Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we start to actually engage very effectively some of the more powerful features of Poser now. We know that working with the Walk Designer already that it exports the walk cycles to a new animation layer. We open our Animation palette right now. We can see that if we come to layers, we've got the base layer and then we've got the walk layer that's on its own layer. But what if we had Ben moving along, he comes across a friend, and we want Ben to wave to his friend? What we're going to do is use the animation capability now. I'm going to add an animated wave to a new layer. Let me go ahead and select New, let me go ahead and name this Wave if we want to, but we'll leave it Layer 1 for right now. We're going to double check and make sure that Ben's body is highlighted, and in the Layers palette right here I'm going to say let's just view our current layer. He goes back to the start pose, the zero position, let's me know that ok, every thing is safe, we can go ahead and work on this layer now. Then what I'll do is make sure Wave is selected, and I will simply say apply to original pose. Look down here and we see that now Ben is waving. I'm going to come back to, well we're seeing all layers now. Whenever you apply a motion or a new pose to a layer, it kicks off this current layer. Only option, you've got to turn it back on if you want to see Ben by himself or your character in that case. But I do want to point out something else. Let me pull this out of the way. I'm going to come back and view the whole kit and caboodle on the Animation palette I just turned on. Let's view all layers again just to make sure we're clear on that. And when I go ahead and do play, we're going to see something kind of funny going on. Notice how Ben is walking for part of the time, and for the part of the time he's waving he's sliding along the path. What is up with that? Just be aware that even though this is a pretty fast way to work, you will need to come in and make modifications to existing animations in the Keyframe Editor, or potential ones that you animate. Just as a recap, Poser is paying attention to which layer is on the top, and it ignores keyframed data on all layers below that. Well the fact that Ben's feet are sliding is a clue that his feet actually have some keyframed information in them that we need to eliminate. The Layer Editor only pays, or I should say the Layer Animation feature here, only pays attention to keyframed information. Come over here to our keyframes, we're on layer 1, I confirm that on the top here which means it's just the wave layer. But you'll notice we've got some green animation occurring right here for the left foot, shin, and thigh. If we go all the way to the end we see we've got a couple keyframed items going in. In fact, right up here by the right thigh, shin, and foot, we've got some additional information. Let's see what other kind of information has been added in here by simply adding that one pose. Got a dark green, or a highlighted green one here. That means we've got some animation on the left forearm, and that could be OK though. And of course, since he's waving his right arm, we've got a bunch of keyframed animation right there. Additionally, it looks like we've got some more animation here in the hips, abdomen, and chest. I'm not convinced I want to start bringing in the abdomen to that. I could leave the chest. The hips, I'm going to get rid of that. We need to eliminate this keyframed data to get this new layered animation to play nicely with the animation below it. So I'm going to go ahead and click once here on the hip version, and actually I can select them all if I just collect that, and I'm going to Remove Keyframes. We'll see if it did that all the way down at the end. Nope, so let me go ahead and Shift click this last one, I'll get that. Oh it would help if I held down the Shift key instead of the Caps Lock key. Clumsy fingers, no? So we'll delete that keyframe. That's gone. Abdomen, I think I'm going to want to get rid of that too, and I actually could have done this at the same time. I'm just being careful as I do this because I don't want to have to do an undo or come back in and try to add some keyframes that I accidentally deleted like that right there. Let me go ahead and select that one, go to the end. Keyframe editing takes time. Go ahead and eliminate that. Now we can do a bunch at once and do it fairly safely. Down at the bottom of this we notice that we had the right leg and thigh action, and then we've got our left thigh, shin, and foot action. We'll get rid of all of these at the same time. I'm going to come here to Right Thigh, click that one keyframe, come to the end, go all the way to the end on the opposite side here, opposite corner, Shift click and I select all that area. A fast way to do a larger selection. I'll do minus the keyframes to get rid of that. It'll think about it for a second, and those are all gone now. All the keyframes you see highlighted in Frame 1, you don't really need to pay attention to those. Those aren't going to compromise the motion at all. I'm going to move this to the side, and now when we play this through we should get some fairly reasonable action. Let's give it a try. There we've got him moving, his one arm is up, it's down now, then it goes up again as we loop back. Let's stop this. We know for a fact that that animation is 100 frames long. Let me pull this up here. Let's come back to our Layer palette, and I'm going to say it's got it at 184, I'm going to turn that back to 100. Let's give it just a little room to work with it here. We've got some room on the end of the animation. I'm going to go ahead and simply drag this layer to the right a little bit. I don't want the wave to start right then, and I want this to transition in for 10 frames, and I want it to transition out for 10 frames. With that completed, now our character will start walking and start waving as he gets into the animation. We don't have to re-keyframe the hands. There it goes up there. Again, it's a little bit jerky because we've got Skip Frames enabled for playback. The actual animation is very smooth. So there is an excellent way to start working with Poser 7 Layer Animation capabilities with the Walk Designer.