I'm visiting here from the Rhino forum. Can you help me with a quick question. My 17-year old son wants to take an Animation and Modeling course at the college next year (using Maya). His one year of Rhino experience satisfies the modeling prereq. It is suggested he become acquainted with animating bipds and quadripeds before the class starts. They use Animation Master for the basic courses, but I don't see it being used anywhere. How about Poser? Using only the wooden maniquin (sp?), are the Poser basics hard to pick up? What is the learning curve like? Sure, becoming expert takes time, but he needs only to become familiar with the concepts. What do you think? Now, the Poser forum is probably the wrong place to get an objective opinion, but try :) thanks

Poser is probably the easiest to start with. It takes around two hours to have the first nice animations ready.

I'm a bit of a Poser evangelist ;) , but have to put up a cautionary word here. Poser's ease of use might actually constitute a handicap for someone who doesn't understand the principles of animation from scratch, but who is trying to become familiar with them. If your son is going to learn Maya, he will need to learn how to place the feet so that they don't slide and so that they look like they are bound by gravity and the weight and momentum of the body supported. Any program with a walkpath, IK, walk-designer, whatever, will give him a nice walk cycle for a portfolio, but not the knowledge of how to make a walking figure. Animation requires observation, among other skills. We can tell by a walk the gender, age, health, and mental/emotional state of the walker. Observation of "fidgets" will tell us a lot, too, about what each of us uniquely human. Androids never trip over cracks in the sidewalk, worry about whether their hair is perfect, limp slightly because of tight shoes, check their zipper, fondle a worry stone, or pick their nose in public. Animation is from the Latin word "anima" meaning soul or breath, and is the process of giving life to something. Any program which automates that procedure and makes it mechanical will not teach animation, but merely kinetics. Movement is NOT life. (And, yes, I've been a published columnist on this subject.) I'd recommend that your son make some flipbooks, where he sketches each frame, rather than have the computer interpolate. He will get a much better feel for how to divide motion by time. He'll get a feeling for key frames, and WHAT makes them the keys. He should also learn by this that what looks good as a still might unbalance the fluidity of the motion completely. I'd also recommend that he experiment with different animation styles. The extreme exaggeration of cartoons is done for a purpose, as is the restraint of some anime. Even if he intends to go into a particular field, he should try to be familiar with a range of styles and techniques. (17 is too young to set limits on a career niche.) A further note: besides bipeds and quadrupeds, we have the undulating movement of snakes and mermaids, the hop-plop of frogs, the waving rows of feet in a millipede (useful for multi-oared ships), the spider which tucks its legs up and rolls down the sand dunes, crabs which scuttle sideways, and all sorts of other ways to manuever across a landscape. What will he do when he has to animate an angry peg-legged pirate in a hurry? Most people walking with a crutch have it on the wrong side so that their body sways back and forth more than it needs to... not good if you have a parrot on one shoulder! So your son will need to learn to think as well as observe. Eeks, I'm getting wordy... but I'm also going to suggest learning a bit of ham-acting and role-playing. If he needs to create and animate a 1200 pound troll, it will be better if he can imagine sore knees, lugubrious tread, and deep impressions in soft earth (similar to the feeling we get walking in sand for hours). A furtive drunk, a fox in stiletto heels, or a 900 year-old witch? (And yes, my cat is vastly amused... as well as safely under the table.) The hardest creature I've had to animate wasn't the dancing satyr with digitigrade legs.. but a multi-tentacled dungeon monster. Why? Motive and personality. I could imagine dancing backwards and put some joyful friskiness into it (tail and ear-flicks), but what goes through the mind of some slimy thing getting his information about the world through suction cups? (shudder) That's part of the job. Poser is an utterly fantastic tool, but I'm not sure that it is a good first program for someone who is serious about learning the basics. Carolly

