Hi- Anyone know if it is possibnle to time-reverse poser Keyframes? In otherwords can you take keyframes and run them backwards? Thanks. Aharon

No, I can't think of a way of doing this except by laboriously copying and pasting. It'd be a good idea for a python script though. This is an example of how Poser hasn't kept up on the animation front, it's so obvious that we'd need this sort of thing but the animator's tools haven't changed since Poser 3 and I don't suppose they will in Poser 5 either (if it exists)...

I suppose one could export the animation as a BVH file, feed it into Life Forms and reverse it there, then import the reversed BVH back into Poser. That would take care of broad animations like body movement, but it wouldn't reverse morph target animations, such as lipsync or facial expressions.

You could key-frame everything and move them physically in the graph editor, perhaps onto some blank frames at the end then slide the whole lot back in line. Trouble is, the numbers at the top don't line up too well. I get around this by reversing my frames in Flash after output....

Oh sod it, before the sycophants get in - of course Poser 5 exists, I'm just pissed off because I haven't seen it yet! and from what we've been told it's going to be an amazing upgrade, whther it adds anything to the animators arsenal remains to be seen, we might get a few crumbs but the improved renderer will be welcome. Personally, there are two apps that interest me at the moment, Discreet's Plasma - seems this will be able to export morph targets to w3d format; and Carrara 2, yes it can import Daz figures but sounds like you'll have to bone them yourself. Neither of these have demos available until the end of June....

'Tis a pity you weren't able to attend hauksdottir's Bay Area Poser Party. It appears that kupa brought something for show-and-tell ....

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=746961&Reply=747897#17

Attached Link: http://www.1st-shock.com/sensual.htm

That's a masterful display of character interaction, saxon. Thanks for sharing.

Lifeforms is the easy solution for this
i do it all the time.

Grumble Grumble - yeah I figured it had to be done the hard way... Thanks. Aharon

Thanks Little Dragon...

Right. Forgot to say cool animation, saxon - jut a bit wrapped up in my own poser woes - did yopu just reverse the animationframes there (did you run the movie backwards)? Aharon

I know the feeling, I've had 5 lock-ups today. Thanks for the kind words. As to the reverse frames, that was done in Flash, copy frames, paste, reverse frames. Wouldn't it be good if we had that capability in Poser...

Aharon and Saxon, Wish I had better news for you, but unfortunately there isn't a simple solution for copying keyframes and inverting or reversing them. The keyframe editor does let you manually use an alt click at the figure level to select every keyframe for that figure and then drag/copy those keyframes into another location on the timeline. Likely a python script would be a good tool here. Wish there were more animators out there pushing Poser into production, the feedback really does help us grow the app. Kupa

As an animator with a poser movie in production
I advise you to keep developing and improving posers animation export/hosting
abilty with other, apps like the new partnership with VUE announced today
Ive posted my trailer in Cinema 4DXl forums outside of renderosty and they are at a total loss as to how im doing it

im loving it!!! :-)

Thanks for the 2 cents everyone. Wolf359 - where can i see the trailer? Aharon

Steve, there's a quicker way! On the graph editor pallette, when a figure is loaded, click on the bold letters line of the figure, everything below it associated with that figure becomes selected, select all elements, click add key-frames and then drag the whole lot over to where it needs to be. Of course it needs to be done with every figure and prop. Apart from the erotic stuff, (ahem) I'm creating a movie with a group of others that'll be shown at Dragon con (I know, I know Wolf, I went along with Bob's idea!). I'm currntly faking animated reflections to use in the movie, faking point lights, and faking radiosity, it's fun though, working out new ideas.

Attached Link: http://66.70.166.29/promo/roughcut2.wmv

saxon, concerning the reflections, what approach are you using? I experimented with reflections in Poser myself, little more than a month ago. And point lights, for that matter. I really miss my trueSpace omni-lights.

Hey there- Saxon- How does that help you reverse keyframes? Wolf359 - Some of that stuff looks really nice, and I like a lot of the effects. The only critique I have is that sometimes the character gestures don't quite match up with the emotion in their voice - this, of course, is coming from someone who does his best to stay away from talking/character animation for that very reason. I'm not great at that, so take anything I say with a bag of salt. For example, when the woman says "is THIS what you wanted?" - that would be a good place to punctuate the words with body motion - also her face should be angry - One of the great thinmgs about mimic is that you can use facial expressions and it won't interfere (for the most part) with mimic's functioning. All in all - looking good. Aharon

thansk for having a look i have all thos poser scene fileand cinmea 4dZxl fie carefull cataloged and burned to CD to revisit and retask for the final movie.

but my sons are out for the summer as of today so my schedual may be rather hectic in the next few months

thanks again :-)

My pleasure. Good luck.

