I am preparing to use poser 4 for storyboarding a feature film and am wondering if anyone else has used the program in this way. What other programs have you used in conjunction with it in order to create environments around your characters? What is most important to me is: Speed and Flexibility. I am playing around with 3d home interiors/architect - I like architect, but you have to import into interiors in order to export as an image file... and neither program exports 3d for use in Poser (which would be perfect)

If you are just doing story boarding, Bryce and Poser make an excellent combination to do just that. With a little patience and practice you can do architectural work in Bryce. Using just Poser as a storyboarder would be a major pain in the arse. I used to be in the music video business so I do have some experience in storyboards. For what it's worth to you anyway. Rob

I'd go with Rhino for modelling the environment. Fast, easy and, unlike Bryce, you can very quickly arrange objects based on real-world measurements. If you know a room is supposed to be 5 meters by 3 meters by 3 meters high, you make a room in Rhino with those measurements. It's harder and takes longer in Bryce. And Rhino exports 3DS or OBJ, thus perfect for importing into Poser if you have to.

If you have a digital camera, I'd shoot real int/ext and load them in as bg. then add Poser. That would be a lot faster. To storyboard a feature film - making 3d environs for each set up , renders... for one person you might have a bigger project than shooting the movie! '

Attached Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PoseAmation

Maybe you could ask this question of ChrisD, he uses poser as a guide for his cell animations (Disney). He has an e-mail list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PoseAmation -JH.

I tend to like the idea of using a digital camera -- when locations are set, one could even use Canoma then (which I find easiest to use between Bryce and Rhino)... thanks for the input.

Most of the storyboarding I've seen has been very basic, without worrying about textures, exact dimensions or such details. Its really to give an impression on the scene, not to block out camera angles and other things where you really need to worry about the actual set. You could do that with very basic props in poser quickly, without even rendering.

Check out my comic, I did all the storyboarding for it in poser and then refined all those storyboards once they were all done, picking and choosing the best of the bunch once I felt I had a good "run". Takes up a LOT of harddrive space but works well, hundreds of files sometimes just to get 10 good scenes....look in the FREESTUFF in Misc. 3DComics..."Molly Mostly"...all preworked in poser via storyboarding like crazy and then finalized and further edited with post production work in photoshop. Once you get on a roll like this you build a knack and then poser becomes quite "fast" for this type of thing; I used to do it by hand, mostly marker, and found THAT took longer sometimes simply cause after a while your hand-eye co-ordination begins to play tricks after a while when your tired, this doesn't happen with poser; poser is a GREAT tool for storyboarding because of all the intricate camera angles at your disposal plus much, much more, it saves you oodles of time if you know what your after and it IS fast if you don't "set" looong renders; it only becomes sloow once you get into testing for lights, but even then the mere fact THIS too is at your disposal makes it even a wealthier commodity for doing this ;-)