Poser Rotational Question

I've seen similar questions to this in my research, but nothing exact unless I just didn't understand the answer.

I'm new to using Poser. I just got Poser 5 as a promotional thing from Content Paradise a few months ago. I just got around to installing it last night because I was in dire need of a better animation.

Basically, I need a 'rocketman' like pose where my arms and legs are closed in tight, head is tilted back, and the AV is laying on its stomach at a perfectly horizontal angle.

I have an animation that is similar to this, but unfortunately the AV is not centered perfectly and is actually rotated at a slightly odd angle. For most things this wouldn't be a problem and hasn't been, but in the case of an attachment vehicle, this really makes it hard to line up the attachment with the hitbox perfectly.

So in Poser, I changed the av in frame one so that their head was tilted back, arms tucked in using the forearm, legs tucked in using the shins, and then rotated the body horizontal. I copied this to frame 2, and then went back to frame 1 and made it the default pose with CTRL+A. I exported it as a BVH file and imported it into SL.

SL did everything right, except that I did not go horizontal. I read something in regards to the hips, so I was wondering if I move the hips up slightly, will that cause SL to realize that this rotation had changed? Or do I need to rerotate the whole AV using the hips?

My other question is....since I want this to be *perfectly rotated* at a 90 degree angle, is there a way I just didn't see to crunch those numbers in directly?

I've got a 100prim ship and if I can't get the 70 prim attachment dead on, it's going to look funny

Any help or hints is appreciated.

Poser has a palate with "wheels/dial" and a number alongside each dial. You use these in conjunction with the tool buttons for translate, rotate etc. Selecting the body part of the figure (or the whole body) you can either drag the dial with the mouse or click in the number and enter a precise figure for the parameter you are setting.

Hope this helps and good luck.

Are you applying the rotation to the body or the hips? If you're not used to 3D animation this sounds like a distinction without a difference, but it's actually important because SL ignores animation applied to the overall body. Make sure your rotation is done on the hips; you will probably want to turn off IK for the feet so that they rotate along with the hips.

Thanks all, I believe that answered my questions, but I will need to verify when I get off work. I didn't get a chance to mess with it much, but the rotational camera, etc, looked very similar to what I'm used to using in Bryce, so I knew I had to just be missing something in regards to the #'d rotational values.

I saw the thing regarding IK in another post, but wasn't sure what/where this was so I didn't include it in my question hoping that whether or not I needed to find this would be key in the answer.

I apologize if the questions are very noobish, but I've never done an animation before heh.

Remember that before you upload to SL, your first frame has to be the 'reference' pose. Your actual animation starts on frame 2.

Also remember to never use the 'body' parameters to adjust position. Always ajust position with the hip. (Oh, that hint already posted.)