Poser Tutorial 1 - Poser Controls
So.. I thought it’d be nice to post a poser tutorial to make poses and animations for use in SL. It takes talent and hard work, but understanding the tools will help any budding animator greatly. Or so I’d like to think :)
In the move to the new template, this post had gone all weird. Instead I’ve rewritten it and made a full section for poser tutorials on the website:www.reelgeek.co.uk/poser_tutorial_1.html
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:46 pm
I love your work at Reel Movement, and every post I’ve ever seen of yours anywhere has helped me. Bless you, woman! Someone needs to start a thread somewhere about Walk Designer in Poser and Second Life there has got to be a way to keep that sexy walk from being bowlegged!
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Thanks :) Happy to be of help. I’m making more Poser tutorials for the website itself, so they’ll be easier to find and formatted a lot better :)
The bowlegged issue is not just with the Walk Designer. The problem will happen even with a hand animated walk in Maya. It has to do with extreme differences in avatar shapes. One walk that will work for mine will be bowlegged for someone else.
The Walk Designer just plainly sucks. Poser is really great for simple animations, but most of the tools seem to hurt more than they help. While the Walk Designer seems to work with Poser 4 and above figures, once added to the SL Poser 2 figure all hell breaks loose.
I would suggest first hand animating. It is a nightmare to do, but you have a lot more control. Another option would be to use the Walk Designer, save the project, start a new one and then copy and paste the important keyframes. Such as full stirde and legs together.
This makes it a lot easier to clean up because the Walk Designer spits out an animation that each frame is keyed. At first keep it simple… to fix the legs passing through eachother, bowleg and way too long of a stride. Fewer keyframes = less altering that needs to be done.
Once the basic movement is clean you can start adding more keys for more detailed work. If you are unsure about the anatomy of the walk, you can always go back to the file with the Walk Designer used and see how it was done. For instance things like the arms don’t swing on the same frame as the leg, it’s usually a bit delayed.
Just remember to go slow, concentrate on one part at a time, upload often and have many different sized friends try it out :)
June 16th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I just purchased Poser 7 and without your tutorials I would have been lost! (OK… still a bit lost but not AS lost).
So you plan on writing the rest of the series? Or maybe I am just missing it. Currently I can get to introduction, controls and setup… Really looking forward to reading poses, anims, couples and AOs!
Thanks agian! You have helped to make this purchase worth while.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Very happy that it’s helped you :)
You should also be able to get into the last link called common issues which is a list of the most frequent questions asked on the SL forums. That should help a lot also.
Saddly these tutorials do take a lot more time to write then I have extra time for. But I’ll be on holiday in the states for 2 months starting at the end of July. I’m taking a copy of Poser with me, but animating on my mother’s laptop isn’t something I’m looking forward to, so I plan to work on the website and all the various tutorials instead.
Once another part gets added, I’ll post on the blog.
August 6th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I’ve been beating my head against a wall trying to figure out why the poses were not previewing in the SL window, now I know! I’ve googled this all over and this is the only one that has actually helped me. Thanks so much for writing this. Those Lindens should make a better wiki about making poses for SL. Now I can fiddle with more poses and not have to spend too much time worrying if they will show or not. ^^