which program . . .

Which animation program would be best if I am looking for one that you can "pin" body parts? Such as if I want to move the hips, but have the feet stay in the same spot. Is there a program that does this, and if so, which one would you suggest?

My apologies if this question as been asked and answered before . . .

Poser. What you're talking about is called inverse kinematics. With poser you can pin the hands and / or feet then move any other part(s) of the body. I believe Daz Studio will do this too, but I recommend Poser, especially if you can get a cheap copy of Poser 5.

Just wondering what on earth you might want to fix the feet / hands and wiggle the hips for?

ty for your reply . . . and um . . . yeah . . . i probably shouldn't mention the animations i plan to make - hehe

now i am curious . . . if i am going to get a copy of Poser - why not get a higher version other than price?

Price is the big reason. Poser is expensive. I think it's around $250 US or so. You can get Poser 5 for $49 right now, however. Definitely worth it if you don't need every single bell and whistle in the newest version and you DO need the "inverse kinetics" feature which isn't available in Avimator and Qavimator.

I didn't do a lot of animating with Poser when I first got it, but I can't think of any upgrades in the animation tools between versions 5 to 7 that have any significant impact on the animations you'd do for Second Life.

Can anyone give me a rough idea of how difficult Poser is in comparison to Avimator or Qavimator? So far, Avimator and Qavimator have been reasonably easy to use and seem to be doing what I need. Is Poser a lot more difficult? Is there a huge learning curve or can I use the basics and work my way up to the advanced feautures ??

Any chance you've got a URL to a reputable site that has Poser 5 for cheap?

I don't have personal experience with buying from this site, but here's the URL

http://www.thebest3d.com/poser/index.html

Just a heads up - I downloaded the latest version of Daz Studio (which is free) and it has excellent joint pinning capabilities, and a couple of new "toys" called PowerPose and Puppeteer that are really useful. Harder to learn than Qavimator (the manual is 300 pages), and the interpolatopn is only linear I believe, but well worth a look.

DAZ will only leave the feet pinned if you move the hip with the power tool. If you move the hip down using the dials the feet will go through the floor. Very annoying because the latest DAZ version, with the puppeteer started to look very interesting.

I wondered why I couldn't get the foot pin to work right ! Thanks for the tip. Also, it seems to pin the translation but not the rotation movement.

Also, is there any way to get rid of a "Move to Floor" once you have set it? It doesn't set a keyframe and there doesn't seem to be any way to cancel it. I now avoid it like the plague, but I ruined several animations before I figured that out.

I use QAvimator, and it works just fine for everything you can ever need.

http://media.revver.com/qt;sharer=29361/380638.mov

The above is a link to a backflip animation I made in Qavimator. It only took me a few hours, and it was on day 2 of learning the program. The other animation in that video is the BVH imported into the animation program I have used for years.

Very nice!

Wow.. That's really great!

Coming in with no animation background, I'm finding QAvimator frustrating to the point of being about to buy Poser. Mine doesn't seem to have any docs with it at all (I have the latest Windows version from http://qavimator.org/ ) and I can't seem to find any good/easy tutorials..

Maede, I just started learning QAvimator and would be happy to help. I've tried Poser and can tell you that it is much harder to learn.

Let me know where you are at and frustrated with.

You're looking to export animation or poses to SL: POSER

For actual, quality (non-SL interest) animation (IK/FK): MAYA

/me smiles. TY!

Just some docs would be nice. Things like what the symbols on the timeline mean, a step-by-step to make a simple looping animation would be great, too.

There is some information (not much, but it is something) on their forums
http://forum.qavimator.org/viewtopic.php?t=358

The guide for Avimator also helps.
http://avimator.com/downloads/Avimator_Beginners_Guide.pdf


Don't worry about the animation at first, worry about creating a good static pose to start from. Set up QAvimator start work at frame 2 of 2. The default is frame 2 of 30, but change that since you are just starting with a static pose. Heed the words that avatar position is controlled by the hips, they are the only body part that has not only rotation settings, but position settings. Getting the starting pose right is your key to moving forward. Do a static pose first, expect to do a lot of uploads as you start to learn how things change when you upload them. Be sure to save your file with the .bvh extension. I think it took me 20 uploads with my first pose before I was happy.

Let me know when you've gotten a static pose that you like and we'll move on from there.

/me wags her tail. Excellent!


Thanks!

I have done a few poses lately - they're not great but they're not too bad. Also made an animation over the weekend which, after a few false starts and some hair-pulling, turned out okay. That forum link on what the symbols are will help - TY again!

I guess my biggest gripe, now that I've kinda sorta figured out how to use it, is that the interface doesn't feel intuitive to me. The camera constraints seem to take preverse delight in stopping me from doing what I want to, especially in sitting/laying poses. Seems it won't rotate more than a few degrees below wherever the hip is.

I'd also love to be able to do things like use my mousewheel to tweak the rotation on the selected limb - maybe it's something in my PC (FX60, 7800GT, 2GB) but the drag-to-rotate sometimes runs _really_ slowly and I have to stop looking at the model and look at the numbers instead. Maybe it's just my lack of experience but I find this really distracting..

Other little things, too.. It'd be great to be able to adjust the line width on the rotation circles - sometimes it's hard to see which direction(s) I need to rotate a limb to get it into the position I want. Having splitters would be really nice, too - I'd love to, for example, make the right side of the screen about 50% smaller.

All lack-of-experience things, I guess.. I'll keep poking at it..