Nutley

For what it's worth, I finally finished this project and the file is available to view at www.nutleys.com/SweetwaterIntro.mov I initially went down the Poser > EIAS route becuase I thought it would save me lots of time having to rig the character etc in Electric Image, but in all honesty the amount of time and trial and error it took to get this pathetic bit of animation to work I should have simply built the entire rig in Electric Image and by-passed Poser altogether. For some reason I could never get the hands or feet to work, so those bits of data always had to be removed before binding - it was okay for this animation but as a robust workflow not so good. That said, I certainly understand what I am doing with a Poser to EIAS 'pipeline' a little more, but I won't be recommending it as a workflow any time soon :)

LOL thankyou Richard. It's officially impossible to do 'that' shot without making it look identical to Andrew Kramers :) Aziz, no they where done in After Effects. Visit www.videocopilot.net and check out Andrews tutorial (and all of the other ones on his site for that matter)

Thankyou very much for your replies gang, I can honestly say I would never have worked this out without your input. The manual mentioned this process, but the inherit scale preference (off by default which is just odd) wasn't something I picked up on at all. As with all things it's simple when you know how - but often I don;t even know where to look in the manual in the first place. Basically if Ian hasn't done a video tutorial on something I'm scuppered :) Thanks again for the help. \^^/ P.S. Richard, your 'Set to all' tip is a godsend. I've spent too long going through each individual material adding Blur Mode > Motion Vector (or whatever) knowing there must be a shortcut, but not knowing what it is.

Here's a project I did for a client who is always banging on about wanting some viral marketing. I started down this route simply becuase I haven't been using EI for a few years and didn't want to totally forget which buttons to push to make it work (I'm getting old enough now that this was an actual possibility!) The Datavault and all the type was built in Modeler and rendered in EI. After Effects and Premiere did the rest. I was fairly pleased with the result, although the transformation shot was never as good as I hoped it would be. One day maybe... http://www.transformersofdata.com

Apologies that this isn't really relavant to the above question, but it feels such a newbie questions I'm a little embarrased to ask it in a new thread, ::clears throat:: How do I import a model into an existing scene and get it to be the right scale. The model in quesiton is made of a gazillion peices (pre-textured in other project) and I don't want to go in and individually alter their scale. I've tried parenting them all to an object and scaling that, but failed. Obviously there is a way to do this, but I cannot find the answer in either the manual or this forum. ::looks around sheepishly::

Very exciting! The attached file was created in Poser, exported using an OBJ file and .bvh motion data and rendered in Electric Image. Now obviously the animation/render is a pile of crap, but this was just to get the thing to actually work. I'll post more stuff as I get used to it. It was a little 'funky' to say the least with no reason (to me) why certain things worked and others didn't. But this is definate progress. Mucho thanks to all of you for helping out - I was beginning to give up. (The attachment is a Quicktime file compressed using MPEG-4 video) EDIT: The attachment didn't work. So go to http://www.nutleys.com/Test.mov to see my effort.

Hey Felix, I'm (sort of) getting somewhere with BVH. I'm certainly not there at all yet, but I have managed to import in the motion data and have a walking rig. Hopefully with a bit of messing around I actually might be able to bind the .OBJ file to the rig too. Tantilizingly OBJ2FACT has a 'Use .bvh Hierarchy File' checkbox too, which the instructions then go on to say: Note: OBJ2FACT does not convert motion files or moving figures from applications like Poser to EI. The option to use .bvh files within OBJ2FACT was only included to give the user a possibility to apply hierarchical information to the otherwise flat structured OBJ file. During this process only parent/child relationships are established. OBJ2FACT does not shift pivot points or does any other modification to the file. All further use of .bvh data in Universe like skinning of geometry and connection to bones skeletons is up to the user and not a feature of OBJ2FACT. But either way this does seem to be at least getting somewhere so thankyou once again. I'll report back if I actually get anywhere.

Thankyou for the replies - much appreciated. :) It doesn't appear as though it is possible after all then which is a bit of a pain. I'm pleased I only bought the Poser 7 upgrade for 50 dollars. The positive spin is I do at least now have a completed model of what I need that I can work in with Electric Image. The negatives are I now have to both rig and animate the character in Animator, or get 'free' rigging in Poser but a less beautiful output. Rock, meet hard place. I tried the Daz export route Barnaby, but haven't got anything to work yet. That said I don't know my way around Daz at all, so maybe I am just pushing the wrong buttons. The export options in Poser do not include either FBX or MDD Tomas, so no joy there either. I thought I was being smart here and getting the best of both worlds, but it appears not...

I have been using Poser 7 for a little while (a week or so) and the character animation is very simple and accessible for me. However the rendered images are a bit sad when compared alongside Electric Image. I bought Poser 'knowing' I could create my model, animate it and then export the data into Electric Image for rendering. Now it's crunchtime and I've got nothing. I thought I could export the model as an .OBJ file and the motion data as a Collada file and then everything would be spiffy, but when I try to import the Collada data, Animator just falls over. I don't seem able to Google a workflow for this. Collada is mentioned, as are FBX files, and this forum doesn't seem to have anything on this subject. Does anyone know what workflow I should be following in order to do this, or am I barking up the wrong tree completely here and it just isn't possible?

I haven't tried that Ian but that's a good idea. Presumably if it's a 'proper' file it will open in the demo but (I guess) I won't be able to save the file?. At least then I can work out whether the file I have been sent is worth a damn or not.

Thanks for the help guys, I looked into Polytrans before asking the question but 'didn't fancy it' becuase it's a PC application and I'm on a Mac (and haven't set up Virtuial PC on this machine yet) however I have now installed the demo on a PC we have here, and when I tried to open the file I have, polytrans basically does not recognise the file as a .3DS file. I'm wondering whether I have been sent something that isn't actually the Model geometry (does Max work in the same way as Animator, you have a geometry file and a scene file?) The size of the file I have been given is a whopping 94.6MB, which seems fairly large, but who knows. I also have along with this file another folder containing all of the textures - pretty standard stuff inside. The main file is called MS_Server_Texture_01.3DS Inside the textures folder the only thing different from the norm is a file called MS_Server_Material_Library.mat This might all just be a red-herring that I need to go back to the supplier with. If I do go back, what should I be asking for, as 'traditionally' a .3DS file is no problem at all for me to use.

Hi Folks, I have been sent a Studio Max 2010 3DS file that I would like to use, but neither Transporter nor opening directly into Animator works. If there a trick to working with these files in Animator, or are 2010 3DS files just not compatible?