animation. Go out about 10 keys into the bad arm spot, and set the zero the collar and forarm. (Alt- click the 3 paramiter dials for the 2 arm parts) Set the forearm bend to 25 for right, and -25 for the left. Do this on each end of the bad arm sequence.

2. Now adjust the shoulder dials to drag the arm where you want it for the sequence. Fix the arm, then go to the next place it starts to look wrong, set the shoulder key where it still is right, then adjust, but only move the shoulder dials, unless the arm is fully extended. In that case, set the key for the forearm before and after the arm extention, then change the forearm bend to 0 or up to 25 negitive (positive for the left arm), then adjust the shoulder.

3. When you are satisfied with the arms, make sure you still have the hand keys all full, and turn off IK. for that hand. Open the graph, and look at the hand peramiters. IK will through some of the dials off by 180 degrees. Select those spots, and move them to line up with the reasonable values. (do twist and bend first, then side-side. Sometimes side to side can't be fixed exactly by just looking at the graph, and you have to  remove some of the keys)

4. Fine tune the hand movement.

If you need to change the hip through chest, the hand will move unless you turn on IK first. In that case, as long as you only move the base parts while IK is on, you will only need to fix the arms as in steps 10 and 11.

Hope this helps... it's complicated, but much easyer than trying to pose individual key frames.