How to Create Walk Path With Poser

Series Summary

The computer rendering program Poser is popular with fine art and commercial artists, who use it to create realistic human and animal figures for everything from product packaging to magazine covers. The program is set up as a virtual studio with lights, backgrounds, props, and wardrobes. Although it is compatible with a number of other 3D animation programs, Poser has limited animation capabilities of its own. Users choose from a basic library of human, animal and robotic figures to build their files, as the program cannot model figures from scratch. Poser also includes a variety of stock poses, textures, hair pieces and facial expressions to be used with the figure. Many third party merchants sell similar content which expands the possibilities of Poser-created figures.

In this free series of computer animation lessons, you will learn how to make your Poser figures walk using the program's Walk Designer feature. This powerful option allows you to program and try out different walks for your characters by creating keyframes and path graphs. Our expert John Carstarphen demonstrates how to adjust the keyframes to create an even and natural stride. You will also learn how to use the walk interpolation features and combine the walking presets with your keyframe animation. Not sure how to use the IK setting in Poser? Does your figure look like a robot walking on marbles? So watch these videos today and become a computer animation pro!

Video Transcript

"JOHN CARSTARPHEN: Hi, this is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. So, let's get our Poser characters walking. We're going to use several methods to create this walk. We're going to use the Walk Designer which comes with Poser and then we're going to use keyframes and the animation graph to help fine tune our animation. So let's begin, first of all, with the Walk Designer and before we initiate the Walk Designer menu, we will first have to create a path along which our Poser character will walk. And so, let's do that. We go to figure, create walk path and the walk path automatically appears for our figure. Now, we can manipulate this walk path to--you'll notice that it kind of goes in a curved motion but we can manipulate this so that it is more of a straight path and we do that by clicking on one of the walk path nodes and just moving the node until the path is straight."