Animation - The Next Challenge

I finally finished sorting through all my models that I have downloaded off the internet. Amazing what people are giving away. With all my new stuff, I was ready to start another project. Rather, than continuing down the same path of creating "still pictures" within Poser, I decided that I would now try my hand at animating. I had a lot of fun with the cameras, props, lights, models and clothes which I will be able to also use in animating. Now I am just adding movement.

I have done some animations for Second Life using Avimator, so, I was familiar with the basic concepts. Poser has much the same approach of using keyframes and interpolation. What you do is set a character in a pose like you are doing a "still" photo and then move the character's body parts (i.e. arms/legs, neck, head) and then save the pose as a keyframe. Then you change the pose to the next logical place you would like the character to be in and set another keyframe. You can do this with characters to make them look like a movie or you can also do it with props like making a ceiling fan spin or a tree blow in the breeze.

You place these keyframes then at a frame in the animation, for example, you place the first keyframe at frame 1 and a second keyframe at frame 30. Then you set the frames per second. I decided to use the standard 30 frames per second (FPS) as it is well above the 18 frames a second that is needed to fool the eye into thinking it is seeing motion. The Poser software then interpolates the frames between 1 and 30. You keep adding or inserting frames until you get the animation look you are looking for. You can add as many frames as you want and you can loop them as many animations have a repeating motion (i.e. eating, dancing, walking, etc).

Poser comes with an intimidating set of options associated with animation just like it does with cameras, lights, texturing, etc. You can smooth the animation using spline curves, incorporate morphing as well as movement (i.e. actually move parts of the mesh like having cheeks blow out) and the most interesting is the ability to have layers of animations that you can use to put multiple animations together. This ability to use layers allow you to create a layer for say the legs independent of the arms or the hands, etc. You can therefore make them reusable. Just the right thing for a software architect to have! So, if you want to, you can animate the legs, arms, body, facial expressions independently and they even have a Talk Designer and Walk Designer to help you with walking and talking at the same time :)

I have decided to create a number of animations for my musicians playing their instruments, as I feel that I will use these over and over. I am also starting to look on the internet for animations already for Poser, as well as, the standard BVH animations used in many games including Second Life that you can import into Poser and use to create an animation with a little work. I am sure that my initial efforts will be a little primitive and I feel like this type of work will take more than a few hours per animation, but, I am looking forward to doing them as it will be the first step into making more professional looking animated shorts. Which is the reason I got into this in the first place.

My first animation is me playing guitar and you can see it on You Tube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojnMl_cortE
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