Now, we’re going to talk a lot about the craft of filmmaking in this article, and everywhere you read filmmaking just substitute it with Poser Animation. For our purposes, the two are indistinguishable. The techniques may be different, but the language of film is the same as the language of animating with Poser or Daz|Studio.

So, what are these film schools? They are the Public Library, Film Festivals, and the Internet.

The Public Library:
For people who are passionate about learning their craft, they will seek out the knowledge they need. The public library is an excellent resource for learning about the language of filmmaking and animation and it’s available to anyone for the price of a library card.

Armed with your library card, you have access to the library’s repository of movies, documentaries, and cartoons on DVD and VHS. Start watching movies–both good and bad. You’ll end up learning technique almost through a process of osmosis as you start watching and visually comparing dozens or even hundreds of different films. With DVD’s, watch the “Making of” features that come with many movies and pay particular attention to how a particular shot was created.

Watch mainstream films, blockbusters, and indie films. Watch classic movies, from swashbucklers to westerns to musicals. Watch classic TV series and see how they put together movie-level adventure by combining small-screen acting with a generous dosage of stock footage.

Seek out the great films and gain an appreciation for why they’re great. The Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 1960s represent a Golden Age for Hollywood where films were made on every subject imaginable, and there was no concept that could not be brought to the silver screen. Actors such as John Wayne and Charleton Heston worked with directors like John Ford and Orson Welles and producers like Daryl Zanuck to create very memorable movie moments.

Watch bad films–even bad films can teach you about the craft of filmmaking. Ask yourself why the movie failed to reach its objective and where it really fell down.

Watch cartoons as well. A lot of the techniques that can be used in Poser animation were pioneered by Max Fleischer, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and Ralph Bakshi. The fact that our palettes are digital rather than acetate and paint is irrelevant. You can learn more about the craft of Poser animation watching an episode of Jonny Quest than you can in reading a dozen books on Poser.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a few lessons that come from watching an episode of the classic Johnny Quest.

1. Work in layers as the old-school cel animators did. They would create backgrounds, and then place layers of clear acetate over top of the backgrounds to create the characters and the effects. Rendering your background, characters, and effects in separate passes and then bringing them together in a compositing package gives you a lot of freedom in assembling the final shot, as well as applying colour correction and special effects like glows and smoke. And you’re able to do it in a fraction of the time of trying to do everything “in camera.”
2. Animate only the parts that matter. When Jonny Quest was first in production, animation was very expensive for television. Hanna-Barbera created the “limited animation” technique as a means of cutting costs by cutting down the number of animation drawings required. In limited animation, the character is static except for a moving mouth when speaking, or moving arm when gesturing. The process is remarkably effective, and can be applied very easily to Poser and Daz|Studio.
3. Don’t be afraid to have action happen off-camera. For many complicated scenes, the action would sometimes happen off camera in order to avoid having to animate all of the action. An example is a vehicle crash, which would normally require a lot of work to animate the vehicle crumpling and the passengers being thrown about. By focussing on the reaction of the observers and incorporating some camera shake to simulate the effect of the unseen impact, the viewer knows that the crash happened. The director then shows the still frame of the crashed vehicle resting against the object it struck, and the audience is then made aware of the severity of the crash. Simulating an on-camera vehicle crash in Poser or Daz|Studio would involve no small amount of physics simulation as well as morphing the vehicle crumpling under impact and would take a talented animator days to complete. Compare that with an hour of animation work in doing it the Hanna-Barbera way.
4. Held frames can save you a lot of work. A held frame is a static frame that is “held” for a long time onscreen. Instead of making sure that every second of your final film is animated, a held frame can eat up time on film without eating up hours and hours of render time. There are dozens of techniques of holding a frame–here are a few suggestions:
   a. Render out a still frame of a landscape, and then use a compositing or video editing programe to simulate a camera tracking or dolly shot by having the still frame slide across the screen. This was used extensively by documentarian Ken Burns in his PBS Series “The Civil War.”
   b. Put the camera in tight on a character’s eyes so that we cannot see his mouth. Then, you can dub over dialogue without having to animate the mouth movements.
   c. Show the back of a character’s head as he speaks–again, saving you from having to animate mouth movements.
   d. Focus on a character’s hands or feet as he speaks.
   e. If a character is in shock at something he sees, a held frame can be used to help convey that shock.
5. Need to animate characters traveling in a vehicle? Simply render out a long image that can be used as the backdrop and animate that in your compositing application.