Carolly, you've thought about this :) I understand your point that learning and understanding animation is more than just learning how "to drive" an animation application. It is like the difference between arithmetic and math, between cooking and gastronomy, between mowing the lawn and landscape art, between talking and orating, between ... (a bit carried away...its early morning and not all the cells are aligned). But, right now he has to learn the mechanics of animation. Are you saying that Poser is different than other animation apps; that it does too much for you? so he won't learn the basic mechanics of animation? What is different about Poser that doesn't make it a good first program to learn the basics? What disqualifies Poser as a good way to learn animation? Again, remember you are dealing with the naive because I dno't know Poser or similar apps. Or, are you saying that simply learning the mechanics of Poser (or any animation app) will not teach you the 'art' of animation. So, the problem is not Poser but the approach? Hopefully, this is what the course will teach in the fall...using Maya as a convenient vehicle. randy I am completely ignorant of Poser versus other animation apps. Sticking with just the mechanics of configuring a software program to display animation For the learning the application mechanics of animation, are you saying that Poser makes animation easier than other packages? so, he won't learn the mechnical concepts

Poser is designed to be easy to create and animate characters and props. It's basically a "toy" of sorts. If he needs to learn how to animate in Maya, I recommend getting Maya PLE, available free @ their website. http://www.aliaswavefront.com Its great for learning, and comes with some great tutorials. Although, the resulting renders and animations are blemished with the maya watermark, it is still a fully functioning Maya as far as interface goes. Check into that. I'd say Poser is more for entertainment than professional use.

oooh. sorry about the straggling sentences you weren't supposed to see. :)

EvoShandor, Poser is definately for professional use! The major flaw is the internal renderer, so final output should be in another program if you are making movies. However, for posing, visualizing, and animating it is capable of solving a lot of problems very quickly in industries where time is essential. What concerns me here is the learning process, and whether Poser would make it too easy to circumvent some of the decisions which must be made. Randy, Poser is unique, although other programs are starting to overlap its features. It is like Bryce in that you can get a passable image within minutes... before spending the better part of a week perfecting it. There are lots of dials and morph targets for the more advanced figures: tweaking is easy if you already know what to look for. Let's use an obvious example... "Cowboy Mike". Most people here simply dress him in cowboy duds, and pose him with a preset pose from the library. He doesn't look like a cowboy to anybody who has been near a ranch, but it is good enough and fast: within a day you can find plenty of props, clothes, poses, make your selections and render up a scene. If you have some experience and a good eye, you'll know that walking in heels changes the stance and the stride, riding a horse for years permanently affects the legs, and sitting on heels with spurs under the haunches because of the absence of chairs on the range gives a man balance... ALL will affect that cowboy's walk and stance even if he is wearing a tuxedo. He'll probably have a plug of tobacco in his cheek, squint lines from the sun (I have yet to see a cowboy wearing sunglasses), and fingers gnarled from roping cattle and tying barbed wire... these will affect the subtle movements of hands and head. So lets take "Cowboy Mike" and put him in Poser's Walk Designer... within seconds you have a 30 frame walk cycle... but it isn't a cowboy's walk. The dials say "power walk", "shuffle", "sneak", "strut"... but they don't say "bow-legged hobble on heels". An animator will have an idea of what makes a walk furtive or sexy and can set up key frames and proper transitions in the animation palettes to recreate Coburn's walk in "Waterhole #3"... but will your son be tempted by the easy way out or would he wrestle a graph to the ground in order to get the right look? Carolly

I'm fairly new to Poser, and I enjoy it a lot. I think it is a great tool and far more than a toy IF you also buy the Pro Pack. Still, Poser has a lot of quirks and limitations. While capable of doing some tremendously exciting and amazing things, to get the most of Poser, it seems that you really have to learns the ins and outs of the program, the vast majority of which are not documented. This means a fairly steep learning curve for the artist/perfectionist, a learning curve that could soon be irrelevant in view of the impending release of Poser 5. My advice: just get Animation Master. It will help your son the learning curve for his classes. Then, save up for Poser 5 because it looks like a real winner. I'm salivating over the enhanced animation capabilities! --Griff

Attached Link: http://annsartgallery.com

If I can chirp in here, I've not made an animation in poser yet, but have in Bryce. I have Maya PLE. If I understand right, you want your son to get a feel for animation software and processes before he goes to school and gets in the class that will teach him all of the above things. That said, I'm not sure Poser would be a disservice. I would not recommend Maya PLE to dive into animation for a pre school animation project. Maya has a steep learning curve and that's what the instructor is for. I would recommend Maya PLE to get familiar with what he is about to do. You are limited on time, so my feeling is that Poser will help him learn what key frames are about and he can quickly creat animations using the walk designer built in with poser then pick it apart. Poser is affordable for this and the best bang for the buck on people animation. I also agree with the comments above about observation and flip books. No matter how much of a computer wiz a person is, they have to be an artist to do it right. Many of the folks here have graphite, bronze, oil, acrylic, etc as well as CG art. I can watch my sister do anatomically correct horses, and my brother make photo perfect oils (right down to camera distortions..lol) but when I see both combined into a full art form, my jaw drops and that's the key to success... capturing the audience.

