Wasn't it Chambers who wrote:
>So I know that for still images, I can export from Poser (or, in my
>case, Daz Studio).  However, what if I want to do animations?  What are
>the best tools for this?
>
>I'm guessing that most people who animate characters don't use POV, but
>I'm not most people :)

To get fairly realistic looking animations of realistic looking Poser
figures you can perform the animations in Poser, either by interpolating
between a series of Poser poses, or using a built-in animated pose, or
by using a motion capture file.

To render them in POV you have to export the mesh of each individual
frame, because the exported information doesn't contain anything that
could be used in POV to work out how the skin and clothes move when the
figure bends its elbow.

You can do smooth animation of unrealistic characters by processing a
motion capture file into POV code, and get results like this
        http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/temp/grenade.mpg
That's using a free sample motion capture file from www.biovision.com
But if you tried to do that with a Poser character, it would break at
the joints instead of bending.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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Chris B wrote:
> You may want to add a few more words about what you're trying to 
> achieve. Animating good looking human figures with hair, clothes etc. in 
> POV-Ray is still tricky, but if you're only after little robots or toon 
> characters it can be a lot easier.

I've got a series of 8 - 15 second clips, each containing between 1 and 
8 principal characters, and up to several dozen secondary characters.

I could do still poses in Daz, but exporting individual frames for the 
entire thing would be cumbersome at best.

> Recently I've been looking at MakeHuman which seems to me to have the 
> most future potential. It's an Open Source human modeller with a Python 
> API that I'm currently helping to document. Once I've done that, I'm 
> interested in exploring the possibilities of developing an API to 
> generate POV-Ray meshes and poses directly (still early days).

I remember hearing about MakeHuman before; I'll take another look at it.

...Chambers

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"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message 
news:48b40ede$1@news.povray.org...
> Chris B wrote:
>> You may want to add a few more words about what you're trying to achieve. 
>> Animating good looking human figures with hair, clothes etc. in POV-Ray 
>> is still tricky, but if you're only after little robots or toon 
>> characters it can be a lot easier.
>
> I've got a series of 8 - 15 second clips, each containing between 1 and 8 
> principal characters, and up to several dozen secondary characters.

Is that 8x15 second clips? So about 2400 frames and an average of 30 
characters per scene? That sounds a lot!
How real do you need the people to look and what sort of details do you need 
(hair, clothes, eye movements, lip movements)?
What sort of poses and animation do you need? Complex unique movements or 
cyclic movements?
Are all of the people moving or can you have some motionless characters 
(e.g. a couple of dozen lying on a sun lounger)?
How much time do you have?

Here are some fairly random thoughts:
  o  You can reduce the effort by re-using as much as possible, so repeating 
the same basic pose sequence (e.g. walking).
  o  If you can reuse the same characters and poses in all of the 
backgrounds (maybe changing their starting points, direction etc. to make it 
less obvious), that would massively reduce the work required. It may even be 
possible to use the exact same sequence, just rotating the entire background 
group so you're looking at it from a different angle in the different clips.
  o  You may even be able to reuse foreground characters and poses, e.g. 
looking over the shoulder of a character just showing the back of the neck 
and having the same character face on may not be too apparent.
  o  If you do a 20 second sequence for a 15 second animation you can offset 
the starting pose by 5 seconds to make it less apparent that two characters 
are following the same sequence.

> I could do still poses in Daz, but exporting individual frames for the 
> entire thing would be cumbersome at best.

With something like a walking animation, or climbing stairs, or climbing a 
ladder you can just export a single walk cycle, e.g. a one second cycle, and 
re-use it by using the sequence repeatedly (translating/rotating it at 
regular intervals as required so that the repeats move the character further 
along the walk path).

If DAZ supports the sort of Poser functionality that Mike described in his 
response then that would probably be the quickest thing to try. If you can 
use an existing animation sequence, step through the sequence and quickly 
export the character and props, then perform a batch conversion you may be 
able to get a single character animation sequence into POV-Ray in a 
reasonable length of time.

> I remember hearing about MakeHuman before; I'll take another look at it.

The currently released 0.9.1 allows you to create a character, pose it and 
export .obj files that can be converted with PoseRay, but there's no clothes 
or hair and no built-in animation functionality yet. This means that with 
MakeHuman you'd currently have to define each pose rather than use the sort 
of functionality Mike described for Poser to cut the effort required for 
generating your frames. If you've got lots of time and want to help exploit 
the future potential then this may still be a good way to go.

If you're on a tight deadline then it's probably going to mean a lot of 
tedious, repetitive conversion work to define a set of sequences that you 
can repeatedly reuse.

Regards,
Chris B.

