Quote - Do you want the animation to show a beam starting from his hand, firing outward, then leaving his hand to finally arrive at the target?  If so, then I shouldn't use a seamless loop, but rather a conventional start-run-stop sequence.

No. I am looking more for something along the lines of the Sith power. But also something close, but not too close, to Green Lantern. When he fires his bolts, they stay connected to him, like in the animation I did.

I can't wait to see what you did. I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas day!

Thanks! I was going for that charging effect. But I don't think I will use it once I get going on the real thing. Takes too much time, making his power useless in battle. So...

I am patiently waiting to see what seachnasaigh comes up with...

I did a quick (about 4 hours total time) render of him shooting a lightning bolt. It's kind of cool, but not really what I am looking for.

It's on YouTube at the link below if you want to see it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcIzaStkpfI

Quote - would say it easier to save your guy as a new character, then u have the second skin loaded and the morph ready for when u need him

or if u made the morph in a modeler then u need to load the morph target (the obj file u made) from the properties tab, to save the second skin ?? guess u have it saved but want to apply it in one go ?? if so make a mat pose file for it

Thank you! I will do that! The texture and morphs were all done in Poser, so I will just save him as Green Lightning. Makes it easier to use him later, I think.

Quote - Interesting subject. I look forward to seeing what you end up with.

As do I.

On a side note, I attempted to morph out the naval yesterday. Didn't turn out too bad, but I don't know how to save it so I can use it later.

I am also embarassed by the fact that I don't know how to save my second skin texture for my hero... oh, what a life...

I am using Poser 8 on a 32-bit. It should be posable because I will be animating him using his powers on bad guys and other things.

I am toying with the idea of him using his power in a Green Lantern type fashion, only not as advanced (it won't morph into a giant hand et al, but will lift an armoured truck).

Thank you for the offer!

Quote - maybe a whacky idea but theres a free posable rope knocking about somewhere

maybe with ur nice green shader u can get the aim and the wavy looking good

Hmmmm, not so whacky if you think outside the box. There may be some merit to it.

Another thought this brings to mind is using the ray blast from a couple different Star Wars-type props I've collected.

Thank you for spawning a new thought process!

Quote - It would be nice if I could pause the simulations like I could pause animation renders in the Queue Manager.   When I render animations, I always choose to render to image files instead of to video so that, when I need to shut off my laptop to take it with me when I go somewhere, I could without losing the any frames already rendered.  That would be a nice feature to add in the next version of Poser.

Hmmmm, I render to image files too, and one of the reasons why is just that: so I can stop when I need to. But mostly it's because I tend to add a lot of visual effects in post. It would be nice to be able to pause any function in poser and pick it up later: hair, cloth simulations, animations, or renders.

Quote - Grrrrrrr....

On second thought, if I could change this to green, it might work....

I just set my screensaver and walk away from it if it's a huge calculation. I haven't tried to pause it either. I have cancelled them before they were finished if I didn't like what it was doing (poke through, et al.), but I usually deleted the simulation and redid it later.

Quote - well at some point in the animation i'm working on,  there is a ball that is supposed to change in ambient color to look brighter from that point onwards...but it didnt work...

You can change that in the material room, too. There is a tab that allows you to animate the nodes attached to the object. But that can get complicated and is a lot of work. Rendering two different sequences sounds like an easier answer.