This is a repost of some stuff I learned a while back, after much desk-biting frustration, trying to import BVH.

They're not all my ideas - many have been trawled from long reading of the Poser forums. I'm assuming a basic knowledge of Poser and how to run python scripts.

1. If you haven't already, download and install the BVH Mixer python and Smoother pythons. Links to the latest versions can be found in the Renderosity Python Scripting forum.

2. Select Posing Camera and Skip Frames on the timeline. Bring your chosen character into the studio.

3. Check Figure/Use Limits. This removes a lot of the shoulder-hunching you get in BVH downloads.

4. Run BVH Mixer. Pick a BVH file to import. Unless your figure will be jumping around, check drop to floor. Press Go! and wait for the script to process the BVH. Close the python window and play the animation to see how it looks.

Next comes the tricky bit...!

1. If any limbs, etc seem to be at a strange angle, select the body part, click one of the arrows in the parameter dials and select Graph.

2. Make sure your graph is set to one of the joint rotations - bend, up/down, etc.

3. Select all keyframes. You do this by stretching the graph out so it's showing the full range of keyframes, then clicking and dragging on a clear spot in the graph window. Drag all the way to the end of the graph. Now shift-click in the blacked-out area, and drag all the way to the other side of the graph. The whole thing should now be black. With large animations, the graph can revert to unselected if you swing the cursor back onto it. Avoid this by clicking on a blank bit of the user interface once the cursor is off the graph.

4. Ctrl-click on the graph. Watching your figure carefully, move the selected keyframes up or down, till the figure's pose looks more natural. You may well need to do this for all rotations of all offending bodyparts, but after a little practise this takes only a few minutes.

5. Many free BVH downloads have glitches in them, where the figure will suddenly jerk for no reason. Find the affected bodypart(s) and look at the graph. It's often possible to cure the glitch simply by deleting the problem keyframes.

6. Although the figure is now in a more natural pose, it will often be trembling and jittery. You can cure this by running the Smoother script a couple of times. This removes any redundant "noise" keyframes.

TIP: before you do this, select the hip, go to the Object menu and tick Lock Actor. This stops the "pirouette" effect sometimes seen when hip rotations are smoothed.

1. If the BVH motion looks really jittery, it may be easier to skip step 10, and use Animation/Resample key frames. Setting this to 4 or 8 tends to get all the bumps out. Again, make sure you lock the hip first, particularly if the figure turns around during the animation,

FOR PAL COUNTRIES: Many BVH downloads seem to be for 30 FPS video, and look a little slow when applied to 25 FPS movies. To cure this, you need the brief help of a calculator.

1. Click somewhere on your figure's body. (You need to do this or you may end up retiming the Posing Camera, which is pointless!)

2. Go to Animation/Retime Animation.

3. With your calculator, take the length of the animation in frames and DIVIDE BY 1.2 - enter this number into the lower-right box in the Retime Animation window. Press OK. The animation will now be at its proper speed.

4. Enter this same number into the of window on the timeline, and press ENTER. You're asked, "Are you sure you want to delete some of your keyframes?". Click OK. The redundant keyframes at the end of the animation will now be deleted.

You can now save this BVH in the pose folder of your choice.

16)  To make a good thumbnail, use ctrl-g to remove the ground. Drag the preview window till it's just about square. Use the timeline pointer to get a frame that shows off a key movement of the animation. Use the posing camera to get a good angle, where the figure almost fills the preview window.

1. Press + in the library, and enter a name for your animation. Answer "no" when you're asked if you want to include morph channels, or the file will be huge. Make sure you select "Multi frame animation", and enter the number of frames into the "End frame" box.

UV mapping means you take a 3D model to pieces and lay them out flat like a tailor's pattern. You then save the model and an image of the flat pieces. You can use this image as the basis for painting a texture (in Photoshop, for example).

UVmapper is a popular program for doing this. A limited, freeware version is available.

