Dale B posted at 1:26PM Fri, 20 December 2019 - #4373875

No matter how you slice it, animation is a time consuming, multi program process. And the more you want out of it, the more complex it gets.

That's very true! As much as I'm impressed by the demo of that rig in Maya, I'll never use it, if only both Maya and the rig have a ton of odd controls with strange names, and I'm just too old to learn all that jibby-jibby - same problem I have with Blender.

But also consider this - if Poser is really oriented towards entry level animation (not as "the premier rendering and animation system" that Smith Micro used to use in their ads), then probably there are simple things that Poser can do to simplify the life of an entry level animator.

My first (and only) animation tool was Poser, and I never had any training with animation. What the manual said was "move to frame 30, then move the arm, then click play - see, the arms moves, hooray!!". Then after many years using it as hobby, I recently realized I accumulated a lot of bad habits. I realized that when I saw a movie in Youtube about the 12 principles of animation, and while the whole thing is oriented towards comics, not realism, I mentally played back, in my mind, the best animation sequences I could remember from Disney, Hayao Miyazaki (my hero) and quality anime, and found that they follow these principles (just under tight control to not look like donald duck)!

So while I'm trying to achieve realism to improve the quality of my animations, I think I have been really missing the point of creating charming animations, which is - follow the 12 principles, plus 3 typically japanese principles (negative times, economy and sakuga).

Therefore, I'm now a believer that an animation program can help newbie animators by making it easier to follow the 12 (or in my case 12+3) principles.

Consider for example the matter of preparation, extremes and breakdown keys - that's one of the principles, to have these particular keys under control. But then in Poser every key is a key, and there's no help to distinguish them - a small accidental key looks exactly the same as an extreme. So, when looking at at timeline there's no way to identify your animation structure, unless you walk through the animation step by step - very time-consuming!

It would be very very very simple to add a color (or some effect) to the keys in the timeline, to indicate preps and extremes. Also, to indicate when a key is a partial key or a full body key. These don't change anything in the actual playback, but help the animator to keep track of what's what in the timeline. That's a kind of thing that a professional tool will probably laugh at, because they have other resources, but in Poser there's no such thing.

It's like a teaching violin and a professional violin - the teaching violin comes with the 5 cents paper overlay to indicate the hand positions, while the professional would laugh at that. But if you have a teaching violin with no 5 cents paper overlay, then it will be as difficult (or more) as the professional violin, and will be extremely frustrating.

So if Poser is really an entry-level tool, then adding these cheap helpers would help us poor newbie programmers to deliver some charming animations in 15 minutes instead of 15 hours.