I think it would be great to have some kind of DAZ/Poser community animation project.

There are two feature length films I know of made with Poser:

Dominator was shown in theaters and released on DVD:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0135991/

Monsters of the Id is an amateur film available from the author:
http://www.monstersmovie.com/

I guess there aren't more because for an amateur a feature length film is a fairly daunting undertaking. That's a seriously large amount of animation for one person to do.

Profesional studios on the other hand need more robust rendering for high resolution output and would have little need for the features of a application like Poser with apps like Maya at their disposal.

Quote - This just in... Nabisco buys Exxon.

Or maybe more like AT&T buying Michael's art supplies.

Let's not be naive here: The main reason this company is interested in Poser is to use the technology to make customizable animated avatars for people to use on cell phone networks when playing back voice mails and such.

What that means for the future development of Poser as an artistic rendering tool is unknown. It might turn out OK, it might not. But the situation is tenuous at best.

All pitch shifters are not created equal. What you want is a type called a formant corrected pitch shifter. The cheap "voice changer" programs you find here and there are not formant corrected.

Waves UltraPitch:
http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=288

This one is for Mac:
http://www.soundtoys.com/products/PurePitch/

Here's one as a hardware device that's supposedly pretty good:
http://www.bossus.com/index.asp?pg=1&tmp=59

Answering #3 of my own questions, in case anyone else wants to know: the option to configure the pan for the 3D viewport is called  "translate camera" in the key config (the 4th item from the bottom). I also discovered it will accept the mouse wheel as the controller for zoom.

If I try to buy anything at Cornucopia3D it says:

"You must register your copy of Vue before purchasing from Cornucopia!"

You'd think they would be rather keen on selling content to PLE users.

Quote - 2: in the camera manager, right under the scene preview, use the arrow-like icon to move the camera forward/backward.

I noticed the arrow like icon but what I was looking for was a key, as in the keys on the keyboard, to move the camera forward in a continuous motion as would typically be found in terrain oriented applications. Having to always switch back and forth between zoom and rotate is a slow way of moving around. Often the arrow keys and/or W,A,S,D are used for this. It is sometimes refered to as "fly-mode." I tried the Vue5 demo a while ago and I'm almost certain there was some sort of way to do this but I can't remember how. Anyone know?

Quote - 3: Keep the right mouse button pressed in the views, you'll see a hand appear, then drag the hand around to pan the camera.

That doesn't  "pan" the camera in the 3D viewport, that engages the "rotate camera" or  "mouse-look"  motion. There are separate settings for "pan" and "rotate camera" in the key config but they are both set to right mouse button by default, which is odd. Changing the "pan" entry seems to effect only the 2D viewports, not the 3D.

Thanks for the reply.

Thanks for the replies. The technique you showed Aeneas is a much better result than using Hue/Saturation.

This technique might help:

koti.mbnet.fi/pkl/tg/examples/road.htm

Also there is a nice terrain editor called Freeworld3D that has a built in function to create roads.

That clears it up then. Thanks for the replies.

tvining, Star Trek Aurora is amazing. In fact it was seeing Star Trek Aurora that inspired me to get into Poser. The emotion and realism you were able achieve in the facial expressions had my jaw on the floor in disbelief. I thought only big studios with proprietary software could get those kinds of results.

If I could ask you a question: Since you have Cinema 4D why do you not import your models into it with one of the utilities available and animate there? Doesn't Cinema 4D have a more robust animation system?

The Silent Hill No Escape film was good too. It actually made me jump in my seat a few times!

Here's another poser movie I learned about. This one was released on DVD:

Dominator
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0135991/

Here's another one I found doing some searches. Looks fairly impressive:

Godspeed
http://www.demianfox.net/godspeed/

I would urge anyone reading the original poster's comments not to let someone else tell you how you should express yourself. No matter what your Poser scenes look like, if you feel that they are art when you are creating them, then they are art. Art can only be defined in the heart of the artist.

Thanks for the reply, that's just what I was trying to do. I don't think I would have ever figured out that was the way you were supposed to do it without someone telling me (and if it was in the manual I couldn't find it). As for things that are a downgrade, one good example is seen above. For every filter and adjustment in PSP you have a dialog box as is seen on the left with a side by side comparison, a field to save a preset specific to that window and several different view modes. PS's dialogs lack these things. Not that big a deal but I'd definitely consider PSP's way to be superior. Mostly it's just ergonomics. I'm sure it's possible to do anything you can do in PSP in PS too, it just takes more steps and more time, and requires deliberate study to know what to do, whereas PSP can be figured out pretty easily by intuition alone.