and so on.

But let’s not forget about the books as well. Read books on writing, on screenwriting, on film production and directing, on acting, on animation techniques. Read fiction as well–if you’re working in animation, you’re trying to tell a story and reading fiction is an excellent way of absorbing storytelling techniques.

Film Festivals:
Most cities have film festivals which are an excellent place to network with other filmmakers and to learn from them. And ultimately, these conversations with other filmmakers can be an excellent way of learning more about the craft of filmmaking. Networking with these filmmakers is also a great way of getting your own production off the ground by giving you access to other people’s talents such as music, or voice acting, or even other animators who may want to take part in a joint project.

Sometimes as you watch the movies being showcased at the film festival, you will find interesting techniques being used in storytelling or visuals which you can incorporate. Film festivals tend to push filmmaking envelopes and try out new techniques and ways of telling stories.

Sometimes, though, you will find films that are filled with examples of what not to do. Watch them and learn from them. It’s less expensive to learn from someone else’s mistakes.

The Internet:

Yes, if you’re reading this, you’re on the Internet.

Video streaming sites such as Youtube have gone a long way towards allowing everyone to access film on their computers. Youtube alone has over 100 Million videos of, well pretty much everything. The vast majority of these are very short films of 5 minutes or less. As with the Public Library, you can learn a lot by watching videos on Youtube or other video-sharing sites.

These sites are also home to many online tutorial videos which can show you how to create a particular effect or use a particular technique.

And the Internet is also home to a variety of other resources such as online tutorials, webinars, and even “war stories” of how people managed to get their own films done. In a future Tips for Poser Animators, we’ll list some of our favourite sites that might be of interest to the Poser and Daz Animation community.

Finally, the Internet is a huge social network where you can meet online with filmmakers and Poser Animators around the world. There’s no reason why you would have to be in the same room with an animator to work together—people can and have worked on projects together even though they’re in different time zones.

So, if you’re starting out in Poser Animation, you should now have some ideas on resources for learning the craft of filmmaking. The Public Library, Film Festivals, and the Internet are excellent resources to learn the language of film.

Here’s a graph that shows how ASL has changed from 1903 to today. It’s amazing to see that the ASL in 1903 was 35.6 seconds and yet in 2009, it had dropped to 2.9 seconds. For years–from 1914 to 1985–the ASL tended to hover in the five to fifteen second range and then in 1986, the ASL started its steady drop to its present very short situation.

While it’s tough to generalize across movies as a whole, there are certain tips that can be gleaned from the ever-shortening ASL.

First, the greater the action on the screen, the shorter the shot length needs to be. In almost any action sequence, the shots last little more than a second in many cases, with longer shots allowing the audience a chance to catch their breaths along with the characters, before demanding all of their concentration for the next sequence of one-second cuts.

Second, even in slower-paced scenes, the camera rarely stays in one place for long–a conversation will have lots of shots of relatively short length cut together to allow the whole. Shots of the speaker will be intercut with reaction shots of the listener, and even wider shots showing the surroundings as they speak.

Third, use the very long shots for majestic moments where you want the audience to be filled with awe at the images on screen and where you want to give them a chance to see and appreciate every single detail. Seeing a giant starship as it crawls past the screen, a slow majestic flight across mist-shrouded hills, or even a slow camera move across the form of an attractive actor/actress are all meant to signal to the audience–hey, you should be impressed by this!

