Flipping out - Poser help needed

I can do still poses well enough but i want to animate longer more natural looking anims.
By that I mean shift weight left and right in a single stand anim. Or return to a neutral stance between anims to simulate real movement.

Whats happen when i try to do anims longer than 3 frames is bizarre. And has been a problem for me for years.

The avatar figure flips and twists all out of shape, spinning around in the air before coming to the pose in the next keyframe.
I've tried everything i can think of like...
-turn off inverse kinematics
-add extra keyframes of similar poses between transitions.
-even saves between adding keyframes just for ha-ha's

I hope somebody knows what i am talking about and has similar experience.

You need to break the spline on frame 2. Poser's interpolation between keyframes is pretty terrible. This is actually quite a common occurance. Another anoying bit about it is that if you move say the arm forward poser will move it back and then forward instead of just the forward movement.

Go to window drop down menu -> animation palette (or the key icon on the bottom right hand side of the screen). Shift select all body parts of frame 2 and click on the button for breaking the spline. Its the last green button with the icon of a curve with a break in it.

Excellent, thank you very much. I havent tried it yet but that makes sense.

Should i break the spline between different positions as well?

Man, I really appreciate that help.

YW.

Just break the spline on frame 2 then run through your animation to see if there are any more oddities. The major twisting and contorting should be gone though. If there are, go to the keyframe right before the oddity starts and break the spline. If you break it on each movement you'll get a more robotic animation.

that worked, in poser, it was great.

Now I'm having the same problem others are having. The mysterious "Drift".

The animation runs perfect in Poser(6), and I have the service Pack3 for Poser too.
Really agrivating, no matter what I do (short of setting every frame as a keyframe) it 'drifts'.

(Tried QAvimator tonight and was disappointed with the app. Hoped it wouldnt drift. It did nothing BUT drift. Trash can is where that app is now.)

Thanks for the help with the flipping out though.

thank you for posting that concise answer to the twisting problem. I was also having some similar issues in Poser 7 when making my animations. I will try it and see if it helps

<3

Vanya

Certainly it is crucial to break the spline between frame 1 and 2 to avoid the animation from trying to interpolate the first frame into your anim but there are other ways to reduce weird behavior of your model in poser.

Poser has two different spline methods. The normal method which I think is interpolation and a linear method. Not sure if they are the correct terms but one is green and one is yellow. Found near the break splines button in the animation pallet.

Interpolation (green) causes poser to often overshoot movements as it overcompensates for natural movement. It is possible to adjust the spline curves by opening the graph to try and repair this overshoot. You will notice that in the graph window for each parameter you are animating the curve for the spline often goes above and below the actual points set in the key-frames.

Linear Splines (yellow) simply connect each key-frame by a straight line. This means you have no overshoot but movement can be a little jerky and unnatural.

I have found the crucial skill in Poser is to know when to use the green and yellow splines and when you need to go in and re key-frame or edit the spline graphs for individual parameters.

Most often it is a combination of the different splines and editing of the graph that will get you the results you want.

Unfortunately it would appear that most of the tools we can use for SL animation will take time to create convincing movement.

I use "Resample Key Frames" early and often to avoid surprise interpolation problems.