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Chambers wrote:
> I could do still poses in Daz, but exporting individual frames for the
> entire thing would be cumbersome at best.

It doesn't allow scripting? Command-line software ftw!

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Chris B wrote:
> "Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message
> news:48b40ede$1@news.povray.org...
>> I've got a series of 8 - 15 second clips, each containing between 1 and 8
>> principal characters, and up to several dozen secondary characters.
> 
> Is that 8x15 second clips?

No, that is probably clips between 8 and 15 seconds :)

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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Chris B wrote:
> > "Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message
> > news:48b40ede$1@news.povray.org...
> >> I've got a series of 8 - 15 second clips, each containing between 1 and 8
> >> principal characters, and up to several dozen secondary characters.
> >
> > Is that 8x15 second clips?
>
> No, that is probably clips between 8 and 15 seconds :)

Correct :)

Most of the "scenes" will be OK with minimal movement; some walking, a few
waving arms, things like that.  I have some creative license, so I can choose
which ones I want to target, and I'll be focusing on ones that let me reuse
assets (characters and scenery).

....Chambers

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> Most of the "scenes" will be OK with minimal movement; some walking, a few
> waving arms, things like that.  I have some creative license, so I can 
> choose
> which ones I want to target, and I'll be focusing on ones that let me 
> reuse
> assets (characters and scenery).

Well this does all sound like what POV-Person does, so long as you're not 
too fussy about the quality of the anatomical models (built using a 
combination of meshes, CSG and Blobs).

It has a crowd generation macro that can generate random people standing 
around in the background (it can position them on a surface for you). The 
animation cycles can be applied to any one of a range of different 
characters and there are options for randomly varying the body shapes. It 
generates some rudimentary items of clothing (using a very limited set of 
macros) and hair (also from a limited set). It even has a pose interpolation 
algorithm so you can manually define two poses (or use two of the predefined 
poses) and generate an intermediate pose or animation (e.g. a hand wiggling 
about).

It's all controlled through POV-Ray SDL macros and variables though, so 
you'd need to learn about how it works from the documentation and examples 
and I don't have any evidence that anyone has ever managed to do that. Also 
I never got round to combining the animation and crowd control options into 
a single example scene, so adding animation to a crowd would require a bit 
of study.

One potential option is to use POV-Person to auto-generate a crowd of 
stationary people standing around in the background (see the examples in the 
download and in the documentation) and punctuate with occasional animated 
character, plus hand-crafted foreground characters converted from Poser or 
another modeller. The disadvantage is , of course, that you'd end up having 
to learn something about both techniques.

Regards,
Chris B.

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Chambers wrote:
> So I know that for still images, I can export from Poser (or, in my 
> case, Daz Studio).  However, what if I want to do animations?  What are 
> the best tools for this?
> 
> I'm guessing that most people who animate characters don't use POV, but 
> I'm not most people :)

If you don't mind using a modeler that is still mostly beta, you can try 
the LionSnake modeler:

   http://www.geocities.com/evilsnack/lionsnake.htm

It's designed for creating posable meshes that can be exported as 
POV-Ray scripts.  You still have to hand-code the posing in POV-Ray SDL, 
although I intend to add a scene-building capability when issues with 
modeling are finished.

Regards,
John

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"Chris B" <nom### [at] nomailcom> wrote:
> One potential option is to use POV-Person to auto-generate a crowd of
> stationary people standing around in the background (see the examples in the
> download and in the documentation) and punctuate with occasional animated
> character, plus hand-crafted foreground characters converted from Poser or
> another modeller. The disadvantage is , of course, that you'd end up having
> to learn something about both techniques.

I've got a feeling that the difference in quality between the two types of
people would be jarring, but I'll take a look at it.

I wouldn't mind using Daz studio to pose people, but I've never done animations
with it, and I don't even know if Pose-ray can import an animation from it (a
quick google suggests that it can't).

....Chambers

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On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:14:07 +0100, Mike Williams <nos### [at] econymdemoncouk>
wrote:

>To get fairly realistic looking animations of realistic looking Poser
>figures you can perform the animations in Poser, either by interpolating
>between a series of Poser poses, or using a built-in animated pose, or
>by using a motion capture file.

I've used the BVH method a few times, after downloading a series from one of the
American universities, years ago. I don't find Mikes method cumbersome, time
consuming, yes :)
Poser can export a series of obj or 3DS files and PoseRay has a batch process
that zips through converting them to Pov inc files. Here is a couple of the one
I found here that I posted


http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.animations/thread/%3Co5cos1tjr1upujtsa0417f0cqtq8ddeg16%404ax.com%3E/?ttop=282885&toff=150

http://news.povray.org/moray.binaries/thread/%3C3de55a13.43690794%40news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=240019&toff=150

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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