Poser Animation audio timeline feature

Animating to music can be fun and entertaining for dance moves, rhythmic image manipulation, etc. Poser (by Smithmicro) makes this amazingly easy as you can import audio directly into your animation session and look at (and listen to) the waveform for keyframing your animation. This is obviously what makes this a great program for voice (Poser's Talk Designer does this automatically) as you can really fine-tune articulations in facial expression, etc. -- But for music,.. nothing I've tried so far is as intuitive and easy to use as Poser (version 7 at the moment) for bringing characters to life as dancers or musicians playing to the audio in the timeline. This is a very rough draft of some ideas for a music video for the song, "Ballad of Dylan James". Our original intention was to create a backup band of animated characters to play "live" with me. I am not in the picture as of yet ("X" marks the spot center stage where Ill be - but you'll have to look closely for it in one of the camera pull back shots). The guitar tracks that I'll be playing will be recorded "live" and simultaneously video taped to match the camera angles used in the animation clip, then dubbed in (chroma key) to the animation sequence. The players are straight "out of the box" Poser characters that come included with the purchase of the program. They are so far the easiest to work with players I've had backing me up (they do what they're told, with very little argument) Thank You Matt (Smithmicro technical support) and Colin Gerbode for your help and encouragement. -more to come Stephen

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Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Poser
• Animation
• audio
• timeline
• feature

[wholderby]

VERY nice work!

[Stephensea]

Thank you wholderby for the nice comment. Poser makes it fairly easy to do this if you import the music/audio file and work with it from there. It's also a great way to fine tune lip sync stuff after running the TalkDesigner feature.

[Playerktw]

Very nice work, did you use mocap for the players or did you animate freehand?

[Stephensea]

Thanks for the comment. I did it freehand. Mocap gear is a little out of range for me as a hobbyist/amature. I would consider using it if the costs came down about 90% or more.

[Claptonians]

quite amazing you managed to do this with Poser - great stuff

nice track -)

[Claptonians]

wow ...; great stuff, very nice animation - I certainly didn't reach this level of quality using poser (I tried it on a music video - check it out - and was a bit disapointed despite the hard work)

[ibisjim]

Excellent job there Stephen. Can't wait for a full song version of poser and you jamming together. Make it so.

[wholderby]

I usually use Poser just to chunk out a green screen character moving around with some BVH motion files. Then I either export into Vue Infinite or take the AVI from Poser directly into After Effects. Poser is STRANGE and the cameras and clunky behavior can lead to high blood pressure :) - great to see what Poser CAN do.