Attached Link: Silver Man and Logo, created in Strata 3D

I started this project in Strata 3D -- I moved the base P4 male into Strata 3D 3.5 Plus and textured it with chrome: http://www.stratacafe.com/image.asp?imageID=8990 Now I would like to animate the scene for the intro to a corporate video. I want to stick with Poser 4 Pro Pack for the figure manipulation, but I need shiney metal and some fog effects so I'm thinking about buying MOVER to let me take the figure into Vue d'Esprit. A question before I dive in, though. Does Mover support walk cycles? Is it difficult to align the figure to the ground plain? Can a motion path be altered in Vue? Finally, is MOVER worth it and will it help me produce a VERY quick animation of a silver man walking through space to find the sphere with my company logo (see image link above). Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. Mike

Lessee... (1)More or less, yes. In Mover there is an option to repeat a Poser figure's animation cycle. So all you would need is a walk cycle that would blend when repeated, and set the option to repeat the animation. The caveat is that if you have a simple walk cycle, then you would have to specify a movement path in Mover. That will take some trial and error to get the motion forward to match up enough to the stride length to not be a 'Shrek-slide' or a Wile E Coyote running in place. Not difficult once you understand the rules, but still trial and error. (2) Not at all. Vue itself has a drop to ground plane feature, and Mover has a 'Pedestrian' setting, that keeps the animated figure following the actual shape of the terrain, not just the ground plane. (3) Abso-frigging-lutely. The motion path that you set up in Mover is made from the top down. Once the basic path is set, you close the wizard, switch Vue to the 4 view mode, select the item, and you have access to the waypoints of the path for tweaking from above, side, and front. The caveat with this is that if the Poser model is imported with a .bvh motion file, you can't affect -that- with Mover. Vue just plays the full Poser animation, and you have to make sure it is correct in Poser and your scene in Vue is set to allow for it. As for Mover being worth it....if you are comfortable with Vue, then absolutely. For some truly spectacular examples of what the Vue-Mover-Poser combination can do, head over to www.belino.net. This is Phoul's homesite, and he has done some work that is literally production quality. His stuff is what has inspired me to start playing around with animation. (If you have access to a network setup, you can install the Mover Rendercow, which is the Vue renderer without a front end, on each computer that talks to each other, including the one that Vue is on, and Vue will act as a distributed render network manager, and the rendercows will each do one frame, then the next available frame after that until it's done. It doesn't work for the thumbnail preview on the Mover timeline, but oh, does it speed up larger tests and final renders....). You have to make sure to have the Vue manual, and it doesn't hurt to have a printout of the pdf manual that comes on the Mover CD. There are tricks that you can find in the tutorials that could really improve things (such as with the full Mover implemenation, you can have twinkling stars, colored stars, etc, animated point and spotlight intensities and color shifts, the terrain animates, so you could do something like having a footprint appear in the sand, or a text message morph out of a terrain field-and as it is easy to set the terrain to flat, you have a quick and dirty way to make a display bar with raised, shadowcasting text... ;) ). Vue actually has a small part of the Mover animation system built in as part of it's native functionality. Vue also fully supports transparencies and reflections...and if you don't like how the silver looks, you should be able to change the material to one of Vue's metallics (tedious for such a model, as you have to expand it in the object display tree and change the material for each body part, but the results can be quite interesting). One thing to be aware of, is that Mover will not be immediately useable. E-on sends a 'pre-registration' number with Mover, and asks you to register the product with that number and your Vue serial number. In 5 business days (a cma number to allow for holidays and the like; I had mine in 2), you get an e-mail with the actual Mover number you install with. Part of their anti-warez program.

Howdy all, Id like to expand on #3 as that's changed recently. If you order online and submit your VUE serial number correctly with the order, the full serial number is now generated and printed on the copy of your invoice which ships with Mover. Also, if you order the Vue/Mover bundle, we have "pre-mated" units which contain both Vue and Mover, with the Mover serial number with Vue (same goes for Vue/Mover/Poser bundle). Most people buy Mover for the Poser import, but there are a couple of other goodies in there not mentioned here, including Vibrate and Rotate effects, and twinking stars, and several Poser models from our friends at DAZ. Best regards, Lynn Fredricks e-on software

Thank you all VERY much for the info. This is exactly the sort of info I need to make a decision, and I'm definitely gonna visit Phoul's site for a look around.

Make sure you have Quicktime 6, a good sound card, and lobster bib or waterproof keyboard handy.... ;)

Got 'em all. I was just planning to use some Botox injections to stop the drool. Think that will work? ;-)

It might.... But Phoul has been a director and film editor, so he has this thing for dynamic camera action and angles. One of his trademarks is that the camera is almost never motionless.

Just to expand on Dale B.'s assesment of applying Vue's materials to your imported Poser figure, you don't have to apply it to each body part separately. I went through that at first but then through experimentation, discovered that you can Shift click all the parts in the hierarchy once you expand it in the object display tree and apply the material to all parts at once. I would recommend either chrome in the metals category or mercury in the liquids category of Vue's materials.

Hmmm... I'll file that one away in the secrets folder. Thanks, Scorpion!