Hello all. I have recently purchased a copy of Poser 4 and Pro Tools. I used to own a copy of Poser 2 so I know how the software works, but I am having some problems. I have tried looking over the documentation but it seems pretty intimidating and I'd rather not spend hours looking for some easy information. To all you poser users- here are my questions:

I have the model that I want, and I know how to make the walk animations, but what I want is a specefic camera angle(s- for all of the 8 directions) that will be the same for all my models. It seems I can only custom make them and not save them. Any tips for how you did it in your games, or how Ambrosia did it for their character models would be helpful.

Thanks again,
Smodis

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Originally posted by smodis:
**Hello all. I have recently purchased a copy of Poser 4 and Pro Tools. I used to own a copy of Poser 2 so I know how the software works, but I am having some problems. I have tried looking over the documentation but it seems pretty intimidating and I'd rather not spend hours looking for some easy information. To all you poser users- here are my questions:

I have the model that I want, and I know how to make the walk animations, but what I want is a specefic camera angle(s- for all of the 8 directions) that will be the same for all my models. It seems I can only custom make them and not save them. Any tips for how you did it in your games, or how Ambrosia did it for their character models would be helpful.

Thanks again,
Smodis

**

You can save camera sets to the drag-out drawer on the right side; just like props or figures, these are saved within the application folder and are available every time you open Poser.

I did discover the walk had to be changed. In a standard walk cycle the feet come togehter twice in the middle of the animation. For Coldstone, you want to START the animation with feet togehter, as this first frame is used when the character is standing still. For the few that I tried out, copying and pasting in Poser's Animation Pallete was easiest, but you could also re-number the frames, or simply re-order them within Coldstone.

Ambrosia didn't use Poser. But since you are, if you haven't already done so check out the free stuff, tutorials, links, and helpful forums and live chat at Renderosity.com

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Butterfly
My husband gave his promise
He would return in the joyous season,
When robin red-breasts rebuild their nests.

The angles for the 8 directions are 0,45,90, etc. The camera angle is somewheer in the 25-35degrees range

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Here's what rplate (unregistered guest) wrote about a year ago. I found it VERY helpful:

Here's a good trick to making your sprites with poser. Set the background to white.(white is transparent to coldstone) Get your character set up to what you want him/her to be. Go to the walk designer and set up to walk in place and nine frames in length. I use nine frames becase eight is the complete walk cycle in CS and the first and last frames are duplicates in poser. Apply and say done. Go to main camera view and adjust your main camera dials. The dials I am mainly concerned with are the: dollyz ( set to 1.4 or 1.5) , Xorbit -23 (sets figure to a slight look down on view), yOrbit is your eight compass positions. -90 = walking east. 90= west, 0= south, 180= north, 120=NW, -120=NE, 45=Swest, -45=SE. I think you get the idea. You can tweak the views as you like, but use the dials so you dont move the character out of alighn with each other. It makes fo a much smoother animation in CS. Now, (thanks to Ambosias great software, Snapz Pro2) the rest is easy. First open SnapZ and set it for pict (yes coldstone can see Snapz pict files!!) name a folder to save your 64 animated poses to. Choose the select button and you see marching ants seletion box. Push it to fit your animation character in walk position one. Here make the box as small as possible but average the size to fit the changing height and width of a walking figure. Center the selection, hit return. Render the next animation 2 and so forth on to number 8,remember 9 and 1 are duplicates so skip number 9, repeat the render and selection process. The selection box maintains its size so every box will be the same size. You may have to tweak the center point once in a while or adjust height and width. I found that keeping the selection as close to the same sizeas possible each time is the key to smooth animations. Now that you did all 64 animation figures, open the folder you saved them into and you will see they are all numbered. But, now you have to name and number them to ColdStone protocal. IE, Hero_WalkN0000.pct thru Hero_WalkN0007.pct. To make this numbering easier cut and past all but the last number, ie. Hero_WalkN000.pct and as you paste insert the last number after the 000_. I don't type, so this is fast for me. Put them in a folder you name and select your new character in the ColdStone Project / Game Options / Misc and test him out. I turn off all the access blocks so I can walk any direction at any place. Then I walk him across the bridges in the cave to see how centerd he is. But then you can adjust your access blocks to fit you animation. The great thing about using Snapz Pro2 is I don't have to convert anything to PNG. The figures are already to use from Snapz. Plus Snapz keeps all the figures the same size blocks. I hope this streamlines some of your animation work for you. I sure did for me. By the way some of the figures in Poser don't have to be rendered first, so that goes even faster.

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-- Debra
Danillitphil Productions

As much as I like Snapz, it's easier to render the animation to a series of images, rather than take individual pics, as described above. That's a very good description, thanks for digging that up!

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thanks alot! that really helped me.

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