Is anyone who is doing alot of serious animation in Poser using Lifeforms to create the animation file (bvh). If so, is it a difficult program to learn? Thanks, Chris

wolf359 is doing some serious work. He recently released an animation pack in the Marketplace, created with Life Forms.

You can download a demo version of Life Forms from Credo Interactive and try it yourself for 20 days.

Hi I don't use Lifeforms or bvh motions at all. That's not to say that I wouldn't use them, but I haven't found many that fit into the type of animations I normally do. I tried the Lifeforms demo, and did like what I could do with it, but I felt the price at that time was too high. I do all my animations in Poser basically from scratch or modifying(sp)some of my existing animations. I think I've learned more doing things this way. Poser can be very frustating at times.... it still frustates the **ll out of me at times, but as everyone will tell you......character animation is a patient man's game. Ed

I've recently just gotten it and yes it is made just for serious animation. You're looking at some serious cash for the package and the premade bvh's are great but using someone else's bvh's is either really good or entirely worthless and the variety of libraries out there is dismal. I've used it enough to say that for body movement animation it rocks. But we are talking gross body movement here not hands or facial stuff. For that, Poser is still great. Quadrapeds are also well treated and making good walk cycle's are very possible. If you have specific needs hit up wolf359 otherwise try out the demo. I use Lightwave with PPP with lipsincing done in Poser using LipSync and trying out textPuppet for some things. Here's the workflow: Do all your blocking and body animations in lifeforms then export the .bvh (pose file) Bring it into Poser and apply the .bvh along with any lipsync pose bring in and animate posable props. host the scene in Lightwave or Max with PoserProPack bring in the rest of the scene elements render animation. sync audio with animation.

That is bascially my workflow except substitute
Cinema4DXL 7 for LW and MAX
and any lip synching is done manually
since im on a MAC.

Thank you all for the advice... jamball77 - what is TextPuppet? And you say "I've used it enough to say that for body movement animation it rocks. But we are talking gross body movement here not hands or facial stuff. For that, Poser is still great." Do you mean Lifeforms is really only good for gross movements and Poser is good for the fine tuning? Thanks, Chris

You do skeletal animation in Life Forms: body-movement stuff like arms, legs, head, etc. Fine-detail stuff, like face and hand animations, are done in Poser using morphs, not skeletons.

TextPuppet is an alternative to LipSinc's Mimic. It generates animations synced to whatever text you input, combined with speech synthesis.

Little Dragon, Thanks for clearing that up for me and thanks for the links. Chris