Setting the wrong shot length is also the second biggest mistake that many starting animators make.

The biggest is whipping the camera around the with no relation to real-world physics and trying to really show off the “3-D” nature of their scene–either that or putting so much jitter in recreating a hand-held shaky-cam look that you can’t see anything on screen. But that’s another topic.

We have all seen animations of fight scenes that look like the participants are involved in a real knock-down, drag-out battle, but because the shot length doesn’t match the intensity of the moment, the life gets sucked out of the fight. Instead, we’re treated to shots that last 30 seconds or more. It’s even worse if the camera remains static.

Exception to the rule: If the scene has its own pacing, and you are willing to continually shift the camera’s point of interest, then you can get away with a very long shot. Director John Woo, in his movie Hard Boiled had a continuous shot that followed the two heroes shooting their way through one corridor, getting in an elevator and having a short, intense conversation, and then getting out of the elevator to shoot their way through another hallway–the shot lasts a stunning two minutes and forty-two seconds and is an amazing piece of choreography. Likewise, Orson Welles opens his movie Touch of Evil in a continuous tracking shot lasting three and a half minutes where Welles seamlessly moves from one vignette to the next.

By keeping shot length in mind, you can affect your audience’s mood–shorter clips get the audience more excited, longer clips let them breathe, and really long clips let them appreciate what you’ve done.

One of the techniques that has been used by Poser artists is compositing images in Photoshop.  By combining still images of different elements such as backgrounds, characters, and special effects, the artists are able to create a combined or composited image that goes far beyond what could be done in camera in Poser.  This tutorial describes a technique for compositing still images generated by E-on software’s Vue.  By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to insert a character into a Vue scene and have them blend seamlessly, even to the point of having their feet nestled in the grass.

We are going to use depth maps in order to cut out the sections of the foreground that will appear in front of the character we want to insert.  A depth map is simply a grayscale map that colors objects black closest to the camera and white furthest from the camera.  Using this information we can insert a character as deep into the image as we want, and ensure that elements in the image that are closer to the camera to the character will appear in front of the character in the final still.

We have uploaded a set of still images and their corresponding depth maps into our downloads section, and you can use these to work your way through the tutorial.

Preliminary steps:

One of the secrets to successful compositing is to match the camera and lighting information as closely as possible.  For the camera, you are going to want to adjust the camera’s focal length so that it is identical in both Poser and Vue.  You are also going to want to adjust the camera angle in both applications so that it is as identical as possible.  Now, for the purposes of the tutorial, the background plates that we’ve made available for download assume that the camera is level, and uses a 50 mm lens.  Using this information, you can set up your camera in Poser to match the angle and focal length used to generate the background plates we’ve provided.

As far as lighting goes, we used fairly even lighting throughout Vue.  The sky is cloudy and overcast, which leads to a lot of diffuse lighting in the scene.  In Poser, we used an image based lighting set up for indoor lights, with the IBL being the primary light source, and with a secondary light source providing highlights and soft shadows to approximately match that in the scene.  To get renders that would match reasonably closely with scenes in Vue, you would want to use image based lighting as well for any of your own renders in order to best match the rendering engine that’s used within Vue itself.

When exporting the image from Poser, we suggest using a format that includes the alpha channel, such as a PNG, PSD, or TIFF32 format file.

Now, you can of course always import models from Poser into Vue, but this is not always successful.  The techniques that we’re describing in this tutorial can go beyond Poser, and allow you to insert any still image generated from any application into a still frame from Vue.

If you are planning on doing your own renders in Vue, you want to also generate a depth map when you do your scene render.  Choose render options and set the render destination so it renders to disc.  Click on the options button besides the render to disk setting, and place a checkmark beside the save depth map option.  Assign a filename to the depth map that is different from the file name your choosing for the color picture.  For our renders, we typically called the color picture a background plate, and the depth map always has the words depth map included in the filename.Then hit render, and you’re done.

