Gimme some advice :)

I'm pretty serious about learning to make my own poses and animations but am a total animation noob. I have the funds available to purchase Poser 7 and I'm a fast learner. Should I just skip the freebie programs and start with Poser? Or is there something significant to be gained from building my way up using the Qavimator, Avimator or other programs first?

Thanks for advice if you can give it!

Sera

im not in that kind of business at all, but my advice is :
try to search for that more discretely coz probably ppl who making that wont say all things about here if u know what i mean ...

good luck

i guess i'm one of those hopeless optimists who thinks there are still some decent, honest people in the world willing to help others... even in Second Life

I use Poser 7 for animations, and I don't have any experience with the free animation programs available for Second Life.

However, if your only interest is making animations for Second Life, I'd recommend trying to learn one of the free programs. From what I have read about the other animation programs, I don't think that Poser 7 has any tools that they don't have.

I didn't buy Poser to do animations, but I've been using it for years to do a lot of other 3D graphics things. I just use it for Second Life animations because I happen to have it. I don't recommend it as the starting tool if your only interest is Second Life animations.

-nod-, thank you for the advice. i wonder if there are many differences between how any of the programs work with couples anims, as I am most interested in creating two person animations. would definitely want something that can handle two avatars (yes, i *am* totally ignorant.. lol.. but i am researching at the same time as posting here, i just have always found the forums a great resource for the clueless...)

You can always just try the free ones for free right away. If they are missing some feature that you want, then you can shell out the money for a commercial program. Don't be scared to download one and just start playing with it.

LOL - I'll help you Sera! I started with Poser - it took me a long time to learn the interface as it is very complicated - more complicated than Photoshop, if you know that package. I went to one in-world education session about QAvimator and learnt to get going with that package in an hour's lesson. So my answer is, it depends on how quickly you want to get going - on how patient you are learning. Familiarity is a great thing - you always favour the software tools you know and get annoyed and frustrated with the ones you don't know. Poser does a lot more than just animation - so it is a very complex package. Other packages are specifically for animation and nothing else - so their user interfaces are simpler and therefore quicker to familarise with.

QAvimator can handle two figures - I've not used it for a couples animation though, so I can't comment on pros and cons. I suggest you read down the forum and check the FAQs and the links to tutorials.

Hey Deira,

Thanks for the responses I've been playing around with Qavimator for a little bit, even managed to upload a very sophomoric pose and even an animation earlier, lol. And I did see that two avs can be shown in the workspace, but still figuring out exactly what that means as I can only figure out how to edit one of them, not both of them. I'm also going to try out SLAT later, that was recommended in the forums as a good program for couples anims.

And your comment about familiarity - this is kinda my thinking, should I go ahead and get Poser, and start getting used to it now (instead of switching to it and moaning about how everything is different, lol), and is it really *the best* in terms of being able to make professional animations specifically for SL. I can do complicated... if it means that I get better results...

That said, I would probably get into using Poser for various other projects too not having to do with SL. I just spotted the Manga Debut software and am downloading a trial version of that, hehehe... So, it might be worth it, but I will play around with the free stuff for a little while first and cut my teeth a little. And just saw the Poser free trial download, yay...

I've had this conversation before in world, I used to do 3D professionally (Lightwave) and choose QAvimator...

QAvimator is custom designed for SL's idiosyncrasies, taking care of a lot of the "busy work" for us. There are also a lot of questions from people having problems with Poser's features, here in the forum, which just can't happen with QAvimator, as those extras you can't take advantage of aren't even there!

However, you mention doing couples animations, which I have done and can be done in QAvi, might cause you to want to look at Poser, as although QAvimator DOES do it, it's not really intuitive.

Also, I kept an older version of QAvimator around for IK, when you want that, maybe that will tip the choice over to Poser?

However, the results will be the same, as they all produce the same file from your talents, the only question is how they get from your mind into the BVH, and which is quickest, easiest and doesn't get in your way!

So would you say Poser is more intuitive with the couples animations? And overall a better program to use for that type of work? Care to expand on that a little?

re: the difficulty of Poser, yeah... I have seen a bunch of forum posts about difficult with this setting or that setting... but it sounds like once all that gets set in the program it's easier to use? At least I hope, if I end up purchasing it, lol...

Hi Sera - well done - you're doing fine I think the reason that Poser is possibly perceived to be "the best" is simply that the SL Avatar skeleton is the same as the Poser 2 skeleton. My guess is that at the time SL was being developed, Poser 2 was just about the only option for a realistic human avatar animation. Poser 7 has many features that just cannot be used in SL because the technology in Poser has moved on - e.g., you can animate fingers and toes and faces in Poser 7 - but this cannot be uploaded into SL.

My experience with learning to use Poser was that I actually had to read the HELP file/Tutorial and study it first. This was a bit alien for me because I tend to get into an application and try things out - check out all the menus and click everything- Only look at HELP as a last resort. Maybe you will find it different - but I do think that experience with using QAvimator will help you get going quicker with Poser. Free Trials are good I sometimes think that there must be many people who have Poser on their desktops, but have given up on using it, and that is why I think people on this board are hesitant to recommend to a new animator that they buy it, before they have some experience.