Alternate to Poser.

I heard about a free alternate to poser.
What is it?

Blender, perhaps?

There are several good alternatives, but it's hard to do the "fixups" on the BVH files so that anims get properly uploaded into SL. I got several BVH files from different sources (a few from Blender), but almost all need to be imported into Poser, and exported again.

But then again, I'm no professional animator lol

Blender is the one... it even works with SL... but it's nowhere near as easy to use as Poser ... and that's not easy, lol

Thanks.
Downloading now.
Where's a blender tutorial?

If you want to use Blender, you'll need to become very familiar with its interface, how to manipulate objects, hierarchies, armitures, and animation IPOs. It's a steep learning curve, and it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy that type of stuff. If you have any interest in a career dealing with computer graphics and animation, Blender and Blender tutorials are a great way to start learning.

To set up a model, you'll need to first import a BVH file that uses the Poser 2 model hierarchy. I've included one in the attached ZIP.

Note that importing a BVH into Blender will only give you a hiererchically-linked set of null objects (or "empties" that will animate the sequence given in the BVH file. To create any useful animations of your own, you will need to build an armature skeleton that you can constrain the empties to. That in itself may be quite a challenge, depending on how realistically you want the figure to move. I'd like to try it myself in due time, perhaps making the finished skeleton available for download, but I can't give any dates at this point. If and when you do this on your own, keep in mind that only the relative rotations of the empties will be recorded in the BVH, not their locations (the exception being the hip root, which will have both location and rotation recorded).

Once you've created your animation (assuming you've read up on how to do this), select all the original empties and export to BVH. Now I haven't actually tried doing any animations of my own yet, but I've successfully imported, exported, and re-imported several BVH files in Blender, so theoretically this should all work fine.

One important note: Before you do any exporting, you'll need to go into "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts" and replace the existing bvh_export.py file with the one I've included in this ZIP. For some odd reason the regular BVH exporter alters the axis setup for translations, even though the BVH importer doesn't. Go figure.

Yippee! Thanks Beatfox. Another Open-Source win!

blender can be tuff iv worked with it for awile and em still learning lol but its worth the efert
a great plase for help is http://www.elysiun.com/forum/
thay have a ansere for whatever you wont and a great list of tuts

You should also check out avimator at

www.avimator.com

It was created by SL's very own Vince Plunkett and was recently open-sourced.