Attached Link: http://www.kevinhammer.com/animation/tdr.php

Attached Link: http://www.infinityminusone.com/tdr081205b.mpg

Attached Link: http://www.infinityminusone.com/tdr080305.mpg

Attached Link: http://www.infinityminusone.com/tdr071005.mpg

I made a slight update. I fixed the overall contrast, touched up a few movements, and made the signiture at the end look more like my own.

I actually took each of the 21 shots into aftereffects one at a time and added all of the environmental effects as post production work. I think it gave it a better overall feel. It also makes it look a lot less poser-ish :)

Attached Link: http://www.infinityminusone.com/tdr.mpg

Very cool! It's nice to see some more poser 4 animators on the forum. I'll definitely have to play with this some then I get a chance. I'm still a little confused on setting the parent figure, but I'll play with it.

In aftereffects you might try using color key rather than chroma key. It's a bit more flexible, and great if you have live footage and the background is a bit off from the color you expected. All you do is load the color key effect on the layer, click the eyedropper tool, then click on the video on the color that you want to make transparent. You've got sliders for sensitivity and edge feathering too. Plus you can animate the sliders in case you need to deal with moving shadows or something.

Wow, that's really cool! The only stop motion I ever did was with my old g i joe and transformer toys and a 8mm camera. It never turned out anything like that.

I've got a couple up: Alleyway Chronicles http://www.infinityminusone.com/alleyway_01.mpg Boognish The Movie http://www.ween.net/garmonbozia/boognish_movie.mpg I'll hopefully have some new clips from my current project up soon. My new one is all cell shaded and I'm spending as much time in after effects as any other program so it's more of a mixed media animation than strict 3d.

I render cell shaded for a number of reasons.

First of all, I've always wanted to make cartoons, but after years of trying on traditional 2d sfotware I finally came to the conclusion that I just can't draw :p

2nd, I use the cartoon with lines preview mode in poser 4, so it's a lot faster. It's nice to not have to wait until the end of the evening and then leave my project rendering overnight.

3rd, Pixar, Dreamworks, and all those other groups are very very good at what they do. So, I could either make what I think is a pretty cool looking cartoon, or make another really amature looking cgi animation. I'm not as good as them, and I don't have the time or resources needed to get to that level. So, I do things my own way.

My method is to animate the characters in poser over a static background image, either something I drew freehand, or a photograph or render from another program that I've messed with in photoshop. I'll render each character by themselves in cartoon mode and then again in alpha mode so I can composite it all together in aftereffects and add any additional effects or 2d animation elements that I need. It's working out pretty well for me, and my current project is finally in post production. Hopefully I'll have a new preview of it up soon.

The best method I found for learning to animate is to record myself with a cheep webcam, then try to match the pose frame by frame in poser using the video as the project background. Doing this I ended up putting in a lot more subtle expressions than I normally would. Now when I try to animate from scratch I can use the skills I learned from working with the reference. As an example to the above, you could record yourself hopping around on all 4 to animate a horse, or playing with hotwheels to animate a car. I can't do ballet though, so I'd be out of luck there. I suppose I could just get a ballet video from somewhere though.