Compositing:

1.  Load the background plate and depth map into Photoshop or your chosen image processing program.

2.  Load in the character image from Poser. Just for fun, we’ve included a few Poser figures that we’ve already rendered that you can play around with, but you’re going to eventually want to render out your own character images from Poser.

3.  We’re going to use the background plate as the image onto a which all the other images are going to be composited.  We’ll refer to it as a comp for the rest of this tutorial.  Now, copy and paste the depth map and character image into their own separate layers in the comp.

4.  Make sure that the depth map is the top layer in the comp.

5.  Pick the location where you want your character to stand, and move your cursor over that location, roughly where the characters feet would be.  In Photoshop’s info window, make a note of the RGB values of that particular location.  Since the depth map is a grayscale image, the red, green, and blue values of any particular pixel should all be equal to each other.

6.  Using the Image> Adjustments> Levels menu command, set the input levels as follows.  In the first box, input the RGB value that you noted in step 5 of this tutorial.  Leave the second box at 1.0 — this is the gamma adjustment, and we don’t have to worry about it for this tutorial.  In the third box, enter the value you entered in the first box plus two.

So, for example, if your RGB values in step 5 were 86, 86, 86, then you would enter 86 in the first box of the inputs levels, you would leave the second box at 1.0, and you would enter 88 in the third box.  So, it would look like this:

And here’s what it does to the depth map layer:

7.  Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, your depth map turns black and white, with only a little bit of gray.  Now, make sure that you have black selected as your foreground color, and use the Select> Color Range menu command.  Choose sampled  Colors as the selection method.  At this point, all of the black pixels in the depth map layer should be selected.

8.  Feather your selection by one pixel.

9.  Click on the color background plate itself, and copy the selection.

10.  Paste the selection into a layer just above the Poser figure.

11.  Turn off the visibility on the depth map layer.  Now, you can scale and move your Poser figure as needed to complete the image.  If you want to bring your Poser figure closer or further from the camera, then you will have to reload at the depth map, and repeat steps 5 to 10 of this tutorial.

And with the visibility of the background plate layer turned on, you can see the final composit:

We hope you found this tutorial useful and that you have fun compositing using depth maps.

If you read through the articles in the News page you’ll see that we’ve already taken steps to do this.  From the Animation Democracy series of posts to product reviews and book reviews we’re hoping to provide our readers with the inspiration and resources they need to help them learn to animate within Poser. Starting with this article, we’re adding a new section to this page for tips, tricks, and techniques. This section will be an ongoing collection of articles that will provide shortcuts, tutorials, and interesting tricks to use when animating with Poser.

Following on from our review of 3D Content Installer, we’re going to be starting this off with a tutorial on how to create multiple external Runtimes in order to show one way to help people organize Runtimes and migrate their contents into multiple external Runtimes quickly and easily.

Just about every Poser user has experienced the problem of Runtime bloat.  Because there is such a wealth of low-cost and even free content available to Poser users online, it becomes very easy for Runtimes to approach several Gigabytes in size.  Of course as the Runtimes grow (and because of the file dependencies between Poser figures, props, poses, and textures) they tend to become confused messes that are both difficult to navigate and reduce productivity to a crawl.  The solution then, is to look at the employing a multiple, organized Runtimes in order to create a logical and easy-to-navigate file structure.

Migrating Poser assets into multiple Runtimes can be a daunting and mind-numbing task of re-installing each and every asset by hand. Given Poser’s system of file dependencies among its assets, re-installation is the only way that migration works. Simply trying to move assets within the Runtime or even move the assets to an external Runtime stands an excellent chance of breaking the file dependencies and making the asset unusable. Trust us on this.

