Quote - It only works with the advanced render settings but the frame rendered doesn't match the camera selected.

Huh?!

So you select a camera, but something else gets rendered?

And if you don't use the advanced render settings it doesn't work at all?

Have I understood that correctly?

If so, that is very strange. What are your render settings?

I have both versions installed and have no problems rendering animations.

Can you render frame 1 as a picture?

Attached Link: daz3d deeta hair

Have you seen this?

Quote - I just put up my first animation with Poser Pro 2012.  Just trying to get a good walk out of V4.

Great stuff!

I was also really impressed with your dynamic hair test. How long did it take to do the simulation?

Attached Link: youtube link

> Quote - Hey all and hope your weekend is going well. > > Listen I would like to try making a simple animation, but dont have any idea where to start. > > My first question is; Do I have to use dynamic hair when doing animations? > > Second when useing dynamic clothing I always move to fram 30 then pose my figure, move back to fram 1 and add dynamic clothing and run my sim.   So what I want to know is if I do the first part which is adding clothing how do I creat my animation with out the part with the clothing drapping and and such showing up? > > Hope I explained myself in a way that you can understand > > Steel

You don't have to use dynamic hair. It costs quite a lot of time to do the sim, but it does save having to animate the hair to get a realistic look. But I would agree with Mike, don't bother with dynamic hair at the start.

As for the dynamic clothing business, it's no problem to start rendering your animation at, say, frame 31 and go on from there. You can determine start and end frame in the render settings. But again, I wouldn't bother with it to begin with.

I think it's best to start with just getting a feel for creating movement, lighting and camera angles.

I've been using Poser for a few months now and finished my first video last week, the link is above, the animation kicks in after 15 seconds.

Have you put the walk into a new animation layer? (Walk designer does this as deault.)

You can check this by opening the animation palette and clicking on the layers tab.

Make sure there are only rotation keyframes in one layer. If not, delete them all from one of the layers - it's easy: click the first keyframe, shift-click the last one, and press delete ("entf" in German).

Switch to the other layer and do the rotation business there.

In general I find it easier to keep all animation in one layer - select "base layer" in walk designer - but multiple layers can be useful for some things.

Attached Link: Smoke

> Quote - Cool music video and I really enjoyed the song too. How did you do the particle effect for the rocket exhaust?

Thanks!

The smoke effect is by Bagginsbill and can be found in the attached thread link.

Thanks for the info! That's very helpful.

I tried the Personal Learning Edition of Vue 9.5 Infinite. It is supposed to import Poser files, but just produces error messages. Perhaps they'll have that sorted in 10.0?

I think I'll give the demos of C4D and InterPoser a go. That should keep me out of trouble for a while!

That seems to be a very common opinion, and is indeed the reason behind my consideration of Vue and C4D.

Nevertheless, I've managed some decent stuff in Poser (perhaps it's only OK because I do a lot of post work in Vegas), and render times have come down with PP2012 from 20 minutes per frame to four or five, which I agree is a tolerable order of magnitude. (Previously raytracing with transmapped hair was simply impossible!)

I would be very interested if anybody could quantify the actual time savings from using an alternative renderer to Firefly.

And what is there to look out for when importing a Poser animation? I can't get Vue to do it at all, and there seem to be plenty of other users with the same problem. How does it work out with C4D?

I tried Vue, but couldn't get it to import anything. And fortunately PP2012 has cut down render times a lot, but I have already been looking at C4D but it's a big investment.

How would C4D render times compare with Firefly for comparible quality?

Hey Mike!

I really didn't mean to dig you out, sincere apologies if it came across that way.

What I meant to say is that the quality of the preview render is not good enough for what I want to do.

An analogy: you see, I'm a musician. I know other guitarists, I don't like their guitar sound, but hey, they make great art with it, they might play a song I really enjoy. But it isn't what I want to do.

By the way, I'm not making seven second videos, seven seconds may be one scene, some may be only three or four. The finished article comes in at three or four minutes, and isn't entirely animation. But still I admit, I can't do that in an hour or so (hahaha!).

So yes, I have to render, render and render, but in the meantime I can go down the pub, be romantic with a delightful young lady, or even shoot some more footage. I can even render in the background while I do some video editing.

Or I can even render whilst I read this forum, I have so much to learn, so render-render-render-read-read-read!

And if Adobe Premiere works for you, that's great! But I've spent a lot of time editing videos, and I honestly think it's trash, and yes, it's just my very humble opinion. But I would urgently recommend anybody wanting to get into video editing to look at Sony Vegas, which also has a demo version.

