I've been using Poser pretty regularly to do animations for a project I'm doing. I've read a few books on character animation (Doug Kelly's book - Character Animation In Depth, and George Maestri's two last books - Digital Character Animation 2 - vols 1 & 2 --all great books btw). I am having problems with those subtleties. I have my character walking around, stopping, pointing, acting surprised, showing ojects, etc, etc... But what I'm finding is that all the movements tend to all blend, even when I try to hold a pose, my character still moves alittle, like he can't wait to get to the next pose. I've been working alot with the interpolation graphs and the splines, but clearly this is no easy task. It seems sometimes Poser has a mind of its own. I've used the linear and break tools alot to try and get some better timing but to no real satisfaction. It also seems that Poser doesn't let you hold a pose by simply creating a pose at say keyframe 10, then going to keyframe 30 and pressing the "add" keyframe tool, instead I think you have to copy all the keyframes at 10 and apply them to 30 - kind of a pain. Can anyone help or recommend some tutorials specific to Poser on this topic. I believe it was "Saxon" who steered me towards his website and he has a nice tutorial on spline interpolation and it helped alot, but what am I missing (or is it just experience)? Thanks, Chris (a frustrated animator-wanna-be) PS:I'm starting to play with AM, anyone use it here?

forgive me for jumping in here, cuz i'm just a poser beginner. i've done some very simplistic avi's with the standard skeleton model. are you saying that if you keep the same pose from keyframe 10 to 30, and say... have 1 second per frame, that poser doesn't hold the pose for 20 seconds? that doesn't seem right. about AM: i listened in on the email listserver for about 6 months. my advice is for you to drop AM and run away as fast as you can. rigging and smartskinning a model is a nightmare, even for the experts. i'm dead serious here... bail out now. cut your losses. if you insist on continuing, definitely join the listserver. not that its that helpful. good luck, miker

Hi It sounds like you are still having an interpolation problem. Here's what I do with a new animation..... Set up the character the way you want at say frame 5... move to say frame 20 and click the Figure square to select all of the figure body parts and props then click the "+" to create keyframes for all the body parts and props. If are using spline interpolation (green keyframes) change them to linear (brown keyframes). Even using linear you sometimes need to add additional keyframes to control the character. If you have additional keyframes past frame 20 this will not work. You will need to click the Figure square of frame 5 to select all of the body parts and props, then copy and paste the keyframes at frame 20. To do this you need to select all of the body parts and props like you did at frame 5 or you will only set a keyframe for the body parts and props you have selected. The thing to remember is every parameter of every body part and prop can be animated......so if you don't want something to move you need to set a keyframe for that item. Hope this helps some and I haven't totally confused you. Ed

Having wandered through the land mine that is Poser animation, Ive found that the best way to approach this is one body part at a time. Go through your animation and set your largest body parts -- hips, abdomen, and chest -- first, and click on the "add keyframe" button only after youve set "body", not "body parts". Stop and check it for rough movement. If it looks good at this point, then work out from there to the arms, neck, and head. If youre doing any mouth movements, do them last (trust me on this one).

That's spline interpolation for you. You can put in a "Break Spline" so that the past won't affect the future. Or put two identical keys in successive frames to get the spline to stay constant but avoid the abrupt corner. Splines are tricky for beginners.

When using Poser to generate output for kiseake files (which requires precision) I have found that creating an animation of frames to a series of BMP files results in noticable differences in the position of the character in each frame when compared to the same frames when selected and rendered individually. I think it is something of a bug but live with it by rendering as individual frames manually.

Thank you all for your replies and help. What I am really having trouble with is holding poses. I'm going to try some of these suggestions and let you know. Thanks again, Chris