Poser 7 Revealed: Use the Basic Editing Tools

For our next excerpt from Kelly L. Murdock's Poser 7 Revealed, the section lays out the use of the program's basic editing tools.

By Kelly L. Murdock | Monday, April 9, 2007 at 12:00 am

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld

All images from Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide by Kelly L. Murdock.

This is the next in a new series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide. In the next few months, VFXWorld readers will develop the skills needed to create, render and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. We will offer step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow readers to apply each new skill.

What You'll Do
In this lesson, you learn how to pose figure elements using the basic editing tools.

In order to pose figures, you need to learn how to move, rotate, twist and scale the different figure elements. The Editing Tools in Figure 1 can help you accomplish these tasks. You can open this set of tools using Window, Editing Tools. You can select only one editing tool at a time, with the current tool being highlighted in yellow.

[Figure 1] Editing tools.

Quicktip: You can use all the Editing Tools also on figures and props in addition to body parts.

Moving Figure Elements
One of the first places to start when posing a figure is to move the various elements. A good example of this is dragging the upper arm to raise or lower the entire arm. There are a couple of Editing Tools you can use to move figure elements, including the Translate/Pull tool and the Translate In/Out tool.

Quicktip: When translating body parts, the body part highlighted in white moves when you drag in the Document Window. The red highlighted object is the current selection.

[Figure 2] Translated arms.

The Translate/Pull tool (T) is the one tool that is selected when Poser is first started. It allows you to move figure elements within the XY plane.

The Translate In/Out tool (Z) moves the selected element in and out of the Z plane, which is towards or away from the current camera view. Figure 2 shows a simple pose accomplished by translating the upper arms using these two tools.

Rotating and Twisting Elements
You use the Rotate tool (R) to rotate elements about their joints. For example, if you drag on the selected forearm object with the Rotate tool, it will rotate about the elbow joint. Dragging an element with the Twist tool (W) causes it to rotate about its joint axis. For example, dragging the abdomen element with the Twist tool makes a figure twist about its waist. Figure 3 shows a figure whose forearms have been rotated with the Rotate tool and whose waist has been twisted with the Twist tool.