Soon as poser finnishes calculating the cloth dynamics on the Nightworld cloak I have turned into an OBJ I will give it ago...

Miss Nanacy, I have no experience of older version of poser, but the fingers were definately all messed up, and I also seemed to get some creep, plus the joint limits were different as the pose that the legacy model had was not fully realized whne the BVH was used on V4, in particular the arms on the legacy model were straight down (she was at attention), but V4 had her arms out at about 15 degrees.. quite a big difference. So if the low poly daz vickies work... its definately better than using the older vickies and then having to fix everything...

Sounds like the can has been moved at some point during the animation, perhaps you moved once or similar. To repair the cans animation now, I would use the dope sheet and delete all the keyframes for the can of coke, make sure the first keyframe has the can on the table, then delete all the others and then copy the first key frame to the last keyframe position.

Then your can should stay in place throughout the sequence. To animate it scrub the animation to the point you want to have the actor move it, once the actors hands are holding it you can parent it to the actors hand and then the can should just follow the hand...

This is guesswork from a another noob, but its what I would do, perhaps some of the more experienced animators could comment too?

Nightfall, any chance you can give me a little more detail on finding the low poly Daz models and how to get them into Poser?

I loaded DAZ to find the only available character is V4.2 EZ, then had a look in the folders but to be honest I have no clue what I am looking for..

Any assistance would be appreciated,

thanks.

Lululee, thanks for your comments, but I think Nightfall has solved it for me, if I can root out the low poly models of V4, then thats all I need... Nightfall THANK YOU!, as soon as I get home I will find them and then figure out how to get them into Poser...

I will take a close look at PhilC's BVH helper, it would be good to make use of the masses of BVH files available on the web...

Thanks to everyone for your assistance and comments.

OK heres an update.

I tried a quick test animation using legacy low res poser models. Creating the animation was a breez, the low poly models makes a huge difference. However, after exporting the BVH file and then loading a new scene with V4 and importing the BVH file created with the low poly models I was disappointed to see that the animation was far from perfect.

The fingers are obviously a completely different rigging set, and so it seems are the shoulders. Althought the animation ran, the fingers were all twisted, and the range of movement of V4 didnt seem to go as far as the low poly models used to create the BVH in that the limits were different. Its also seems the the IK chains are different as I noted a little weirdness in the posture of the legs (having left IK on for the test BVH set).

Although the differences could be sorted using the dope sheet and smoothing the graphs, I dont think that this post work to the BVH file is worth the time saved by using the low poly models. So its a trade-off that doesnt seem to be worthwhile at the moment.

So its back to the drawing board, or back to the stuttering scrub lines even when using hidden wireframe.... and thats on a vista 64 box with 8GB RAM, still waiting for the quad core processor, but not too hopefull that it will make enough difference to make animating V4 smooth enough to enjoy using Posers animation features.

If anyone out there is clever enough, please please give us a low poly model of the existing V4.2 so that we can make full use of the poser animation features...I know a low poly model rigged exactly the same way as our V4.2 will make all the difference.

Perhaps I am doing something wrong, so if I am beeing an ass, I would be delighted to be told so, and pointed in the right direction...

Thanks to all that have contributed to this thread...

I tried PhilC's suggestion using the low poly P2 model and it makes a huge difference, I havent tried to export a BVH file and apply to V4 yet... but the performance difference is massive...

OK PhilC I am convinced, didnt realizer there was such a huge difference in the poly count, now all I need to do is go find a P2 model as a stand-in for V4, any ideas where I can find the old gal?

Thanks very much for the pointers...

Quote - some of the poser figures vary in their groups/body part names,
e.g. apollo max and v4.2 differ somewhat from the lo-res p2 figures.
some bvh apps allow one to attach a bvh skeleton to an unrigged obj file
of the kind found in the poser runtime/geometry folder.  a bvh previewing
app might still be slow with v4.2 even in wireframe mode, due to the gigantic
number of polygons.

I was afraid that the Poser models may vary, although I havent tested it, thats pretty much why I wanted to try and re-create the V4.2 skeleton inside another app and then create the BVH file from there to import back into Poser 7.

Am I overcomplicating things here? I just want to be able to have a very smooth timeline scrub to speed up the animation work, its a bit unproductive to have to create preview movies to see how the animation is going to look in realtime, because although that shows the end result, you cant narrow down the frames that need work....

Thanks for your replies...

No I havent, I dont think I have any to try. Is it safe to say that if I find these figures and use them that they are rigged the same as V4 and that the animations will work without any additional tweaking?

I guess I am not sure if the Poser 2 bones are exactly the same as the V4 and Poser 7 models??

Thanks for the reply PhilC, I am using V4.2 but have hidden wireframe turned on, so the machine shouldnt struggle. Current PC specs are Intel Core 2 duo with 2GB, will be a Core 2 Quad and 8GB by the weekend, but I am not convinced that the Poser scrubber can be smoothed with hardware uplift, even if I heavily reduce the quality of the preview window and turn off frame skipping the scrub is just nasty, particularly if I have the dope sheet open....

Many thanks jt411, I suspected something similar to that.

Here is what I have done, I would be very gratefull if anyone can help me sort out what I am doing wrong.

Objective is to take a scenes standard lighting and change it to IBL using an HDRI image generated from within the scene itself.

First thing I did was to open a pre-set scene (Dream Islands) and insert three spheres with variouse textures, I then rendered this out and saved the results.

I then inserted a spherical camera in the scene, positioned it a little above the terrain and rendered the image. I then created an HDRI image from this render using HDRShop.

The next thing I did was to change the scen effect Atmosphere from Realistic Sky to None
Select the Scene Background as HDRI and loaded the image I created in HDRShop. I then turned off Light 1 so it wouldnt interfere with the IBL.

The attached image is the resulting render, as you can see the sky is messed up showing what looks like large chunks of the hdri image, and the lighting is a lot softer than the original image.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the quick reply Mark. One thing I didnt realize, being the 3d infant I am, is that the shaders actually reflect the scene anyway. This has confused me, as I was thinking that you had to have HDRI map to crate reflections in shiney objects inside a scene.

I have done some testing using reflective objects in scenes that have realistic sky, and all the reflections seem to be reproduced flawlessly.

I need to play around more, as I am confused about the relationship between regular scene lighting, HDRI/IBL and object reflections.

Thanks for the replies, I suspect that lighting differences as well as shader differences are at play. I basically created the same scene in both P7 and C6 lighting each with a single spot for consistency, I was really testing how well the P7 model and its textures would import into C6. I realize I could play with lighting but that wouldnt give me the comparison I was after.

I guess I dont understand how there was so much of a difference between the two renders, even though I set the scenes up as close as possible to each other. I am still learning this stuff so excuse me if I seem vague, its just that I have a lot more questions than answers :).

Thanks bagginsbill, I will explore further...