rotoscoped dancers, which app is best?

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve used older versions of Poser and this is one good cheap way to generate a lot of various body silhouettes in a hurry, add a canned movement file to the models and offset them a little bit and it could work pretty well to generate crowds or single bodies. It is probably what I would try first in your place.

Poser can also render just the solid black shapes in 2-d, ready to composite. There is a great community of Poser users online to help you and provide those motion captured moves. You might also find some at Turbosquid, which has free and payware models, textures, and other goodies for many different platforms including Poser. Beware when browsing the user groups that some of the Poser people can be a little on the kinky side in how they use their models.

Your problem with Poser will be that without a premade file for the motions, if you don’t know what you’re doing, your dancer is going to emulate the “Elaine” character’s dance moves in the famous Seinfeld episode.

I have not dabbled in Poser for a year or two, but here’s an idea that might help, it’s called “poor man’s mo-cap”. Shoot yourself or anybody willing against a high contrast background, a bedsheet or wall will do, doesn’t need to be a clean luma or green screen. Put some duct tape on your wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, ankles, and belt buckle. Do your dance moves and shoot it on a locked-down wide shot that shows the full body. Import that footage into Poser as a background, I forget if it can handle an AVI or MOV or if it has to be a still image sequence or what, but just play along for now, figure that part later or RTFM.

Now just match the poser model’s joints to what the taped joints in your sample movie do/where they are, every ten frames or so. Once keyframed, delete and burn the incriminating and embarrassing background, set the render to silhouette, import the render to FCP or Motion for compositing. If you can’t find a way to make the render as silhouette, render it as 2-d against white within Poser and reverse-key it in Apple Motion later or in FCP using blending modes.

Don’t forget that the camera in Poser is animateable independent of the model’s own actions, try a nice half-circle dolly move with the virtual camera in an alternate render.

This is just one way, there are sure to be others. Good luck, would like to see a link to the finished version of your project and your description of your eventual solution.

[Jaap Verdenius]

For the silhouette, empty the background, render the alpha channel of your render and transfer it to RGB.
You can render alpha in Maya – not sure if you can do it in Poser, but you can always import your Poser model as an obj file into Maya.

[David Bogie]

Use After Effects.
Wait, is this the AE forum?
Then use Motion.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Chris Borjis]

[Mark Suszko] “if you don’t know what you’re doing, your dancer is going to emulate the “Elaine” character’s dance moves in the famous Seinfeld episode.”

thanks for making me laugh and getting a good start on my day! 🙂

(I’ve used poser and know exactly what your talking about)

[Lars Fuchs]

you can also try iClone from Reallusion. That comes with a bunch of prebuilt dance moves, and there’s a pretty big community of users who create and post more.

[Dave Scruton]

wow!
thanks for all the suggs!

dave

[Dave Scruton]

wow! thanks for all the ideas!

dave

[Dave Scruton]

I don’t have any preference for any app.
Motion is just as OK as AFX, as long as
the result is good.

I have both packages, so it’s not an
“either/or” question, maybe it’s even
a “whatabout using both to make something
even better” queston?

folx? any comments?

i don’t know, all i’m doing is
asking gurus for advice

dave scruton

😉

“Reality is a sandwich I did NOT order”
Zippy the Pinhead