Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we'll deal with animation a little bit more, you've probably been watching if your new to animation going that's really cool, but man that's a lot of work to get motion if we have somebody doing anything besides deep knee bends and turning their heads and you're absolutely correct. Animating motion simply is one of the most labor intensive things you can do in 3D outside of simply building the geometry and the 3D assets themselves. Fortunately the folks at Poser made it very easy for you in our library palette. There are animations that are built into that already in the same way that you apply a pose to a scene you can simply add this to your character. So let's say we got somebody waving right there, we may use that one later now that I see that, we've got some robotic movements, we'll look there is only what is that five of those? The truth is there's a ton out there. There's a ton of free ones, there's a ton of ones for sale and these are created by a process called motion catcher. A few years ago, you know in the way back days of like 2002 motion animation and capture was just getting its real start in 3D animation. It's a lot more prevalent today. Systems that do it are coming down in cost and the all special effects you see going on in Hollywood now use that same motion. One of the most common motion formats you'll find here under the file menu, under import and that is called BBH motion. This stands for BioVision who were the original purveyors of the technology to do that and the computer software that they created to accomplish that has become the standard for most motion capture. There are some proprietary systems out there, there are some other ones called FBX they all have their pros and cons. Proprietary usually means you can't get your hands on it and FBX while it works OK on its own systems. Sometimes it doesn't play nicely with other systems. So Poser is only giving you one option here to import motion, that's BBH motion. If you happen to have the full set of files that come with this, you can click on this BBH motion file. Again you can surf the web and look for free BBH or something like, you should get a whole host of those files, like anything in Poser you would import this by double clicking on it in my case and you get some dialog that comes up and says do you want to scale this character. Usually a good idea. And how are the arms aligned in a motion. The first frame of most motion files wind up with the person just like our character right here, the arms are straight out, so its asking how are they aligned, along the X or the Z axis and the reason you get that dialog is that some motion capture systems use Z in this lateral format. So it just let's the motion know which way it needs to twist itself as it imports its way in. In the case of Poser we know it's a long X axis, I'll click OK and now we got a big change. Well the motion files that you import override everything that you may have had keyframed in there. If we open our motion pallet, not our motion but our animation palette we'll see that we now have a new base layer. Let me pull this over so we can see everything and I'll even expand it. We've got a animation now that went from 30 frames all of a sudden to 197 frames because that is how long this animation is taking. Go ahead and scroll to the end. That's nice, one big bar. If we go to the keyframes every single frame is a keyframe in here. That's how the motion is controlled so specifically. Where the keyframes don't exist are in those small things like the hands, so as we watch this motion in action you'll see that the hands are just stationary they don't go anywhere. Go ahead and scroll down here so the main body parts all have keyframed emotion but the finer more minut things expressions on faces, fingers, toes, those type of things don't have any emotion with them. This is where you would need to go in and not add a keyframe at every frame but you might want to add one every ten frames, 15 frames and let it tween that way to catch up. So even with imported motion there's a little bit of work. Let me go ahead and pull this out of the road here and I got the main camera on here. When you work with animation you may want to shift to the posing camera, there is a keyboard shortcut which is command comma on the Mac or control comma on the pc. The reason I suggest moving to the posing camera is because the actual movement of the main camera, if you move it because your working further along in your scene it to will be keyframed and your camera will start moving. That's fine, it's usually desirable but when your posing your scene you need the freedom being able to work with a camera that is not going to be keyframed and that's what the posing camera is for. So let's go ahead and back out a little bit and we can see exactly what's going on for our character we'll play this and see what this imported motion does for us. This is one happy guy. And it just looped again, so we got our animation, it runs at almost 200 frames, 197 frames, that's a lot of animation work you won't have to do because its been done for you, so that's how you bring imported animation in if you happen to purchase or get some of those free motion files and again working from your library palette, which is the easiest way to start experimenting with that that is how you just bring it in you just double click on it or do your add there. So adding complex pre-made motion in Poser, pretty easy.