software choice advice

I have read all the posts on different software choices available for Animations, and am now in the position of deciding which one to use. I have the option of getting Poser, and am thinking this will be better, as I would like to get into making skins/clothes as well and I understand you can view these through Poser?
Can anyone who has used a few different types of animation software give me any advice? As I am so new at this reading the sites for the different software really doesnt help as I dont know which features will be useful to me!

Many thanks

I'd recommend Poser or its free alternative, DAZ Studio. Poser has a lot of tools in it (quirky as they may be by established standards) that will help you do things like create walk cycles, create muilti-person animations, etc, all of which will be much harder to do in the various resident-created programs that are out there, from what I know of them.

As for previewing textures, yes, you can do that in Poser, but so you're aware, you can also do it in DAZ Studio, Tattoo, Blender (all free), or in any commercial 3D modeling application such as Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave, etc. Any program that can read OBJ files can display the avatar mannequin models.



(I never would have thought I'd ever find myself saying "recommend" and "Poser" in the same sentence. I'm feeling a little freaked out here. What has SL done to me? )

i do not recomend poser, atleast poser 6. After spending hours tyring to upload BVH's and getting messages "can't get rotation order" i'm about ready to give up on the whole animation thing.

Avimator would be good, however the limb lenghts are not even to scale of the newbie SL avatar.

I'm still using Poser 5 so I haven't experienced this first hand, but I know from having spent my share of time lurking around these forums that in early releases of Poser 6 there was a glitch in the way it handled certain rotational values for BVH export. They patched it after a few weeks, and according to everyone's comments at the time, the problem was solved. Perhaps someone with Poser 6 experience could comment more intelligently on this than I can, but in any case, I'd recommend taking a quick trip to e-frontier's website, and make sure you've got the latest updates.

If that's not the problem, then it sounds like perhaps you forgot to start your animation of frame 2. If you start it on frame 1, SL won't be able to define the skeleton, and the animation will fail. That's an SL thing, not a Poser thing, so if that's what's going on, don't blame Poser for it. The same thing would have happened had you used any other animation program.

(I can't believe I'm defending Poser now after having spent so many years hating it. Wow. To be completely candid, I still do hate it; it's just that for the specific task of SL animation, it does the job well, and the fact that it's intended for non-professionals makes it very easy for the casual SL animator to learn, which is good.)


Bone lengths will never be to scale, not in any program. There really is no "scale" anyway since there are so many slider permutations. Everyone's various body parts are all different sizes. All you can be certain of is joint rotation.

As for the default (newbie) zeroed avatar, it's been a while since I've looked at it closely, and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure the mannequin models are not a precise match for it. It would take some doing to figure out exactly how long the bones are on the real thing.

Thank you both so very much for your help! this was exactly what I needed
cheers!

I have Poser 4 and it works great, although there are occasionally bugs with keyframe copying that are easily fixed by setting the keyframes manually. As for previewing your textures, note that I am working on a simple viewer app for SL clothes designers to use. I hope to make it next week (away all weekend) and will announce it in the texturing forum.

It's true, Poser 6 works just fine with the newer updates. BVHs don't make any problems.

I am just starting out as well and find that Poser 5 has a steep learning curve just because of the odd/qerky/IMO stupid user interface. I sure it will be grand once I figure out that. Right now I am getting great results using Avimator and Qavimator.... each depending what i'm doing. Odd I know but it makes sense to me *grins*

There's a patch for Poser 6 that fixes the glitch of which Chosen spoke. Just update Poser 6 to the most recent version and you'll be in good shape. Also, be sure to download the SL Man and SL Woman models into the Figure library of your Poser installation.

For making anims in SL, I think Poser is a very good choice.