By using multiple external Runtimes, we can organize the content in a way that makes sense to us as users.  Fortunately, this is a relatively easy process. And with the right tools, a bit of planning, and a bit of know-how, anybody can end up adding Runtimes reaching up into the hundreds of gigabytes with very little difficulty.

Now, if you have read our review of 3-D Content Installer, you probably know that that’s a tool that we recommend very highly.  You can create multiple external Runtimes without the tool, but it becomes a lot easier with it.  We will, however, walk you through the process both with and without 3-D content installer.

Let’s get started.

Step One:

We’re going to start by recommending that you prepare a Content directory.  Now, a Content directory is going to hold all of your multiple external Runtimes. By having all of your external Runtimes in a single directory it’s going to make it very easy to back up all your Poser content by simply backing up the one directory.  You can name it your content directory anything you want, such as “Poser Runtimes”, “My Runtimes”, “Poser Stuff” — anything at all really.  For the purpose of this tutorial we’re going to refer to it as “Content”.

Let’s start by selecting a location for your Content directory.  It’s usually best to do this on the root level of a drive rather than burying it several folders deep.  This will keep the directory path fairly short, and you’ll be able to navigate to the content directory fairly easily.

So, create a new folder on the root level of your drive, and name it “Content.”

Though you may be tempted to put some external Runtimes in the My Documents directory, we actually advise against this.  The reason for this is to keep the directory path fairly short since Poser 7 has a limit on filename length.

Step Two:

At this point, it’s time for you to decide on how you want your content organized.  You can organize it in any way that makes sense to you, but we’ve found that a functional approach is probably the best.  Below is a sample listing we use for our external Runtimes.  You can use this as a template to build your own external Runtime structure.

• \Content\Accessories_Ancient
• \Content\Accessories_Buildings
• \Content\Accessories_Buildings_Ancient
• \Content\Accessories_Exterior_sets
• \Content\Accessories_Fantasy
• \Content\Accessories_Historic
• \Content\Accessories_Horror
• \Content\Accessories_Household
• \Content\Accessories_Interior_sets
• \Content\Accessories_Military
• \Content\Accessories_Misc
• \Content\Accessories_SF
• \Content\Accessories_Vehicles_Air
• \Content\Accessories_Vehicles_Land
• \Content\Accessories_Vehicles_Water
• \Content\Accessories_Weapons_Historic
• \Content\Accessories_Weapons_Modern
• \Content\Accessories_Weapons_SF
• \Content\Clothing_Everyday
• \Content\Clothing_Fantasy
• \Content\Clothing_Historic
• \Content\Clothing_Military
• \Content\Clothing_SF
• \Content\Figures_Animals
• \Content\Figures_Hair
• \Content\Figures_Monsters
• \Content\Figures_People
• \Content\Figures_Robots
• \Content\Projects

When you decide on a file structure, start creating and naming folders within your Content directory.  It’s best to choose short, descriptive names so that you can readily identify these Runtimes within Poser.

Organizational Tip: Given the vast amount of female clothing available to the Poser community, it may be worthwhile to split the Clothing_Everyday external Runtime into several runtimes categorized by the figure type.

Step Three:

Now, we’re going to go into each of the folders that you created in the Content directory, and we’re going to create another folder in there.  Name this new folder Runtime.  This folder is what will allow Poser to recognize the external Runtime as a Runtime it can add to its libraries.  Make sure you do this for every external Runtime folder in the content directory.

Step Four:

Let’s open up Poser, and go to the libraries window.  Use the blue folder at the top of the categories palette to navigate upwards in the runtime directory as far as you can go.  You should see a blue folder with a red dot beside it, just like the picture below.

To add an external Runtime directory to Poser’s list of Runtimes, click on the “+” at the bottom of the libraries window.  This will open up a requester that will have you navigate to the external Runtime that you’ve just set up within your content directory.  You only have to navigate to the external Runtime folder and not the Runtimes subfolder within there.  Click on OK, and Poser will add the external Runtime to its list.

