Poser questions

Okay, so I have looked around and read (what passes for ) the FAQ, and I still dont know much beyond Ulrikas basic tutorial and the answers to a lot of problems (that don't actually come up if you read Ulrikas tutorial closely).

My question...

When you use Poser it's pretty easy to grab the figure with the mouse and re-arrange it, and all the tutorials I have seen merely tell you to do that.

I have found however that grabbing the figure and moving it around with the mouse makes for huge errors.

The arms and legs often go akimbo immediately and it's far too easy to make the avatar move in quite unatural ways. Unless you are extremely carefull, it also seems extremely easy to introduce a kind of slant to the avatar's body (which is probably why so many SL animations look like they were done on the deck of the Titanic! ), because there is little indication given of the orientation of the avatar relative to the ground.

Anyway ... what used to be standard in animation was to animate the skeleton, not just grab the butt with the mouse and move it till it looks good. That way you get a real good idea of the spatial relationships and things are lots easier to move around.

How the heck does one get poser to switch to skeletal animatoin mode so one can make natural human movements instead of the wild approximations I have mostly seen?

Secondary to that, if it *is* possible to animate the skeleton, is there a setting to make said skeleton only have the degrees of motion that the human skeleton has? Again, this was standard practice lo those many years ago that I last tried animating.

DO NOT use the mouse to move the body parts. Intstead use the paramter dials.

Turn off inverse kenetics. This will make things harder to animate.. but will in turn not make things cause problems like you are seeing.

There is a figure of a skeleton. But not the SL version. I used to use it before the SL version came out.

One thing you have to remember is Poser is in no way a standard animation program. From what I am used to, it is a dumbed down buggy program. Saddly it is the only one we can use.

Thanks for the info.

I dont think its so much buggy as just poorly designed, but its all we have I guess.

So you are saying that one cant use the skeleton cause its not included in the SL avatar that we have to import? That would explain a lot.

By inverse kinetics I assume the program is trying to re-align the rest of the body parts in a more natural way relative to my chosen motion?

It seems to me that the whole animation would be eaiser done using a text editor since it cnat amount to anything more than a collection of vertice points with all that turned off. Argh.

Thanks though, for the tips.

oh you can use it... most people dont because the SL avies translate better into SL. Just load the skeleton one like you would load any other type of figure.. through the libarary.

Yes the inverse kinetics is an auto setting that if you move the hips, the legs stay put. but that also does very funny things to the legs so it doesnt ever seem to work as indended. You can use it to say rotate the hips a bit after you have posed the legs, but you just have to watch out because it tends to over rotate the feet in the process.

Please to god tell me there is another way to do animation in SL. Not only is Poser nothing short of horrific, but for Mac is the most buggy piece of crap ever written. I finally got a character positioned READY to animate and figured I had best saved *crash*.
I get the character about half way to where it was before *crash*.
Even if I do get the save dialogue to come up it is obscured by huge chunks of the interface, which I resized because they're so bloody tiny to begin with. This is Poser 5, with the latest patch and it crashes more than anything I've used!


Needless to say I haven't even managed to successfully POSITION a character, let alone begin animating it. I can animate fine in other programs, but none of them seem to export this format we require.


Please someone tell me they have a guide to creating these animations for something that's actually decent? Because Poser is not a program to build a game upon!
This should be the easiest money maker for me in SL, and I can't get a single animation!

*cough* easiest? I know a few clothing designers who spend a 1/4 of the time creating and the items at going rate cost 4x as much as the going rate of animations. Not to mention more people buy clothes then animations.

If i could use houdini i would have a lot more fun. but i cant. just the way things are.

Yeah but I suck at designing clothes, I have a few neat pictures to put on T-Shirts and that's about it