Here are some tips for learning character animation in Poser for the several people who have asked about it recently. Please add your tips. Maybe we can throw this up as a sticky somewhere when this little list is more thorough. Note that almost all of these little tips have exceptions and/or can be expounded upon at length, but Im sick of typing :) Expound away if ya like.

1 For character animation practice with a simple character with no clothes, hair, texture or anything else to slow down your comp and you should be able to play back your animations in real time without having to render if your comp isnt too old. Spending 5 hours render time to discover your timing is off is a slow way to learn.

2 Work with the same frame rate as much as possible to help learn timing.

3 For major movement animate from the root (hip in Poser) bone out. I.e. if you spend a lotta time animating arm movement you might find afterward that abdomen movement you had to add throws off all your arm work. This is not a hard and fast rule, but helps in a lotta cases.

4 Dont overlook the value of IK even if it doesnt seem to exactly fit what youre doing. i.e. to generate some random minor movement turn on IK for any or all limbs and just key some minor hip (or abdomen or chest for arm movement only) rotations (just 1 or 2 degrees back and forth staggered a bit, for example, in more than one axis if you like) to make a standing or sitting figure seem more alive.

5 Use ockhams Naturalizer script to add eye blinks and breathing. A quick painless step that goes a long way to bringing a character to life.

6 Dont overlook the possibility of using point-at objects for eyes and even limbs sometimes.

7 Use the UI and Pose dots AND the all eight view ports. Id suggest setting up your default Poser scene with a basic figure (At least for the time youre going to spend learning to animate in Poser) as in #1 above and ALL EIGHT VIEW PORTS configured. For example. I like to have the two pane vertically oriented windows with one for front view and the other for left view. Have your basic figure loaded when you set up the view ports and UI dots. Most of the cameras will need adjustment.

8 Work with linear interpolation to start and add quaternion later. (Not a hard and fast rule, but a good starting point)

9 Manually create a few walk cycles! The walk designer is great, but creating a walk cycle yourself is excellent practice. Hint #1: To steal another quote from Martin Hash: The fewer key frames an animation has the more elegant it is. Hint #2: Dont forget about Figure/Symmetry/Swap Right and Left.

10 Insert a primitive or simple prop or even a floor with a grid drawn on it as a spatial frame of reference if need be. Delete it when youre done.

11 When limbs are flying around and youre stumped: Save your file with a new name, go to the animation pallet, highlight all key frames and set interpolation to linear. Replay your animation. If the movement looks pretty clean, but now machine-like of course, then the problem probably lies in overshoot with one or more parameters. After youve narrowed down the list of possible offending parameters (good luck) go to the graph for each individual parameter and see where your over shoot problems are. Sometimes its helpful to do the same process except change all keys to constant instead of linear, then step through your keys one by one. This can help you find a pose that you might have screwed up accidentally.

12 Do keyframing in the graph a lot, a whole lot. You can work fast this way once you get your head around it.

13 Set your camera animation off. Add camera animation when youre done with everything else.

14 To delete, for example, all key frames for a particular parameter or group of parameters use the animation pallet. To copy and paste key frames use the animation pallet. (copy and paste on the graph is unreliable on my XP system running P5).

Message edited on: 01/19/2005 15:42