Anyone else used Poser 4?

Hi all,

I'm a beginner at animating, and getting nowhere fast. ...no...come to think of it, it's taken me ages to get nowhere.

I have Poser 4. It's from the last century, and I couldn't find any updates for it. Many posters say Poser 4 is fine, so as a first project, I decided to try to make a simple still pose like the "T" pose but with arms at 45degrees(for adjusting attachments etc).

I followed Ulrika's basic tutorial, and made the animation, which works fine in Poser.

On uploading though, the figure in the animation upload viewer was unaffected by my bvh file, except for a slight parting of the feet (which could be just a default SL animation?).

I have since tried with many other bvh files, and almost every possible combinations of ease-in, priority, and loop settings, but always with the same result: no movement in upload window or playing in-world.

On the Poser side: as instructed, I have left frame 1 alone as the T pose (and also tried resetting all frame 1 positional %s to 0). I have tried with just 1 more frame containing my pose, as I believe a still pose is just frame 2 looping. I have tried with 2 more frames (2 identical and 2 different). I have tried with and without setting keyframes. I have made longer animation with 30 frames and 3 key frames which look great (but only work in Poser). As a test, I tried with frame1 all settings to 0, frame2 all settings to 2, frame3 all settings to 4 except the arms which rotate down 45, with and without keyframes. None affect the upload viewer figure in any appreciable way.

I've also tried animating using the Poser2 "casual manP2" figure as Ulrika suggested as an alternative to the SL avatar. Same results.


Is this a Poser4 bvh export problem?

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions.

Kendo


***PROBLEM SOLVED -SEE MY LAST POST***

I think you need to download the avatar files from the downloads section, you cant just make a T pose, you have to download the files, and import them into your character section of poser, then start poser, then use that.

Hi Heather,

Sorry, I thought it was clear from my post. I followed Ulrika's tut, which includes downloading the SL av and adding it to the Poser library. I read a lot of posts for how to's before I tried animating, and searched them for similar problems afterwards!

I use Poser 4. As a visit to my store will attest to, bvh export works just fine.

I use poser 4 too. I tried the newer ones, but they run so slow that it makes animation pretty difficult. Poser 4 runs much smoother and the movements are real time. The improvements in the newer version are great for rendering images in the program, but they don't add anything for exporting animations, so you're better off with versin 4 for creating sl animations. They even still offer version 4 under a different name since so many people still ike it.

I just tried one myself with Poser 5. It uploads & works just fine, but you'll find that the Avatar doesnt stand perfectly still. The arms & Legs stay out at 45 degree angles, but any movement of the mouse causes the body and head to move around.

Try finding one of the Freebie Pose Stands (if you havent got one already).

Bear in mind that animation is only applied to body parts that are moved in Poser. As in, if a given body part never changes from it's frame 1 position, then SL ignores that part of the animation. That's the entire point of frame 1 being separate from the animation, to use it as a reference for which parts have moved. Thus, if you want the entire body to be perfectly still, you must slightly move every single body part in frame 2. Otherwise, the default animations will continue to be applied.

Thanks for all the replies.

At least now I know it can be done with Poser 4, and it's just that I'm most likely doing something wrong!

I'll keep trying.

Quotes:
Johan Durant: "Bear in mind that animation is only applied to body parts that are moved"
Tod69: "Try finding one of the Freebie Pose Stands (if you havent got one already)."

-One bvh I made left the default pose in frame 1 and moved every body part 4 units in the second frame (except the arms which I moved 45 units) and this was to get all body parts to go still. I'm aware of the "no change=default anim" rule. And yes, I could use a posing stand (I have one), but the point was to just to start with something "easy".

Keep the suggestions coming though!

------------------------------

PS: Having read a later post, I've also tried breaking spline between frames 1 & 2, but still no joy.

Also, I'm on XP with 1Gb RAM, so Poser 4 wouldn't run until I installed a alternative startup exe which referenced an intercept.dll and gets over the "generic memory" bug. Probably irrelevant, but I thought I'd mention it.

Also consider the current pose+animation bug. Sometimes you fail to see a pose and stay in the default sitting or standing animation. Try using the uploaded files again after relogging, it could be that it works fine then.

Thanks for the suggestion Ishtara, but still no good after relogging.

This is SO frustrating. Poser works fine, but my bvhs don't work at all in SL. If I could just see some tiny effect on the upload window figure (or on my av in-world) I could work on it.

To recap:

~I leave frame 1 as the downloaded SL avatar (the position dials were NOT all zeroed in the download version, but I've also tried using an all-zeroed version).

~ Frame 2 is my pose, with all position dials moved a minimum of 4 units. I made some rotations big so they should be obvious. Ive tried with and without keyframes set for frames 1 & 2.

~I export as a bvh (poser4 has no "scale automatically" button).

~ In the SL upload window, I set loop and prio 4 (I've tried all setting combinations here...no ease in/out etc).

~ The SL upload figure never goes into my pose. If I pay to upload, neither does my av in-world, locally or in-game. I've uploaded textures OK before.

~ I've also tried a 30 second animation with 3 keyframes, which works great in Poser, but does not work in SL.


What the hell am I doing wrong???

Ok, thanks for all the replies, but I think I'll give up on my Poser 4.

I've just downloaded Avimator. Did the exact pose I wanted first try, and it uploaded and works perfectly. Took about 10 minutes total.

This is turning into a bit of a blog, but for the benefit of others who had the same problems as me with Poser 4 bvhs:

POSER 4 MUST BE UPDATED FOR THE BVHs TO WORK WITH SL!

MANY thanks to Zapoteth Zaius, who solved this in a June 06 post which I missed, as that was about Poser 3. The updates for the older Posers are available from:

http://www.e-frontier.com/filemanager/list/updates/0/0/0?sbss=300

It's a bit of a pain to get them, as you have to give a verifiable email address to which they can send updates first, and allow cookies etc, but you don't have to give names. Also you'll need your Poser product key number.

But it works! My bvh's now upload no problem.

Anyway, for newbs like me, I think Avimator better for those first animations and still poses. It's free, simple, and has a much more intuitive and user-friendly interface than Poser. Poser probably does a lot more, but I haven't got to grips with it properly yet. It does have the advantage that you can pose more than one figure.



PS: Older Poser apps also cannot cope with too much RAM, and just give an error message at startup. The "generic memory" problem fix is also available at the linked site, and this will get you up & running.

Ahh, I'd updated my poser 4 with the pro pack years ago and forgot about it, it must have had this fix in it too. This is great information for any other poser 4 users that might want to animate in sl. We should add this to the faq!

Huh, interesting. I didn't need to update because I simply got the latest version of 4, and I didn't need to update because of memory since I have 1GB RAM.