This is not an unusual question. Both Poser and Daz|Studio have long been known as methods for creating outstanding looking still images, but not so much for animation.

Now, if you go onto any CG Animation forum on the net, you’ll likely find that lower-cost programs like Poser and Daz|Studio are not held in the same esteem as more expensive programs like Maya, 3DS MAX, Lightwave and Softimage. The perception is certainly out there that “good” animation needs expensive software and that the more expensive the software, the better the animation.

While it is true that the more expensive programs tend to have extensive toolsets, the capabilities of lower-cost programs have been expanding tremendously over the past few years. And for programs like Poser and Daz|Studio, they can indeed be used to make movies.

When it comes to making movies as opposed to still images, you have to worry about two things:

• Ease of Use
• Render time

Ease of Use: Both Poser and Daz|Studio have one tremendous feature that really has to be explored for its impact on animation to be fully appreciated. That shared feature is the massive library of low-cost and even free content created by users. Now, we’ve written about the content libraries for these programs before, but when it comes to making animation easier, easy and inexpensive access to pre-existing assets can do a tremendous amount to accelerate and simplify the animation process. Rather than spending time building all of the necessary assets, you can instead add in the pre-made content and get started animating immediately. This is a huge time saver, especially for independent animators who literally have to do everything in their projects. Whether you are using pre-made characters and clothing, props, or even our Motion Capture Moves Packs, the ability to compile animations out of all of these assets can make your animated projects quite a bit easier.

In working on animated projects in the past, we would always run into one massive hurdle, and that was creating new content. It’s one thing to be creating one or two assets, but when you have to create dozens or even hundreds of assets before you can start creating even a single frame of animation–that can halt a project in its tracks and relegate it to your own subdivision of Development Hell.

Render Time: When animating a project at 30 frames per second, render time is a huge issue compared with still-frame renders. An animation that takes 2 minutes per frame to render means that a 10-second animation of 300 frames will take 10 hours (600 minutes!) to render out. Imagine if that same animation would take an hour per frame to render–that means that the same 10-second render would tie up the computer for nearly two weeks!

With the release of Poser Pro and its Queue Manager, the ability to do background renders and network rendering makes the use of Poser Pro for an animation environment much more attractive. Rather than having one computer tasked with crunching out animation frames for a scene, the load can be shared among all the computers on a network. A simple two-computer network that’s likely to be found in many homes could cut rendering time in half. A four computer render network that’s within reach of small production studios cuts animation time down to a quarter. And because Queue Manager renders in the background, the computers can still be used to generate new animated scenes to be added to the render queue. (Daz|Studio has no network render function, but there are ways around that–that will be covered in a future post).

As you can see, Poser can definitely be used for making a movie. We’ll be showing off exactly how it’s used in a series of upcoming posts as we at Posermocap.com start creating our own short movie–and you’re welcome to follow along with us.