TAKE MY COMPUTER AND CHUCK IT OUT THE WINDOW, GO DOWNSTAIRS TO MY BASEMENT AND JUST START BREAKING EVERYTHING THERE!!! Now I know that after the enormous amount of time I've spent wrapping my mind around this program that it can't just be me. Six weeks may not seem like a lot of time to some people here but I'm talking about 6 straight weeks of doing this minimum 6 hours a day! Now its starting to dawn on me that maybe there's a reason why so few if any people use this thing for animations and instead just use it for posed rendered scenes. Its got to be that Poser has too many bugs in it for this to be doable. So now I'm here to ask all of you who have been using poser for some time now to share with me the known defects in the program that make it unfeasible for animation. The main problem I have is I start out making poses, adjusting them and then when I go to play it back the part of the figure I moved is going in the opposite direction between the keyframes. It always ends up where its supposed to be at the saved keyframe but goes all over the place between the keyframes. Since I first read about this program I fell in love with it and swore as soon as I got it that I would spend as much time as necessary, do whatever I had to do and anything to master the animation aspect of it. Now people please, I need to know right now if its more effort required on my part in which case I'll go right back to doing what I've been doing until I get it right OR Poser has to many quirks in it and all the effort in the world on my part will never change the situation.

Have you tryed using the "Window - Graph" to check out what is happening. If you have been using Poser for 6 weeks and you are attempting animation, my hat is off to you. It takes much time (months) to become skilled at 3d software that is any good (like Poser). It sounds to me, between your keyframes, you'll find in the graph that things need to be adjusted. Be patient.

NO - - DON'T CHUCK IT OUT THE WINDOW.....it doesn't take that much to do animation....I am terrible at it, but have made small animations....if you go to www.poserarcana.com you will find a great tutorial on exactly how to do it...it is a flash movie tutorial so be patient while it loads unless you have broadband. Look throught their tutorial site. Hope this helps....keep the computer....could get rid of the operator....LOL just kidding. Sharen

Hi farang, I've been doing a lot of animation in Poser lately and actually enjoying it. It isn't buggy at all, but it IS quirky. The good news is that once you get the hang of it, animating in Poser is pretty straightforward. But you DO have to keep a few basic concepts in mind. First of all, there's this whole "spline vs. linear interpolation" thing, which is what I think you're having trouble with. With spline interpolation, every time you tell Poser to move a body part or object somewhere, it wants to add a kind of "anticipation" move and a "reaction" move. Poser calculates this all by itself and you don't have much control over it (unless you want to really dig into the guts of the program, something I always hate to do -- I'm not a mathematician or an engineer). That's why objects are flying off to places where you don't want them to. Poser is trying to "help" you by adding movements that you didn't ask for and probably don't want. But Poser isn't doing this to be mean. It's just trying to make things more "natural" looking. Since Poser defaults to spline interpolation I suspect that's where things go wrong for most beginning Poser animators and it's why people don't animate in Poser more often. Choose "linear interpolation" and objects will start behaving themselves and moving closer to where you want them to. But, since linear interpolation is a bit robotic-looking, once you get the hang of it, you can start using spline interpolation to "smooth out" your actions and make them look more normal. The other basic concept that you're probably having problems with is understanding how to keyframe successfully. You have to remember that making a keyframe for ONE body part or object in the scene doesn't necessarily make on for ALL the body parts or objects in the scene unless you specifically tell Poser to do that. So you have to keyframe very carefully and think everything through for each body part. Keyframing is an area where Poser really doesn't act intuitively at all. But if you think more like a stop-motion animator, ready to keyframe just about everything in sight, then Poser makes much more sense and behaves better. Study up on those two concepts and see if my advice helps. Jsemp

Hi I have been animating with Poser for over a year now and once you get the hang of it, you will find that it is indeed fun, but alot of work...that IMVHO is why more people don't use it to animate. I have around 200mb of Poser animations on my site and probably twice that much on my hard drive. I would post the link, but the site is not quite appropriate for this forum. If anyone wants the link, contact me and I will send it to you. Your problem is with the type of interpolation as jjsemp stated above.. Spline interpolation bases everything on curves, linear makes all the movements uniform along a straight line and constant the gray choice only changes the movement at each keyframe. Click on the Figure keyframe on frame 1 and Poser will select all of the body parts below and change your interpolation to linear...the brown colored one. Once you get something that looks good to you, you can always change the interpolation back to spline, but be warned you might not get the same result. Also use more keyframes and cut your frame rate down. I use 6fps for animations with no sound and 12fps for those that have sound and dialoge <--my spelling sucks BTW to cut down on file size. Hope this helps you some..if you have any questions I will try to help. Ed

I've used a couple of other animation programs, including Alias (a real long time ago, but still it is the industry standard), and I've taught animation, I wanted to say there isn't anything wrong with Posers animation tools, it is really just learning how to use them. As the rest of the guys have said, the problem is it is just hard getting used to spline averaging. The flow of this always seems to throw new animators off, as the animation often goes to places they know are wrong, but it is just the animation program following the curve from the points you set, it doesn't know that isn't what you really wanted!

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/odeathoflife

My animations are not too risky (I'm not into poser porn) to be mentioned here. There are 4 on my site, each better than the last (Spiderman is my favotite) www.geocities.com/odeathoflife then enter>movies>poser animations I am working on a movie now, I'm shooting for 1/2 hr long, about my comic character (in the poser4 section of above page) I find thaqt the animations definately are querky(I never knew about the splines) when ever I get a wonkey section between keyframes I always shruged it off and where it atarts to go wrong go in and manually change the poses to follow properly, now I know better thank you all

OK, went for a run, had a nice dinner and I'm much calmer now. So calm in fact that I went into the interpolation graphs that you all mentioned above and now my confidence has been restored. Up until now I thought that I could bypass learning the interpolation for now and just adjust the speed of the movements by placing the keyframes closer to each other. Learning Poser reminds me of when I was younger and played guitar in that while easy to learn the basics there is always something new to master. Thank you everyone now its back to praactice time.

Farang, one very specific hint once you get used to using those keyframe graphs: Always mark the start and end of each single motion (like each bend of the elbow or each grasp of the hand) with a Spline Break on every parameter you changed. This will keep the interpolation from running forward and backward in time from the desired motion. There are a few cases where this will look too jerky, but using Spline Break universally is a good rule of thumb to start with. .... ockham

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/~deimos/

First thing when actually "twee ning" between poses make sure that IK are tunded off. Try to only use IK when setting up a pose and turn it off when your not using it. Secondly. Try and keep your shots small about 3-9 seconds max. If you watch t.v. you will notice most shots are only about 3 seconds any ways. This will greatly help working with the Key Fram Editor. Also less damagew is done if computer freezes or totally crashes. Don't over look using the Keyframe Editor if your not using this this is vary important that you learn this. There are a few t.v. shows in the U.K. that are in production that are done in poser! Also Raven a 22 minute short was supposedly done in poser though I have yet to see it as my modem is to slow :( If you find my comments usefull and think that there is either enough demand or that this and my few other bits of knowledge would make a good tutorial please let me know. Yes 6 weeks of 6hour days of animation is a lot to all of use. But please don't get to disapointed with your out come rembember shows like Reboot, Shadow Raiders, Max Steel and Starship troopers usually have teams of 15-30 animators working 60 hours weeks for about 4 weeks per episode. Along with Specialist, Rendering Farms powerfull computers and software, and have other business profesionals supporting them and they get paid unlike many of the people here at renderosity. Sorry for the long resonce. Deimos.