What I like to do for animations is render what I need from MAX, then insert the characters into it with Poser. It's a pretty painless process, even camera movement never seems to be a problem, but one thing that might be totally simple (but isn't - at least for me) is getting shadows to show up. Since there is no ground plane (it's in the AVI file), the shadows just won't show up. When I work with it, I can get the shadows posistioned right with the figure, but they are never in the rendering output. Does anyone know a way I can fix this? Shadows are pretty important, otherwise, the audience immediately knows that it was two different programs being used to compile the scenes, and that just steals the effect. Thanks in advance.

Someone posted a tutorial on this already, but the essence of it is that you save your background movie as a .mov file, then apply it as a texture to a plane. From what you describe, it sounds like you'd be applying it to something like Nerd's backdrop prop, but whatever you use, make sure the frame count of the background movie texture matches the frame count of the Poser animation.

Attached Link: http://homepages.tesco.net/~thistle/

If there is no camera movement in your AVI footage I would recommend matching Poser's Ground Plane to fit the video footage ground. (May need some work, re-sizing, rotating, texturing and lighting, but it can be done!) Then your Poser characters would appear to drop a shadow as they move.

My wee website has a few tips on using Poser's Ground Plane with photos than can be successfully applied to Digital Video footage too. (Plus plenty of Ground Plane textures to download!)

Virtualsite's advice above is very sound too - you need to set the number of frames in Poser before you load your AVI.

Poser's ability to load images and AVI files, including full-screen DV movies, in the background is nothing short of amazing! Love it!

Dave :-)

Sadly, VS, Poser for Windows has no Quicktime support. Can't export it, can't import it. It don't wanna know nuttin' about it. It's a HUGE shortcoming of the windows version.

Well, I would imagine an .avi would work the same way, right? It's still applying animation as a texture.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?Who=the3dwizard&fileid=332&key=677128

You can also make the backgound and ground plane green or blue then use a video composer to blend the to videos, (Poser and Background). I use a program called Video deLuxe, (www.magix.com). It is only about ~$50 US and has a lot of features. I did a simple green screen test with the software which you can view here: http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?Who=the3dwizard&fileid=332&key=677128 I did not render the Poser figure with shadows to save time but it should work with shadows. I rendered the Poser avi with a green background. Then load the background AVI into video deLuxe. On the next track I loaded the Poser avi. The I dropped a Green Screen icon onto the poser avi and that was it. I was real simple to mix. Later, Phillip

You'd think so, n'est pas? I, however, cannot for the life of me find a way to apply an .AVI as a texture. And believe me, I've tried. Anyone have any success doing this on a Windows box?

I'm running the Pro Pack under Windows and I've noticed that it has an extra checkbox, under Surface Materials, labelled "animateable" that's not available in the standard Poser 4 version. Perhaps that's what's causing the confusion?

desler, maybe you should consider purchasing the Pro Pack and rendering everything inside of Max? (Not sure how effective the process works though, with characters and such). Any Max/Pro Pack users out there that can help?

Dave

P.S. Thanks Phillip for the info on Video deLuxe. Will check it out! :-)

Even with the Pro Pack the only thing you can animate as far as a textures are the color, highlight, ambient and reflective colors. You can't change texture maps during an animation. Hope Poser 5 addresses this. The only thing I have tried that even worked somewhat was to create a long plane like a film strip and create a texture using the sequencial frames from the animation and place this strip in front of the box and use magnets to squish the strip on each side of the box. Then move the strip along the xtrans on each frame to create the illusion of an avi. I also used constant interpolation. It does work, but it's hard to set up and get the magnet falloff zones to work right. When I set it up I used it on a tv prop which gave me a little room to get the strip squished before it cleared the prop. With the ability of exporting to the other programs (I use Cinema and World Builder) now using the propack, I doubt I would ever try it again. Too much work for something that should be very simple if we could just use an animation for a texture. Ed

Thanks Ed for clearing that up. I was hoping that it would be possible to use an AVI as a texture. Yep, maybe Poser 5?

I remember seeing a Lightwave anim where they placed footage of two actors "inside" of a 3D helicopter, mapped on to a flat plane. (Visible from the front) Looked very cool!

Poser is still cool though - I've been playing around with Digital Video recently, and was very happy to find that Poser can load full-screen PAL DV video as a background AVI. Great fun!

Dave :-)

Even with the Pro Pack the only thing you can animate as far as a textures are the color, highlight, ambient and reflective colors.

And the transparency settings. You can animate stuff fading in and out.

Oops... I forgot about the transparency. Ed