Tell your son to buy Poser and spend YOUR hard earned money on business courses. He'll be able to make anything he wants using Poser. And nobody will be the wiser. Poser will let him be productive without special training. I'm a recruiter for the largest staffing agency in the country. Your son needs to gain as much business training and experience that he can get before trying his hand at a "fun" job. He'll need something to fall back on. All day long I interview highly educated people who can't find work and are coming to me asking for $7.00 factory jobs because they are desperate. Now is not the time for him to play around with his education decisions in a willy nilly manner. You're only young once. You only get one shot at having your parents pay for your schooling. DON'T PISS IT AWAY ON PIPE DREAMS OF HAVING A COOL JOB! There's plenty of time for 3D stuff after you get a real career under your belt. ScottA The secret to life is having choices.

Recruiters don't know anything. If they could predict the future, they wouldn't have placed all those folks in dotcoms a few years back. Recruiters just respond to current market conditions and have zero visibility into the future. Current conditions are not a predictor of future conditions.

Have your son follow his muse. There is always time to buckle down and get serious. By the time he can complete his education, the current hot undergraduate degree will be completely passe. Focus on learning and enjoying the ride.

--Griff

Poser is primarely a human figure composition tool. With poser you buy the ability to make human figures, dress them, put hair on their heads and props in their hands and then pose them in a certain way. This gives you as result a "tin soldier" that you can export and use in another more mature program such as 3DS Max or Lightwave. Building a human figure is what Poser excels at, not at rendering or animating.

Poser is easy to learn if you stick to this human figure approach. Poser is more difficult if you wish to dig into the more advanced technologies that it covers: file formats, UV-mapping, CR2-editing, Python scripting etc.

Another often overlooked difference between Poser and other 3D modelling tools is that poser does not implement a true XYZ-world as e.g. 3DS Max. The approach of Poser is a bone-figure-relative-addressing method. This means that movements of the bones of the figure are dictated by relative position of a master-bone (slave-master as in a hierarchy). This can give odd results when trying to set-up a complex scene with many props. That is for me a big reason to split activites in Poser and other 3D applications based on my previously mentioned "tin soldier" approach.

Hope this makes sense...

BTW, did you known that Maya is used by ILM for Star wars II ?

"Have your son follow his muse. There is always time to buckle down and get serious. By the time he can complete his education, the current hot undergraduate degree will be completely passe. Focus on learning and enjoying the ride." I wish I lived on your planet. It sounds much nicer than this one. ;-) ScottA

I'm sorry that I consider Poser a "toy", no offense meant towards any devoted Poser users, I love Poser. Its just that If I were going to be taking a class animation in Maya. I would sure as hell want to look @ Maya PLE, regardless of the "steep learning curve" everyone associates with it. If I wanted to prep for a Maya animation course, I wouldn't think to get prepared for it by "playing" around in Poser. I'm sure if this kid is familiar with modeling in Rhino, that will ease some of the strain of Maya's "steep learning curve" so animation can more easily be picked up. I condiser Maya's interface alot more intuitively designed than 3DS Max 4.0 (we'll see about 5.0-I hear some good things about it)and thus easier to use. Plus how many job req's out there do you see with the requirement "must have at least three years experience using Poser"? I haven't seen one. While Poser is fun as a standalone, I only consider it a supplement to the core necessity of a Maya/3DS type package.

