Well, first draft of the script is complete, has been for almost a week. I've been showing it to trusted family/friends for input/reactions. So far, all is positive. (Hmmm...) Will be adding a bit for second draft, but not much. Then, Christmas Day, going to have a read through with family playing the parts to see if it all fits in with the timing I had planned scene per scene. As far as working with the software, namely Poser, I have become quite discouraged regarding conforming clothing. My main model is tweaked to my specs, and the clothing models are not. I am not a modeller by any means, so this requires me to contort stretch rotate and basically murder each piece of clothing my character needs. Then, in animation, it pops out anyway. It's driving me up the wall, and I don't know how to get around it. Any help would be hot. -darth_Logice

Hi Folks! Darth, I have some suggestions that might help, but I should caution you that they will create more work for you. In essence, create your animation as a series of stills (which is what animation is anyway). That way you can control the exact positioning of the conforming figures in each image. Move each figure a tad in each new scene, render out the scene as a .bmp or .tif (or .pct if you're on a Mac) and repeat the operation until you have a complete series on frozen movements. Save all your stills to a single folder, open the folder in Premiere or Avid Cinema, and create your animation there. You'll have to decide what kind of motion speed you'll want--but short clips can be convincing even at playback speeds as slow as 10 frames/sec. If you don't have movie creation/editing software (which you absolutely must have if you're serious about computer animation), there's lots of shareware floating around that allows you to batch render sequenced or numbered stills into an .AVI or .QT movie file. My favorite is one for the Mac called MovieMaker. BTW: if you're going to do convincing animations with this method, you should also have an image-editing program like Photoshop, Painter or PSP. You'll need to apply a slight motion blur to each still image before you process them as a movie. In real life the human eye sees a series a blurred stills that the brain processes into a vision of continuous motion. I'm not a champion animator, but these techniques has worked for me. I Hope they help. Peter (Dr Zik)

Thanks Peter, that does help! I hadn't thought about it that way, and I do have Premiere and Photoshop, so all is well. I actually plan on rendering animations as individual frames anyway, instead of directly to avi, so this won't be too much extra work. You have revitalized my intentions,thanks! -Darth_Logice

when i move the character mouth to match up sound file it matches perfect but then when i move an arm or leg it untweeks the mouth to god awfull ugly mess streching and pulling lips every which way help me wat to fustrated and not to metion hour of great work gone to *$%^&tt.

Darth, the only solution for you seems to be combining clothing with the person into 1 object. Here's a tutorial http://www.geocities.com/mr1_x_1/combine.htm & here http://www.users.fast.net/~ghastley/merge.htm . I don't see an easy alternative. I personally gave up for the most part on Poser animations of any length. The time spent fixing splines etc was killing my project. Now I use a dedicated character animation program for these task, then export to Poser to take advantage of the beautiful characters & power of user contributions. ZMan11: make more keyframes for the head only first, then mess with the body after. A cheap workaround would be to create extra frames, do a copy & paste of the head animation frames to the extra frame numbers, or perhaps paste to another figure, say the head only figure (provided it has all the same Morph Targets) then cut & paste back to the original head when your done messing with the body. Did this make sense? Pack