I love Poser, but sometimes I wonder if there is a better program for animating and posing. It can take a hours just to get a still image posed properly and an animation can take days. Is there anything out there that is more user friendly? If so can you you use Poser characters with it?

Short of motion capture or some telemetric input device, I can't think of an easier way to set up poses and animations.

Making use of Poser's wide variety of pre-made pose files can help. You might not find exactly the pose you need, but if you use something close, then it's only a manner of tweaking it for the desired results.

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Come to think of it, a bipedal or quadrupedal armature rigged with potentiometers would make a great accessory for Poser. The stop-motion wizards at ILM used something like that to animate the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park film while they were learning the software. Create an application that can read the signal over a USB port, and then save the results to a BVH file, and you'd have hands-on control over your figures. I wonder how much something like that would cost?

Little Dragon, Bushi made one of those and it worked using Python scripting. The post is an old one in the Poser forum.

I noted that it does not create x,z, or z trans movements for the figure and that those would have to be done manually in Poser. From what I can see the real benefits would be that it would enable people who have difficulty with interpolation. This program strikes me as the equivalent of tracing paper. I'll try it out though. Are there any other low cost mocap programs that we can look forward to on the horizon?

Attached Link: MIke 2 speaks

*"I love Poser, but sometimes I wonder if there is a better program for animating and posing. It can take a hours just to get a still image posed properly and an animation can take days. Is there anything out there that is more user friendly? If so can you you use Poser characters with it?"* Have you learned to use your poser graph editor?? I find it one of the easiest and responsive character posing and animation tools around. and ive tried HASH animation MAster( ArrgHHH!!) and ive used rigged character in lightwave and cinema4DXL. as far as animation No program Ive seen animates **FULLY ARTICULATED** REALISTIC HUMANS with the ease of poser and animation do **NOT** take "days" if you are using the graph editor properly. I Hand keyed this animation **( See link)** in a matter of minutes after applying a MIMIC file for the lipsynch. even if you use BVH files you **WILL** Need to Adjust them sothere is no avoiding learning the **POSER GRAPH** editor for character animation on Poser. Good luck **-wolf359 founding member of "the 12 animators"-**

I remember putting up a piffling little freebie once, right next door to "900 free poses!", tens of thousands went for the free 900 poses, bugger all went for mine (I think it was a curtsey for Av Lab), nothing wrong in that but it does beg the question why some people find posing so difficult. I suspect it's because they're still trying to work with the mouse on the figure in the document window. So, Bob - chuck away the manual and start using the dials, work from the hip and feet first and then out from the hip, once you've got your first pose right, fine tune and key-frame with the graph editors just like Wolf said (and which, incidentally don't work quite as well in P5 as they did in PPP - they don't change automatically from parameter to parameter like they used to)...

I don't think there is a single program that comes as complete as Poser is packaged. Every other program requires rigging skeletons, setting hierarchies, grouping polygons, and assigning textures. Poser has taken out that much labor for the figures available. And with online communities and brokers, that's alot of figures available. There are some specialty programs, such as RenderMan, but that requires tweeking. Poser is way cheaper!

I thank everyones input. I have tried a couple of other programs also and have found that Poser was the best so far. I was just wondering if there was anything better out there. One last quick question, I don't have the Pro-Pack is it as good as I hear?

Yes---get propack because you can import native poser files WITH textures right into max, lw and c4d. It works flawlessly in c4d, don't know about the other programs. Poser now also has the same import plug-in for Maya and Vue Desprit. so Poser is definitely seen by the industry as an important tool and the only one of its kind in existence.