Be aware that the early Poser models were a bit crude, and UV mapper can mess up the skeleton model - it did for me! But you can re-map the skeleton with a bit of work.

Well, blow me down, never noticed that before! You learn something new about Poser every day!

I think what you're seeing is part of Posette's neck, not the catsuit neck. I've just looked at the catsuit just now and I can't see any extra stuff above the collar.

If you want to stretch the collar of the catsuit itself, there are plenty of tutorials on making morph targets at Renderosity - search for Dr Geep's "Morph Targets with Wings3D" tutorial.

The basic process is -

1. Export the neck as an .obj file with "as Morph Target" checked

2. Alter the neck in a modelling program

3. Import the morph target by going to the parameter dials and clicking "Figure/Load Morph Target" and selecting the new .obj that you made in the modelling program.

I've also seen this from time to time. Some modelling programs inject phantom polygons and verts into models and they don't always clean up afterwards. You might try taking the model into various 3d applications or perhaps UVMapper, and seeing if the polygon shows up and can be deleted.

You are in luck! Geralday, maker of great low-polygon props, has a haybarn you can search for in the freestuff. It includes bales of hay, ladder, lantern, etc.

Koji?

billy423uk

It's probably not legal to give away a modified mesh, even as a freebie. You could look into the possibility of encoding the mesh with Objaction Mover, and using the copyrighted mesh as a key. That way, people who own the original mesh can use your modified one, but it's useless to people who don't have the original.

If you're determined to try - and Poser got where it is today by people trying impossible things - here's a couple of tips.

You don't need a greenscreen in Poser. If you render out your animation as a series of still images in .PNG or .TIFF format, they'll automatically have a transparent background. Premiere should be able to import these without a problem.

Poser renders tend to be quite low-contrast anyway, so you've got a head-start.

Experiment with higher-than-normal motion blur settings. Camcorder footage tends to blur movement quite a lot.

Instead of trying to hide the CGI/video difference, could you emphasise it? Think about Matrix Revolutions, where the two guys are rolling round fighting in the mud, and suddenly there's this long, slo-mo CGI shot of a fist hitting a face.

Do you have Poser 6? If so, you can experiment with IBL lighting. It shines a diffuse, multi-tinted light onto your models, making them look more realistic.

The right hand image has the displacement channel plugged into the Dork texture map. See how he's gone all wrinkly?

Acadia -

You know what a bump-map is, right?

A displacement map is similar, but takes advantage of the Firefly renderer's improved abilities, and gives much more realistic grooves, bulges, etc on the mesh.

Find a model in your Runtime that uses a bump map. Go to the material room, disconnect the map from the "bump" channel and plug it into "displacement".  You'll need to tick "Use displacement maps" in the Firefly render settings.

Experiment with a few different renders of your model, increasing and decreasing the displacement amount.

Tip - in Render Settings, ensure that "displacement bounds" is set to a higher amount than the setting you use in the materials room. This will avoid artifacts showing up in the render.

Umm...

Er...

The only thing I can think of is - ask Peter Jackson or George Lucas to help you out. This kind of photorealistic animation is an enormous project.

The room area looks like a fairly simple shape. Can you still get access to it? Does it look the same? You could maybe take some photos and put them onto a UV-mapped model, built e.g. in Wings3D.

As for the girls, you might find clothing and hair to match, and morph some faces, but they definitely will look CGI.

Poser works for Final-Fantasy style animation, where everything has a superclean CGI look.  As for making things look down and dirty, that's something the major studios are still trying to perfect. It might well be possible, with a lot of work, to get some kind of interesting fight animation. But it's unlikely to match your camcorder footage.

If your cat's still having problems, you could show it this leaflet. Just click to magnify.

Search around the forums for the Casablanca Suit for M3. It's Japanese. I think Acadia will know where to find it.

I'd stick with Acadia - it's classy and everybody recognises it. But if you really want to change, and in honour of all the helpful information you've supplied to us, what about caLISTa?