Located on top of your work space is the document tools. The work space is the grey square in the middle with the figure inside The circle is to pan (rotate), the arrows are to zoom in and out and side to side, and the hand is to move the workspace up and down.

Keyframe:

On the bottom right corner is the keyframe controls. The arrows are to jump to the next keyframe, the key is for the keyframe editor, + to add a key frame and - to delete a keyframe.

On an important note, the arrows jump to the next keyframe, not frame. Use your arrows on the keyboard to go to the next frame.

Parameter Dials:

On the right middle side of your screen you have the paramater dials. Some people when animatng click and drag the sections of the body. This is actually very common practice with programs like Maya, but I suggest you do not do that. Why? Because things just go wrong. You may think that grabbing the hand and pulling it foreward would work, but it won't just pull the arm. Everything will come with it. Where once you had your figure standing nicely, you know have it leaning foreward.

Instead you click on the individual body parts and rotate them using the dials. You can also click on the number value and type it in. This is extremly helpful for small tweaks, if I say wanted to make the shoulder twist -17 degrees instead of -18.

Drop down menus:

Here is the File drop down menu. We have the typical new, open, save, ect.

Revert is really cool because if you fuck things up as much as I do you can revert to the last saved version.

This really helps when working on arms - the most difficult things to work on. A lot of time I upload see the arms look twisted or broken, go fix them, reupload but its not fixed - its worse. So I revert and try again.

Also important is export. To bring in animations into SL you need them as a BVH file. More info on this later.

 

 

Here is the Edit drop down menu.

Along with the usual stuff you have a restore option. This is really nice because the first frame always needs to be the poser default. SL reads animations by how many degrees the different parts move from the default.

Problems can happen many times where you accidently work on frame 1 (whoops) or Poser has been known to change it for some unknown reason. Restore makes it a fast and easy fix for those accidents.

Restoring the camera also helps when you’ve panned oddly and can’t get back to the origional view, or when you forget to lock your camera.

Then you have memorize which has the same options of element, figure, camera, and lights. Honestly I’ve never used them, but I’m going to guess they come in handy

Next up is the Figure drop down menu.

When you start a new project Inverse Kinematics (IK) is turned on for the legs. What this means is that if you move the hips, the feet stay in place. Now, this is good for small edits but Poser just isn't very smart. The legs will move accordingly but more often then not in a way that looks very very painful. IK can also really mess up an animation if its kept on while playing or exporting. When I work, I keep IK off unless I’m doing tweaks to the hips like a small tilt then turn it off directly after.

There are a number of people who would disagree with me about IK. If Poser was able to do this feature well like the far more expensive programs, then I'd be happy. But the fact of the matter is, Poser is bloody dumb. It'll dislocate shoulders and hips faster then you ever will.

Also whats really cool here is the drop to floor. A fast and easy way to well.. drop to the floor. This will make the lowest body part be flush to the floor, so its helpful with standing ones also.

Next up technially is object, but I dont use it. You can place objects about your scene and I’ve heard that it’s helpful with things in SL, but I just don’t use it. So.. we’ll skip to the Display menu.

Here you can change your camera views. Want to see your figure from above? Or really just about every normal angle is in there.

Most important for me in this menu is the guides. See the dotted lines around the hips and shoulders? Thats the guide for hip-shoulder relationship. This really helps a lot when you make things with a lot of tilts like I do. Uneven hips is good, but looking like you are about to fall over is not always what you want to do.

Last thing I’ll talk about here is the Window menu. This allows you to choose which tools/windows you have open while you are working. As you can see I only use what I need.

This also where you find the walk designer - otherwise known as a big pain in my ass. It works… sort of. But when applying it to a SL avie things go really weird and I end up having to edit it so much that it'd prolly be easier to animate by hand.

Also we have the libraries option which opens a menu to change the type of figure or movement you have saved there. Depends on what you are doing tho. More on that one later

Another window I'd like to talk about is memory dots. These are useful to me when I'm not thinking and I do something stupid. With the memory dots you can save a limited number of poses and UI settings to recall when you'd like them. Typically I don't have them up because I like using a big work space, but if you need them they can be found in the window drop down menu.

With the pose dots you can save them quite easily, but if you use them very often you'll run out. To delete them you alt click on it but it's still mildly annoying when using too often. Mostly because I've accidently deleted the wrong one when trying to make room. So I just use them for specific things that I know I'll probably need later. Such as a starter pose with all body parts moved in frame 2, only upper body moved and only lower body moved. I'll talk more on that in the next tutorial.