That was a brilliant little tutorial, bagginsbill! It worked perfectly! Thank you!

My apologies. I forgot that the Superfly renderer was a thing. I don't have that version of Poser. Let's go with the Firefly renderer.

How about a searchable hierarchy? Some of my scenes can get kinda complex with many figures and props. This fills out the Hierachy window and when I'm trying to find a prop or figure body part or whatever, it quickly becomes a treasure hunt. Add to the fact that parented props can be below many injected morphs (which admittedly can be hidden) but inside the figure parented SOMEWHERE, and you're spending 3-5 minutes sometimes looking for the prop you want to work on.

Some sort of heirarchy search, please.

I would love to see a complete overhaul of the animation palette and the graph editor. Here's what I'd love to say added:

1. Spline handles to allow for better easing-in/out, spacing, and so forth of animation.
2. Show all elements in the scene at once along the left (or right) side of the graph editor, allowing you to show or hide the individual elements and parameter dials, and have the splines all overlaying each other so you can see how the elements interact with each other over the course of the animation.
3. Ability to extend splines beyond the ends of the animation. This will allow for a spline to continue indefinitely beyond the end of the animation and before the beginning of the animation to have better movement at the beginning and end of the animation.

I don't believe I'll go any further with Poser until these features are added.

Alrighty, I'll try that.  Thanks for your help and I apologize if there was any stubbornness on my part.

I find if I try to do it that way, the cup unrealistically drifts on his mouth.  At the point where the cup is on the mouth, the head is essentially "driving" the action for that portion.  In real life, when I put a cup to my mouth and then turn my head, I can feel my head pulling or pushing on the cup, which moves my hand.  Both the hand and the mouth are driving the motion of the cup.

Here's what I'm trying to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtemiW4PH8k

Please don't critique the posing or animation; this is merely a very rough test animation, but this is essentially identical to my actual animation.  I want to be able to to have him lift the cup to his mouth, then move his head as the cup is connected to the mouth, then return the cup to its original position without the wrist, shoulder, or hand wigging out.

Thanks!

That's what I did originally.  But for this animation, I need the head to turn while the cup is on the lips.  Therefore, I need the cup to "stick" to the head, otherwise it'll be nearly impossible to have the cup not drift around on the lips.  This would be the same if the character was trying to facepalm (a hand touching the face, then the hand moving with the head), hands on hips (hands moving to the hip, then moving with the hip), hand adjusting a watch (grabbing the watch on the other wrist and then moving with the other wrist) or other similar types of actions.

Hiya, folks!  To piggyback on what is being discussed here, I'd like to ask for your assistance with a similar setup.

I have a guy typing on a laptop in a darkened room where the only light is coming from the laptop screen.  I have the laptop and I used a high-res square primitive sized to the shape of the laptop screen set as my light emitter.  The screen reflects GREAT in the eyeglasses I have on my figure but when I render it out, I have these disco-ball-like splotches all over the place.

Here are my render settings.

What am I doing wrong? (Poser Pro 2012.)  Thanks in advance!

Quote - My guess would be that you can already do something very similar in Poser.  See my attachment, this was done in Poser 6.  The first is two key frames, one at 100 and the other at 200.  The second side is the same first two key frames with two more at 101 and 102.  Adjusted frame 102 down slightly and end up with something very similar to what you showed in your prior post.

Yes, I'm aware you can do something like that, but it's a hack that becomes quickly cumbersome with a lot of keyframes.  I'd rather have the ability to have a lot more control the slope and curve of the in-between frames, especially if you WANT overshooting, such as if a character is pitching a ball, their arm continues a bit from the final arc before coming back to the position.

Quote - Actually I was amused by the notion that anyone thinks SM has any interest in people creating animation in poser

Well, Poser does have the capability of animating, and has multiple tools associated with it.  If they didn't want to deal with animation, they should remove those tools (but I have a feeling if they did that, a lot of customers would leave for other products...like me).

Animation tools should not be neglected, in my opinion, if they're going to have them at all.

Quote - ** "More control of the curves in the animation palette.  Other 3D programs give this option, like the pen-tool in Photoshop, there are two handles on each side of the keyframe and you can pull each handle to adjust the way the curve goes from the previous keyframe to the current keyframe to the next keyframe, and so on.**

Fine control over the interpolation!  I needs it, precious!  :)"

??????..... HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA
 HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA !!!

Cheers

Not sure why the laughter, but, okay.

Quote - an avi with a tranparent back

Yeah, I don't think that's possible.

Fine control over the interpolation!  I needs it, precious!  :)

(See attached image to see what I mean.  From Blender.)

I'm using two lights in this scene.  The main light is an infinite light off to the left of the figure.   Shadow Blur Radius: 10, Shadow Samples 38, Shadow Min Bias: 0.5, Atmosphere Strength: 0.01 (I played with these amounts to see if it would get rid of it and it didn't). No connected nodes, just a yellowish color (255,255,200) to the Color entry.  The other light is a spotlight off behind the fence primitive; shadow blur radius: 2, Shadow Min Bias 0.8 Atmosphere Strength: 0.01, also no nodes attached, and a slight purplish color (201,177,237) in the Color entry.

It's a relatively simple scene.  A few props parented to the figures (there's another figure off camera), a couple of primitives and some displacements on the primitives.

I zoomed far in on one of the artifacts and it appears to be as if it were part of the texture (it's in the same place no matter where the camera is) and seems to be limited to a single polygon.