Poser version question

I've been using Qavimator for some time now, and have become pretty comfortable with it, however, from some folks that I've spoken to, and from some things that I've read on here, that poser is a decent program to use. Now I know that the current version out right now is v7, but I think I remember seeing some post to the effect that SL doesn't behave well with anything over v5.

So my question is, does poser v7 work well with SL?? Or should I just stick with Qavimator?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I have not had any problems with animations created in Poser 6 or 7 in SL. However, Poser 7 is a pain to work with at times. It locks up unexpectedly sometimes causing you to loose your work. It freezes when saving work leaving the only option to kill the process and restart.

I would try a demo first (if there is one lol) on your PC to see if it works well for you first. For me, it works for a while, then (pulls hair out).

Hope this helps!
~Maddy

In addition... if I would have known how quirky the program would be for me I would have saved my money on Poser 6 and the upgrade to 7 and just bought Maya which I here works pretty smoothly.

~Maddy

Thanks Maddy for the advice. Qavimator is great, but sooner or later I'm going to have to stick more than just my foot in the water to try it out.

I looked for a demo version, but could not find one. I might just give it a go, and hope for some updates.

Thanks again

http://downloads.e-frontier.com/us/user/home.php?cat=1349

Scroll down on the page until you get to "Poser 7 English Demo"

I guess I must have that classic male problem of just opening the door and saying something's not in there. Not bothering to actually move something to get a closer look.

Thanks Maddy, you're the best.

edit: Any Maya users out there that can weigh in on it??

I've used Poser 4, 5, and 7 without crash problems (of course, with any software, it seems that there is a crash sometimes, but Poser does not crash more for me than anything else). I've only used Poser 7 to make animations for Second Life, so I can't speak to any compatibility problems with previous versions. I wouldn't think there would be compatibility problems; one has to export to .bvh regardless, a standard format. Maybe earlier versions of Poser did something weird writing .bvh files, but if I were you, I'd do some research on specific problems, rather than going by hearsay.

However, I don't know that Poser does anything that the free animation programs can't do, when it comes to making animations for Second Life. Before spending the money, I'd recommend checking what specific features Poser might have over the other programs. Poser works fine for me, but I didn't buy it just to do Second Life animations. I've used Poser for a long time to do lots of things not related to Second Life.

I've seen the question of whether to buy Poser come up a lot in these forums, but I've never really seen any specific feature that Poser might have that another program does not have. What does Qavimator not do that you want to do with Poser?

Well for the moment, nothing that I'm not aware of. Part of my reasoning for wanting to try it out was in the event that I wanted to take it beyond SL, I was kinda looking for something that was established, and well used to allow me do that.

IIRC poser stopped doing funny things in exported bvh files in version 5 (v4 needed a patch)

Funnily enough Poser 6 needed a patch as well, there was a bug in the bvh file saving.
Oh, poser has a great little feature that I havn't found on any other, and is perfect for walking, sitting, lieing anims. "drop to ground" in the top tool bar menu's.

While hand animating is difficult, doing it in Poser is seriously agravating. Things that should help like IK ends up just frustrating me more. Plus when you move the joints around by grabbing, things mostly get messed up. For instance, grabbing the arm and dragging it forward shouldn't move the entire upper body forward. Then you have tools like the Walk Designer which doesn't work on the SL avatar and you end up spending more time fixing then it would have taken you to make from scratch.

Once you know how to use Maya, it's a lot less frustrating. I personally find it much more intuitive and gives far more control for hand animating. But it has a much higher learning curve then Poser and a whole lot more tools which you'd never need with SL. For me it's worth it because I don't want to chuck my entire computer out the window like I do everytime I use Poser. But then again, there are issues with bringing it into SL because of the different ways poser and maya calculate rotation values.

If you have the time, I'd suggest trying out both to see which ones are most comfortable with using. While the free programs have everything you need to make animations in SL, the workflow of the expensive programs might fit you better. Not to mention knowing Maya won't hurt you at all if you want to animate beyond SL.

The only version incompatibility I'm aware of is with version 6; you will need to download a free patch in order to export to bvh correctly. I use version 4, so I can guarantee that every version of Poser from 4 to 7 works for animating with SL.

I am an accomplished user of Maya (I teach it in RL) and very much prefer it as an animation tool, but I decided to pickup Poser for animating in SL simply because I wanted something stripped down to just what applies to SL. I got version 4 off ebay for $40.

The reality is that while people get all hung-up on this software or that, an accomplished animator will just use whichever tool is most convenient for the job at hand. Heck, if it had spline interpolation I'd probably just use qavimator.