Can anyone tell me what the best way to composite poser characters into live action shots is? Can the shots be brought into poser or is there another way to do it?

Jason

I've done this work extensively. Please check out the gallery and search for my work to see examples of stuff I've done. If this is the type of compositing you mean, then I can give you tons of pointers I've learned over the years. In short order tho, yes, you can import a background photo into Poser via the File menuImport. Also, you will likely want to touch it up a bit and do other fancy stuff in an editor like Photoshop. I 'highly' recommend you save the resulting images in a format with an alpha channel so you isolate the rendered section of the image from the photo background. Note, be careful here because there is a bug in Poser they never fixed that results in corrupted alpha channels for various images. I know how to fix this but won't go into it unless you wanna know. Have fun. -Jeff

Thanx Blitter. I'm going to check out your gallery ASAP. It's nice to know that I can import AVI's also, cuz many of my shots are moving shots. BTW, would you happen to know where I could get a MAC copy of Poser 4 (perhaps by discount or something?). Jason

Curious Labs is probably the best place to shop for Poser 4. It's a pity you weren't in the market for a copy a month ago; they had a heck of a sale.

Retail price for Poser 4, Mac or PC, is $219.

If you're eligible for an academic discount (student or faculty), you can purchase Poser for $120 or less, at places like DV Direct.

I'm not sure how you'd get an academic discount directly from Curious Labs; I've seen nothing about that on their site.

Another thing is that often you won't like simply importing a graphic into the background. You may want to look at Nerds prop (Nerd3d.com) and the 3D Worlds stuff in the store. Neither will help with .avi backgrounds though both are big helps in other situations. In addition to Jeff's caveots you also may want to know that you can't render out shadows in your alpha. I've been playing a lot with compositing also so if you have more specific questions, I'd like to help and learn.