I have one more scene to shoot for my first Poser video, I'll be doing that tomorrow, so I should be ready to upload at the weekend, then you can all have a laugh at my rubbish art!!!

My compliments...

Quote - I swear by The Font Thing.  You don't even have to have the font installed in your font folder, it will open a folder with fonts in it, and you can see them all, right there. Plus, it's free.  It's the best price.

+1 all the way!

I do a lot of graphics, and "The Font Thing" is 100% the way to go! It's a "must have"!

My compliments...

Quote - Welcome Marc
You do not say what version of Poser you are using but:

If Poser9 or PP2012, the preview can be made VERY good and MORE then acceptable for an animation reducing render times a lot. (Depends on what you render and what output you desire)
Mike renders at 1600x900, that is quite large for an animation.

Goto Render settings
Enable hardware shadows, and Enable AO (ambient occlusion@optimize AO)
AND ; ; ; ; ; Set texture display  : Preview Texture resolution at 4096 (default is 512)

Also; use as little lights as possible, and for every light that makes a shadow ?

Goto the light paramerets properties palette and increase Preview Shadow map size to 1024 or 2048 or max at 4096 to get quality shadows.
Or use raytraced shadows.

All this is very nice and well, but know that it comes at a cost.
Increasing quality will slow down your méachine.

Have a nice day

Thanks for the welcome!

I'm trying PP2012 at the moment, and unfortunately, there is no way to tweak the settings to provide a preview output I could live with. But it's fine, as a preview.

And, by the way, I don't understand why Mike renders at 1600x900 if he's using the preview engine. Perhaps if he tried Firefly without raytracing at 800x450...

And indeed, finding a compromise between quality and render time is essential for animation. I'm gradually getting there...

My compliments...

Quote - Welcome to the forum, Marc.

Thank you sir. It is an honour and a pleasure to be here.

Quote - Now, the quality of the preview renderer isn't really comparable to Firefly. You won't get good lights, reflection, refraction or reasonable shaders. I would use Firefly for the final render for any real animation, although I would make sure that the render settings are as low as possible, for the quality I want to archive.

I agree entirely. I'm coming from video editing (well, actually, in real life I'm a working musician, but that's another story...), and I'm used to working with a preview that is good enough to get the job done, with the quality coming in the final render, so I'm not complaining about the preview quality at all.

Quote - If time is really an issue, I would try not to use ray tracing. This would mean no IDL and no AO, no real reflections too (but reflection maps are possible), so lighting a scene can be problematic, but you will have very short render times with a much higher quality than with the preview renderer. If you are interested, here is a nice presentation from Pixar in which they explain the use of Ray Tracing in the "Cars" movie - Pixar did not use Ray Tracing in earlier movies. Movies have long render times, if you want quality. If possible, use a couple of computers for rendering, all pro versions can do that.

Hey, first of all, thank you so much for the link. I love stuff like that, and I need it, because I have so much to learn!

I have already learnt to judge on a scene by scene basis if I need raytracing or not. A few test renders will usually sort things out. Unfortunately, for the look I am going for (and, by golly, I have a long way to go to get there!), for most scenes, I need raytracing.

Oh, and well done to 96 for the win against Bayern!

My compliments...

Hello! This is my first post, but I've been lurking here for a few weeks while I've been making my first steps with poser animation.

I wanted to wait until I could post my first video until posting, but I saw your question, and I have learnt such a lot here in the last few weeks, I really want to give back, and I just can't keep quiet...

I disagree with Mike 100%.

The "Preview" is just that, a prieview, the quality is awful, it's fine for sorting your scene out, but unless you want a kind of "toon" aesthetic, it's useless for renders.

Using Firefly, a typical seven second scene will render overnight (well, in about twelve hours as long as I'm not using any smoke haha!).

Yes, you have to make trade offs between render quality and render time, you have to find that for yourself.

And yes, single frames into png's (lossless)... and you can import a frame sequence into any decent video editing software. Mike's suggestion of virtualdub is an excellent freeware solution.

I don't like his Adobe Premiere idea at all though. It's just my personal opinion, but I think it's overpriced trash. Try any flavour of Sony Vegas, it's really cool (PC only) software, that was once written by a cool US company until Sony bought them, easy to learn and absolute professional quality. And yes, it imports a frame sequence.

I must apologise for a first post that sounds so "know it all", but I couldn't shut up. Hopefully my first animation short will be finished in a day or two so I can back my wild claims up somewhat.

Oh, and weight mapping... I agree with Mike...  (I have absolutely no idea!).

My compliments,

TheCaptain.