Share Your Advanced Poser Tips and Tricks!

(DOH! I meant to post this as a reply to a question and ended up starting another thread on accident. That's what you get for staying up till 4 a.m. playing SL. I'll repost this in the right place but as long as it's here, let's use this as a chance for other Poser users to share their advanced tips and tricks!)

My tips and tricks are the use of inverse kinematics, the animation palate, and graphs!

Another benefit of using inverse kinematics is that if you manipulate the hips it will automatically add realistic motion to the upper (or lower body). Deleting frames will lead to a relatively still upper body resulting in an unnatural stiffness.

There are two really useful tools in Poser, the animation palate and graph window, which both can be accessed under the "Window" menu item.

The animation palate shows a grid of squares which represent body parts on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. To eliminate the movement of a body part, select a horizontal row of squares and hit "delete". To time shift animations, select a large block of animations and slide them to the left or right. Further, one can copy a set of blocks (with ctrl-c or cmnd-c) and paste them into another spot (with ctrl-v or cmnd-v). One word of warning, the MacOS version of Poser crashes if you copy 2 blocks and try to paste it into more or less blocks (on accident).

The graph window is profoundly powerful. Poser uses a spline to create movement between keyframes. Sometimes the spline can create unwanted, exaggerated movements in the intermediate frames. The best way to fix that is to go into the graph and add extra intermediate keyframes for a body part to "tack down" the motion. (Another solution is to switch from "spline" to "linear" or "constant" in the animation palate.)

Once you have down inverse kinematics, the animation palate, and graphs, you'll know everything you'll need to be a Poser expert.

~Ulrika~

The importance of the animation graphs (aka function curves) can't be overstated. If you have body parts that are rotating out of acceptable range between key frames, this is the place to fix it.

nice, thanks!!



BEHOLD the power of the spline!

Because SL uses the first frame of the bvh animation file to normalize the rest of the animation, several problems can occur:

1) If the hips aren't at a neutral orientation and height, the rest of the animation will be translated and rotated leading to "leaning" and "hovering" animations.

2) The first frame is omitted from the animation which can lead to a jump in a looping animation.

My first solution to this problem was to create a neutral first frame and then begin my animation on the second frame. The problem with this is that by putting two key frames right next to each other, the spline can vary dramatically between the second and third key frame. Additionally, if you use poser to optimize the spline for a looping animation, the end of the animation will move to the first normalization frame instead of the second key frame.

My solution is to simply start all animations with the hips in the neutral position.

I had experimented with constant or broken splines but haven't had much luck. Does anyone have any tricks on getting around this first frame problem using advanced Poser settings or do you all start with neutral first frames, which are then discarded at upload, too?

~Ulrika~

You might try putting the same keys at frames 2 and 3 (and possibly even 4) to help keep the spline from overcompensating.

You can also break the spline in the keyframe window. I think it's the far right button on the top.

I leave the default poser 'pose' as the first frame, then start my animations on the second. I break the splines on the first and second frames and everything seems to work great. Perfect looping in SL and no unwanted limb movement.

I tried breaking the spline after I realized there was a problem but it seemed to have no effect. Do you break the spline immediately after creating the second frame or in theory can it be done at any time? I'll experiment with it again.

~Ulrika~

JOINT LOCKING:

This is a little SL quirk that many people dont understand yet, let me explain. When you upload your animation to SL it looks at the first frame just as a reference and doesn't include it in the animation. Then it looks at the SECOND frame and for each joint that hasnt moved from the reference position(first frame) it sets that joints priority to -1 automatically. This means that any other animation(no matter priority) that tries to animate that body part will be able to do so, including the default SL animations.
How to fix this? Simply put a keyframe for all body parts you want to lock in frame 2, and make sure to at least slightly move every joint. This might sound like a hassle but you can do it once and then just save it, then just open up that file instead of going File - New.

Brilliant post Archanox! Thanks for taking the time to share it.

~Ulrika~

Apologies for bumping an ancient thread, however I am having problems with this advice.

In Poser 4 (perhaps this is the problem), I created an animation using the SL_Male avatar from the SL website (after saving it first to get rid of the loading errors) with two frames.

The first frame I left untouched, while in the second frame I moved every body part a bit so that the default priority would not be -1.

However, I still find that the arms will shift about and the hands will open/clasp from time to time.

Is this a problem with Poser 4? I tried adding a keyframe for both 1 and 2 as well as just adding one for two. I set the priority to 4 and loop.

I've seen this work with other animations, so clearly I am doing something wrong. Hopefully it's not the version of Poser, but I suppose it could be.