I've been playing with 3D still images for a while now, so I'm no stranger to the software, but I've never tried animating anything. I'd like to make a short experimental trailer for a movie, so I need a program that works well with both characters and backgrounds. This is my dilemma: as an image artist I usually import a Poser character into a Bryce environment. This works great for stills, but it gets real complicated when you need to reposition a character (or at leats I think it gets complicated, if I understand how it works). So I'm trying to find out the best way to approach this project, and if there's one program that will make its realization the least painful. All advice is appreciated.

You can do great animations with Poser and Bryce. But since Bryce can't handle character animation...you never actually import your characters into it.

What you do is:

• set up your character in Poser and your environment in Bryce.
• Animate your character in Poser. Any Props that your character interacts with should be handled in Poser rather than Bryce.
• Next, setup your camera in either Poser or Bryce (depending on what type of scene it is...Poser if you are focusing on the character, Bryce if you are focusing on the environment) then recreate your camera setup and animation in the other program.
• Setup your lights in Bryce and try to match them in your Poser scene as close as possible.
• Render your Bryce animation.
• Import the resulting AVI or MOV from Bryce as a background movie in Poser.
• Preview your animation to make sure that the camera angles, lighting and character positioning matches up to the background. If you need to make any changes, it's much easier to make them in Poser at this point.
• Render your Poser animation.

This method does leave a bit to be desired...your Poser characters can't cast shadows on the Bryce environment. For a more robust (and more expensive) method, you could get LightWave or 3DS Max along with the Poser Pro Pack. With this you could import your Poser animations into environments you've created in LW or Max and render with their superior render engines.

Well, that gives me a place to start. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Attached Link: http://server3006.freeyellow.com/3908/stats/hark.MPG

Can you import Bryce environments (moving) into max or lw? Or do you have to make scenery there? I know PPP let's you export your Poser animations to there--wondering if you can do same with Bryce and have the two meet.

No, you cant export a complete scene, the only thing you can export to max or lightwave is a terrain with textures.

(That Konan approah looks very interesting). That's too bad that you go terrain by terrain. So pratically, you'd really want to design your entire enviro in these other apps (I guess there are plugins that speed that up). Bryce may head for the shelf if I go this route, save Konan.... Thanks for info.