Creating Buildings and Sets for Scenes

So, now that I am exploring the use of the Poser software, I decided I needed to do my first project beyond just testing things out. I have decided to do a music video like the machinma I did last summer for the Rough Cuts original song "Dallas Heat Wave Blues". You can see the grainy, You Tube version of this video here.

So in order to do create a video you pretty much do the same things a film maker would do. In fact, I got very interested in the techniques used by film makers last summer when shooting my first animated music video. It is a fascinating field and I have read a couple of books on it now. I will blog about it all sometime in the future in the context of shooting a video in the software I use.

So when shooting a video, you need to first storyboard what you think you will do for the video. During the storyboarding I identify the Scenes I want to shoot. I break the scenes down into the set, the props, the characters, the dialog (or in this case timing of the music), the animations or action, the lighting and the camera angles. I have a "Making of the Dallas Heat Wave Blues" Video Series for how I did this in Second Life. I will cover how I do this with Poser in future blogs, as well. This specific blog will talk about the set in Poser.

For my first scene I decided to shoot it in a Music Studio. So I decided to build a Recording Studio as my first Poser Scene/Set. This meant I would have to build the props for it as well. I made up a list of all the props I would need and sketched out what the basic building should look like.

I started with the creating the basic building. Looking at the software I owned I decided to try building it in an Architecture and Landscaping package I had bought at Fry’s called 3D Architect. I had played around a little and knew I could build a house and other buildings. I also had noticed that it allowed you to save your buildings in both a DXF and 3DS format. The Poser package had a 3DS import option, so, I felt that it should all work.



I built it with three basic rooms and a long hallway joining the rooms. Since this was my first real project in the 3D Architect software it took me a couple of days to build it. It took some getting used to learning how to navigate between 3D and 2D building plans and how to tweak the options for doors, windows, etc. I took the resulting building and exported it into 3DS format. I then got into Poser and imported it. I had to rescale the building and also get into the Materials Room and fix up some of the textures that hadn’t translated quite right into and out of the 3DS format. The main tweaking was associated with adding something called alpha channels to the windows to make them appear transparent. When I first imported them, they appeared like solid objects and this needed to be adjusted in the Materials Room using the Transparency options.


I had so much fun building the Studio in 3D Architect, I took a momentary diversion and built a house and a cottage to use later in my scenes. The house was a beach home. It has three levels, has 4 bedrooms and a full basement. It also had a large deck off the main living area that is focused around huge plate glass Windows.

With the buildings as a basic set, I now had to put things in my Studio and later my houses. The things you put in your sets are called props in Poser, borrowing from shooting movies again. In the next blog I will cover the making of props for Poser.

Here are some house shots.