Aharon, frames 12345 could then be 54321 but, you would have to make sure that the whole horizontal line is keyframed. I've just tried it and it does work. Wolf, I'm mapping an image strip from an avi of the Poser movie with Gif Construction Set onto a square, I know how many frames there are so I set the square (now a rectangle of course) at the first frame at the top, go to the last frame of the movie and move the rectangle up to the top. The movie is made from a camera placed directly opposite to the eventual one. The movie on the image strip then plays in a similar manner to a flip book. Replacing a window and setting the transparency correctly the movie apears to have the reflection mirrored in the window. Of course you have to find a way of hiding the unwanted parts of the image strip. The same method works for TV mirrors etc. The lights are much easier, just one up and one down with the area needed to glow set to a full reflection setting...

Hmmm. You have Pro Pack, right? You could place each frame on a separate rectangle, and keyframe the transparency values to maximum on the unwanted frames.

I don't know if you saw these earlier; I documented my experiment in Poser reflections over in the 3D/2D Animation forum. Maybe you'll find it useful.
Less boring animation test -- Poser reflections
Poser reflections -- Take 2
Poser Reflections -- The Final Cut
Poser Reflections -- Special Edition

see if you can get the free copy of lifeform 3.5 that was given away on a magazine CD a while back
( anyone remember which MAG??)

animate your character in poser
export the animation Data as BVH
open the BVH in lifeforms
select all frames and choose "reverse" from the file menu.
export the new reversed BVH for use in poser.

anyone remember which MAG??

It was Digit, Wolf. Issue #47, May 2002. I got my copy. :)

From the website:
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Great info LD!!

Little Dragon, yes I did and very impressive they were too. I needed to have a reflection in the glass in a window and I've found the image strip method works well. Your idea for separate rectangles might come in useful if there's no easy way to disguise the bit of the strip you don't want to see. In my case it's hidden in the wall but yours would work for a TV. Guys, the current edition of Digit (#49) has a copy of Vue d'esprit 2 free, the forthcoming one should be interesting as they're celebrating their 50th edition and there's usually good goodies to be had... Wolf, you had any success with that freebie motion capture from http://www.geeware.com/ I finally sorted out the installation but when I tried exporting one of the sample as a BVH file the figure in Poser disappeared completely! Thanks Nance is that the pz3 file you've got open or the bvh export?

Saxon,
im at a loss brother!!
i cant open the exported BVH in Poser ,Cinema
and Lifeforms gives me an I/O error !!!

OH well :-(

We'll get there eventually! When all else fails it's time to read the 'ing manual...!

Send the BVH to me, I'll try importing in MilkShape. I won't be able to get it out of MilkShape, mind you ....

Don't know if you mean me, Little Dragon, but I've already reversed it by hand. Thanks Though! Aharon

I was addressing Wolf, actually. Drifting back on-topic, I've just realized that MilkShape has a keyframe reversal tool. Works surprisingly well. Now, if someone ever writes a BVH export plugin ....

Wolf, regarding the BVH:

I was able to import it into Poser, as-is. The hip's trans settings place the figure well off-camera. So I could see what was going on during the animation, I zeroed them. The results weren't pretty.

Remember, much like most Poser file formats, a BVH is a simple text file, which can be opened and modified in any text editor.

Do a find-and-replace. Replace all instances of "EndSite" with "End Site". This may solve your compatibility problem. I can't vouch for Cinema and Lifeforms, but it fixed the import problem that MilkShape had.

Take a look at the Hierarchy section in the first half of the file, and compare it to a functional BVH file. I think the parent-child structure is botched up. And all the offset values are zero.

Maybe if the Hierarchy section is fixed, it'll work. I can't really say.

to fix this in life form would require resetting the joint angles
for each frame since the animation data is already applied to the skeleton with the incorrect joint angles for poser characters.
and using the auto scale import option in the propack made no
Difference.

frankly it would be easier for me to just import some background
footage into lifeforms and manually rotoscope a working mike or vicky BVH skeleton to the footage by keyframing a matching pose every 45 frames or so.

I wonder if whether we wrote to the guy and told him what a brilliant idea it was and would he mind making it compatible with Poser, (I think I'm turning into Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh)....