2 Minor Animation Problems..

Hi, I'm brand new to this, I thought maybe some of you veterans may know the answers to my two questions.

1. When I preview an animation in Poser, for some reason my SL mannequin turns into a block figure instead of retaining his humanoid form. Since this happens, I'm unable to tell what the original character would look like doing the animation. How can I get the preview anim to be the character?

2. What exactly IS the default SL pose? The SL Mannequin that came with the template has is arms straight out. Are we really supposed to begin our animations with the arms sticking straight out at the sides? It looks messed up in game.

Thanks in advance.

There's a set of tracking widgets next to your canvas window. The bottom one says 'full tracking'. That'll fix the box thing.

The default pose you should be shootin' for is basically the avatar with it's arms at it's sides. Move the arms down and save the file... then you can just use that one.

Thanks a million, man, I can't tell you how much that helped.

Ok, now I'm gettin another problem. The animation preview in SL is not even CLOSE to what it turns out like ingame.

For instance, I made a smoking animation. The Av lifts the cigarette to his/her mouth, pauses, and goes back to normal. It looked perfect in the preview, but then when I uploaded it, my AV tried to do it an dthe cigarette didn't even make it to his neck before going back.

Are his arms too short?

Ah, welcome to the tough world of animation If your SL avatar is not exactly the same size and proportion of your Poser mannequin, this will always happen!

You can get a somewhat "official" Xenon Linden model from this link.

Still, this will happen a lot. Us amateurs will need to do lots of "trial and error" (meaning many many uploads) to get things working perfectly aligned to our humble avatars...