Hello... is it possible to do special effects in poser 5 like a character shooting off a large energy beam or something? How do you do it? Of course... animated... Thanks in advance=)

well... Ya could use a fullbright deformed sphere or something I guess. but for the most part you'd be better off drawing your special effects by hand in a paint program, or using another 3d program to make a particle effect then compositing it all together in something like after effects or Aura. For my current project I plan on taking animation done in poser and importing it as an animated background into Truespace 4. (which you can get really cheap now) then adding particle animations (using the PP FX plugin)and lens flare effects (which can be much more versitile than just the cheesy B5 cliche)over the top of the poser animation. This type of compositing without using an expensive compositing application is also very easy to do. Hmmm... come to think of it I could also change the pixel aspect ratio that way... (because you can do that in TS but not poser.)

What about a red (or green) spot light with atmosphere? I never tried to control a spot light that tightly with the angle and falloff.

Something like this? This was done in Poser5 using a cylinder with ambience and some transparency. Motion blur was turned on.

Attached Link: http://www.dodger.org/friv/

_dodger has done some nice static effects with three intersecting planes with transparencies. Though I've never done any animation, it seems likely that you could do a lot with his stuff by moving it or stretching it in the individual frames. Attached is a link to his site, where you can get the blaster effects to try out your schemes.

Yup yup. Download one of my blasters that comes with a blast effect and simply either position it and move it, or even position and scale it. For instance, you could start it out scaled to nothing with the 'beginning' of the prop at the laser gun's barrel, then increase the size until it reaches the target and then decrease it whilst moving it along its own path until it is fully collapsed at the target for a cool Trek type effect. For the Star Wars type blasts, shrink the prop to 0 length, then increase it quickly to full length coming out of the barrel, then move the blast prop along it's path until it hits the target and collapse it again (or just send it right through). On a similar note, my Dungeon Lighting Kit I (II and III will be soon, though my computer is broken right now -- I'm on someone else's) has animatable and posable flames with multitudes of flicker morphs. If you combine this with P5's ability to use an animated texture map and use an actual animation of flames you can get really impressive realism.