"I wish I lived on your planet. It sounds much nicer than this one. ;-)" You do live here. All you have to do is open your eyes. Seriously, the economoy is a cyclical thing. To tell somebody who has no plans to enter the workforce today to "don't piss it away" misses the point that you have no idea today what will be waiting for this young man in 4-6 years. You just don't. All the highly qualifed people who can't find jobs today because of the current crunch will most likely be doing okay by then, if not sooner. The ironic (and illogical) thing is that you are telling this kid to follow the path of all the highly qualified people who you can't seem to find jobs for these days. Doesn't this indicate that there is no sure-fire formula for success? FYI -- here's my background: S.B. EE MIT, law degree, 9 years experience in IP and currently holding a senior management position in the legal department of a Fortune 50 company (at age 35). One might say that it is hypocritical for me, who has succeeded quite well by taking a more pragmatic approach, to instruct somebody else to follow their muse. The fact is, however, that the key to my success thus far (and I hope into the future) is the creative streak that nobody can teach you and is most often retarded by others' efforts to make you conform. Personally, I believe that anybody who takes the time to follow his/her muse while he/she is still young will have a tremendous advantage over the "paint-by-numbers" crowd. If you see it, and believe it, and REALLY try to make it happen, whatever the outcome, you will be a richer person for having tried, and you will be better prepared to meet the world and make it your own.

Agree that the current market is often a bad advisor for career choices. When I graduated from high school, my interest was in engineering. In 1973, engineers were lined up collecting unemployment checks. The common advice?..."engineering is a dead field". By graduation day, the engineering boom had hit and there were more jobs than bodies.

Would like to comment on the OT but interesting discussion between ScottA and grypho...
Both gentlemen want your son to take the best career decision. It is a merit to them both that they came forward to defend their position.
The critical question is " Do I have the talent?". If yes, go for it. If no, let reality kick in. We all had dreams of becoming an astronaut, a successfull "Indiana Jones" archeologist, a famous sportsman. In the end this ususally is not the outcome.
Make sure that the career decision you make gives you enough money to make a living and that you like the job. After all, most of your life will be spend by doing your profession.
I am an engineer and my job decision was based on economical grounds, because in 1985 Europe had a big recession. I now have enough money to do 3D as a hobby. I sincererly am dubious if I could make the same money as an artist (I am actually very certain:)

Sorry for taking this kind of an OT direction. I deal with this subject all day long and it's kind of a touchy subject with me. grypho has no idea that the way I landed in recruiting was not by schooling. But by managing businesses ranging from factories to H.R. departments over the past 15 years. So I'm not exactly what you'd call a "traditional" recruiter. I'm more experienced and worldly in the business world than most traditional recruiters. That's why they hired me in the first place. So I understand why he said what he said. All thing being equal. He's basically correct. However, all things are not equal in this case. Following the course of business schooling will not gaurantee you a good job. You still need to start at the bottom and pay your dues. However. Dreaming away your youth on pipe dreams is almost guaranteeing that you will struggle to earn a living. Business savy people have the CHOICE of trying to break into an industry that's a pipe dream like professional acting, musician, 3D animation, owning their own business,etc. If they fail. They can always go back and earn a living the not-so-fun way. Dreamers with no business education as a kid have NO choices if the dream doesn't come true. Sorry for the preaching. I just see too many people wasting their lifes away during the day. Then come to me to save them. And it kind of gets to me after a while. ScottA

ScottA, don't apologize for the direction of this thread. It has become required reading for my son and its been great. Its not often that a young person can listen in on a discussion that is so relevant with contributions from a variety of seasoned views.

My pardon, but I do not consider business savvy a difficult task to p/u. Having worked a "business" job for a several years, I decided to leave it to persue a career doing something I actually enjoyed (Animation)and glad I did. Living a life in which you loathe waking up everyday because you have a job you hate, is no way to live at all. I don't understand why anyone would discourage a person from persuing a career (degree) that they find interesting, in order to be "safe" with a "business" job (not that there are, on some planet those who like "business"). True, today's market is not so hot, but I would not suggest leaving something you want to do behind for something you think you should do because you are afraid. A job in the "business world" w/o a focalized education is a difficult rut to get out of if you don't want to be there. People stuck in that rut end up as your middle managers who have been desensitized to a boring life and no passion for their career.(Not that all middle mgr's are like this) Animators/Graphic Artists, etc. are semi-highly sought after positions(and potentially fairly profitable ones too). And generally, due to the skills required to BE in these fields, you will find that a person in such a job, loves their job, and would never ever feel sorry for persuing a career in it, regardless of pay. Sorry for the rant there.

when I was at school I was told to toe the party line and get a boring bog standard job, not the dream job I actually wanted, I wanted to be an artist, but I listened to & gave in to the people who supposedly knew what they were talking about. I've spent the last 17 years paying for their mistake, don't let anyone tell you, you have to go into a business if you don't want to, follow your heart & dreams, if it doesn't work out then at least you tried & wont spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened. Rob