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(Three Stars out of Five)

Larry Mitchell’s new book Character Animation with Poser Pro is a welcome entry into a relatively unexplored field of Poser Training and reference material, but more advanced Poser users may find the book to be somewhat lacking. As a primer for character animation with all versions of Poser, however, this book serves quite well and is really meant for people just starting out with Poser animation.

Chapters include:

Principles of Animation: As the chapter title suggests, this deals with the basic principles of animation that can be found in many animation reference works – concepts such as squash and stretch, anticipation, and it also explores the idea many Poser users are familiar with: Pose-to-pose animation.

Advanced Figure Posing: This chapter explains in detail how to replicate poses from reference photographs. Figure posing is an art all in itself with Poser and Mitchell’s technique is a handy way of making it easier.

Basic Poser Character Animation: Here, he deals with the Walk Designer in some depth and discusses how to modify walks that are generated by the walk designer.

Walking and Running: The Walk Cycle, a term familiar to keyframe animators, is explored here. This chapter would hold the meat of the book as once you have worked through the tutorials, you’ll be very familiar with Poser’s Graph Editor and Keyframes.

Animating in Environments: By building on the lessons in the walk cycle chapter, Mitchell explores ways to bring characters to life within a setting, though much of the chapter is spent having a character walk up and down a flight of stairs.

Lifting and Throwing: This chapter focuses on how to have a Poser character interact with objects and props, such as throwing a ball.

Animating to Reference Video: Now we get really old-school here with rotoscoping. The technique used by Ralph Bakshi in his Lord of the Rings animated movie, by Disney in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and by Filmation for many of their Saturday morning cartoons. With Poser, the use of digital video as a reference for character animation is within the grasp of every user and Mitchell’s chapter goes into it in detail.

Poser and Cinema 4D: The only chapter to deal with Poser-Pro specific elements, this chapter looks at using Poserfusion and third-party plugin interPoser to allow for hosting a scene in Cinema 4D and overall, this is a rather disappointing chapter that really only reiterates concepts in the Poser Pro Reference manual without really adding much more to those concepts.

Overall, the author covers off the basics very well but the book has a few drawbacks however.

• There is not a lot of time spent on using motion capture data in animation. While we may have a certain bias towards mocap data, the fact remains that motion capture is becoming more and more prevalent in character animation. Poser is readily able to import mocap data and apply it to figures in a scene. But often, that data needs tweaking and it would have been good to have a greater discussion on what would be involved.
• There is no effective discussion on one of the most powerful character animation tools in Poser–animation layers. These layers are ideal for editing animation and mocap data.

In fact, in one of the sections on dealing with mocap data, he recommends using the Python script Scripts>Utility>DropFigToFloorAllFrames included in Poser. While it is a useful script, it does have limitations when dealing with mocap data. The issue arises because a lot of mocap data will, when mapped onto a figure sometimes cause a figure’s foot to drop below floor level. If that foot is below floor level when the script is run, then Poser will treat the toe as being the contact point with the floor for the figure. As the figure walks, Poser will raise and lower the figure as needed, making the figure look like he’s walking on a matress. A more practical solution is to insert an animation layer set to “Add” rather than “Replace” keyframes and keyframe on that layer to lower the figure to the floor. Do this by adjusting the yTrans dial on the figure’s Body on Frame 1. Set the resulting Keyframe to constant and you’re good to go. You will still have toes piercing the floor, but those can either be keyframed or you can shoot the figure so that the feet are not shown if you don’t want to put in the time.

• Although the walk designer is given some good coverage, there is no discussion on Poser’s Talk Designer or Daz’s Mimic. These two tools allow synchronization of facial animation with a voice track. Nor is there any discussion on expressions and how to use those to elevate the animation to the level of a performance. Yes, you can make characters walk, run, lift, and throw things, but there’s nothing in the book on how to make a character laugh. While it may be argued that the keyframe techniques can be translated over to expressions, it would still have been extremely helpful to have seen space devoted to integrating dialogue, facial morphs, and body movement to create an expressive performance by a character.

So, overall, we have a book that will work as a very good primer for beginners or people who are just starting character animation. But there is a lot more that should have been in this book. Advanced animators in Poser will find some value to the book, but it will be the little nuggets of information that come from looking over someone else’s shoulder rather than a full-fledged course on animation techniques.

Three Stars out of Five.

Tags: Animation, Character Animation, Poser, Reviews

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Film School, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.