Okay ... animation-newbie on the loose!

I made my first attempt at animating two figures using poser and my motions didn't come out anything like I expected. I'm pretty sure I'm having problems understanding keyframes in general and keyframe interpolation (linear vs. constant vs. break spline, etc.) For instance, my character would move past the point where I wanted him to stop and this caused him to interact poorly with the other figure.

Three questions:

1. Is there a good tutorial or document that does a really good job of teaching animation theory so that I know what the different interpolations are and why I'm using these things at different times?

2. Even more basically, should I even be attempting to learn animation in Poser or should I be saving up cash to buy a different program?

3. How do you help your bruised ego when you can't animate like a master on your first attempt???

-Dean

Hi Poser seems to get the best of almost everybody when they first try animating with it. I love it now, but when I first started I got so frustated that I actually grabbed the keyboard, ripped the cables off of my machine and threw it out a window.... Dumb ass me had to go buy a new keyboard after that one... luckily I didn't mess up my machine. But anyway to answer some of your questions. Poser defaults to spline interpolation.. which is based on a curve or spline. Linear is based on a straight line between keyframes and constant doesn't really have any interpolation.. the figure or body part only changes at each keyframe. Using spline interpolation is probably causing your figures to over run where you want them to stop. My rule of thumb is to use linear for anything that you want to keep in place...like the foot on the ground during a walk sequence. I also use linear on the head of characters when changing expressions. Spline does give you a more fluid movement, but IMHO it requires many more keyframes to control the movement of the body parts. I use Constant to fake visibility since Poser doesn't animate visibility by using the scale of the props. As far as your other request.. you might want to join the Poseamation group on Yahoo groups... most of the people that do much animating with Poser tend to go by there every so often. Hope this helps you some... feel free to send me a message if you have any other questions and I'll try to answer them. Ed

Attached Link: http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/product/film_info/0,3699,2404769,00.html

Welcome to the wonderful world of animation. I think Ed's covered most but I'd like to add, learn to love the graph editor. I did a brief tutorial on Poseamation a while back and put it onto my site http://www.enigmastudio.co.uk go to the tutorial section that'll save you having to trawl back through the archives. It might help explain some of the mysteries. I've now left Poseamation, but I've started a new little group on Yahoo called Flash_erotica you'd be welcome to join me there. Personally, I think Poser is the easiest of the apps to learn animation with and many of the concepts cross to the other more expensive apps.

Attached Link: http://members.tripod.com/~knittingman/