I have been reading the manual for P5 on how to do animatins but am really having a hard time making heads or tails of it. 1. Is there a way to make the walk path shorter or is it stuck at the defalt length 2.I found some premade walk poses that are pz and rsr files but cant figure out how to use them ( the creater doesnt speak english and I dont speak russian) 3. Creation of the whole animation process is baffling to me so if you can walk me through it like a 5 year old it would be greatly appreciated.

1. Open P5 2. Figure/Create Walk Path 3. Ctrl-T or Top Camera 4. Adjust or lengthen walk path using control points. 5. Window/Walk Designer 6. Button "Apply" 7. Possibly choose transitioning from starting pose 8. Select Done. 9. Render/Render Options. Possibly choose production. OK 10. Animation/Make movie 11. Quality current render settings. 12. OK 13. Enter filename. 14. OK That's a very basic walk. It doesn't deal with the camera moving, following the character or capturing the entire walk.

See those white dots along the walk path? Those are spline handles. The cursor will change when it moves over them. You can grab and move the spline handles to alter the direction and length of the walk path.

You can insert additional spline handles, if necessary, by clicking on an empty section of the path. The cursor will show a little plus symbol to indicate that a handle can be added there.

The walk path is 2D, so it may be easier to adjust by viewing it from the Top camera.

2. PZ2 files are pose files, and should be placed in one of Poser's RuntimeLibrariesPose folders. Animated poses are applied to figures just like regular poses.

Attached Link: Walk cycle for V3 complete with instructions to load it.

I know somebody that has bunches of walk cycles, but if I mention it in this forum my post will be deleted. Be careful putting poses in you walkdesigner folder. They MUST be 30 frames. They also need to be properly constructed so thay will work correctly with the path tool. If you're working with V3 hars's a link to a free blend for her: http://www.nerd3d.com/Poses/pose.htm

Thank you all for the help you have saved my hair from being pulled out :) The P5 user manual seems to be user surly not user friendly. I hate how it bounces you back and forth from various chapters. I finally did a decent animation thanks to the help you all gave me. I would post it here but it is 600 frames long and took four hours to firefly render. I'm not even sure RV could even hold it.
Thanks again for the help.

Message edited on: 08/01/2004 04:23

They MUST be 30 frames.

Found that one out the hard way.

Your right LD I guess I didn't state what I meant correctly the movie or animation is five minutes long and is at 30 frames a sec. I am now in the process of rendering it with all the textures and background such as walls, furniture, etc... So far it has been rendering for 20 hours and is one fourth of the way done. I just hope it turns out as good looking for real as it does in my head. Thanks again for your help.

Long animation render tip...

Render to image files!

Here are just a few reasons:
You can interupt the amination, restarting where you left off.
You can peek at the progress. (I use Quicktime for this because it has an option to open image sequences and it's very easy to use.)
If you discover a goof you can make changes and pickup rendering right before the mistake.
If Poser freezes (Imagine that!) you can restart from where ever it croaked.
If you need to do a bit of post work it's easy to work with individual images.
You have an alpha channel to work with if you are doing compositing work.

"OK, how do I pickup where I left off?" you ask. On the key frame editor there is a green bar at the bottom of the window. That is the animation range. Slide the little triangles at either end to set the range. Set the start point to the next frame after the last (good) frame rendered.

Nerd

Very cool and handy tip Nerd thanks a bunch