Repeat this for every external Runtime that you’ve set up in the Content directory.

Step Five:

At this point, you have a lot of Runtimes added to Poser but they’re all empty.  Now, we’re going to start putting content in there.

We’re going to create a mirror of the folder structure in your Content directory and use this as a means of organizing all the installers, archives, and zip files that hold all of your Poser assets.

Create a new folder on the root level of your drive, and call it Poser Content Install.  Now, go into your Content directory and select all the external runtime folders and copy those folders into the Poser Content Install directory.

This is where the grunt work comes in.  Take your Poser installers and zip files and move them into the appropriate subfolder in the Poser Content Install directory.  While you’re at it, rename the Runtime subfolder in each category to Installed.  Also, create another subfolder in their and name it Manual Install. We’ll use these folders to sort out content that has successfully been installed, or that needs to be installed manually later on.

One of the added benefits of consolidating all your installers in a Poser Content Install directory is that it makes it easy to back up all your installers onto multiple CDs or DVDs. It’s good to have that available in the event of a hard drive failure or even if you just want to re-organize and re-install your external Runtimes.

Step Six:

If you’re going to manually install all of your Poser content into the external Runtimes, then here’s the procedure that we’re going to follow:

A. For a Daz-type installer, activate the installer and go through all of the activation screens until you reach the following screen:

By default, the Daz-type installers will want to install into the internal Runtime.  However, we can redirect the installer on this screen to install the content into our chosen external Runtime.  Simply enter the directory path of the chosen external Runtime in the space provided.  So, if you want to install a file into the Accessories_Buildings external Runtime, enter the directory path like this:

Once you have successfully executed the installer, and the content is in your chosen Runtime directory, move the installer into the “Installed” subfolder to to get it out of the way now that you’re finished with it.

B. For a zip file installer, extract the zip file right into the same directory, like this:

Do this for all the zip files in the category.  If the zip files are packaged properly, they should all extract into a Runtime folder in the same directory. Once you have finished extracting them, move the Runtime folder they created into the external Runtime of your choice.

Step Seven:

If you’re using 3-D Content Installer, and we highly recommend that you do, then the process is a little bit different.  Choose all of the installers and zip files in the category, and move them over to the install directory for 3-D content installer.  Then run the program, point it at the correct Runtime directory as follows, and sit back as 3-D Content Installer does the work for you.

Once 3-D Content Installer has finished its processing, go into the success folder and move all of the files in there into the Installed subfolder in the category of the Poser Content Install directory.  Then go into the failed folder and move all of the files in there into the Manual Install folder in the Poser content install directory.  You’re going to have to manually install all of the files in the Manual Install directory later on.

For right now, let’s just keep on installing all of the content from each category into the corresponding external Runtime.

Step Eight:

Once you’ve done an install or series of installs, you should check in Poser to make sure that everything was installed okay. Try loading up some of the assets within Poser. If there’s a problem, you can use an uninstaller to remove the content, or you can go into the external Runtime and delete the problem file(s).

Step Nine:

If you run into problems with the install, such as with a zip file that doesn’t have the proper Runtime file structure packaged within it, then you’ll have to manually move the files over into the appropriate external Runtime one by one and make sure that they go into the right folders.

Tips and tricks:

3-D content installer has a text file within its program directory called the runtimes.txt.  This is a file that is used to populate the drop-down menu in the 3-D Content Installer interface of all of the external Runtimes.  If you want to speed up your content installation, then edit this folder to include the lists of all of your external Runtimes.

There is some content that really should be installed into the internal Runtime.  We installed the Daz Millennium figures such as Michael 3, Vicky 3, and Vicki 4.2 into the internal runtime.  Some of these files actually search for a Poser.exe file before loading, and so having them in the internal runtime allows them to load without difficulty. We also make sure that Python scripts are also installed into the internal Runtime.

We hope that you enjoyed this tutorial, and we look forward to bringing you more soon.