World’s longest Poser tutorial for AoK modders

Article written by Matt LiVecchi
Published on 10-11-12
Tags: , ,

Alright, I’ve been promising this for a while, but here at last is a tutorial on how to make unit graphics for your AoK mods in Poser.

What is Poser, you ask? It’s a 3D modelling program, with an emphasis on people, faces, and animals; and animating or posing said people, faces, and animals. Where 3ds max or other such programs are designed for the user to create there own models, Poser is much more newbie friendly in that it really relies on a large catalogue of user created models.

Enough meaningless talk though. Let’s get down to the essential information:

The Program and Alternatives
Poser has like 14000000 versions. Basically, they all do the exact same thing, with newer versions often having minor but unessential enhancements. Also, the library of models your poser comes with will often differ depending on the version. Still, I wouldn’t sweat the version too much.

Now, as you might be guessing, Poser is not free. Some of the newer versions bought on the website can cost stupid amounts. But you should usually be able to find the program for dirt cheap. On Amazon.ca (I’m living in Canada here), I can find Poser 9 (newer version), for around $20.

Unfortunately, $20 might be no obstacle for most people, but this site does have a lot of young people and students, who either do not work, don’t have a credit card, or both. So for them, there is Daz Studio.

Daz Studio is free, and 100% compatible with poser models. Don’t ask me how it works, I’ve never used it. I only know that it is supposed to be somewhat similar in design, and any model you download for poser will work in Daz, or vice versa. So those of you going the cheapy route will just have to see how much of this tutorial actually applies to you.

The basics
First before we even discuss Poser, let’s discuss AoK and modelling basics.

1. AoK units have five animations: Attack, Walk, Stand, Die, Decay
2. Each of those animations has FIVE angles: Facing South, Southwest, West, Northwest, North. The other three angles (NE, E, SE) are mirrored internally by the game from the west facing angles.
3. Each angle of the animation is made up of anywhere from 5-15 frames typically. Over the course of these frames an animation is played, like any cartoon animation.

So, what will this mean for modelling? Simple:
1. Five files for each unit, one for each animation. Alternatively, many people don’t actually animate the decay, or just do it by hand. That still leaves you with four files.
2. We will model in the South facing view, then turn our model in 45 degree increments to get the other angles. Just one model, rotated to five angles.
3. Our animation will usually be designed to be 10-15 frames long, as those numbers are simple, common to aok, and provide smooth but not overly long animations.

Let’s Begin

To start, you need a poser file with the proper setup. Where do you get that? From me, of course. Email me, I’ll email you my setup file. If enough people are interested, I’ll submit a utility to the Blacksmith.

Once you have that, Poser, depending on your version, looks something kind of like this:

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Let’s ignore 90% of that. I’m not teaching you to use poser, I’m teaching you to make AoK units in it. There’s a big difference. As it is, this tutorial is going to be long.

So the big pink area, that’s where you will model units. There’s camera and light controls on the left, WHICH IF YOU TOUCH YOU WILL DIE. Once you use my setup, lighting and camera are set. No touching. Seriously.

On the left is access to your library, where all your poser models go. This is where the default models your poser came with are stored, and where anything you download in the future will show up. So let’s pick a model.

What unit shall we make? Hmm, maybe like every other person out there, you are sick of Joan the Maid, and her evil doppelganger granny from Scythia. So let’s make a nice female unit.

All poser units for Aok will consist of 1) a base unit, 2) clothes, hair, armor, etc, and 3)props, such as swords, shields, etc.

Let’s start with a base model of a female. I’ll use the default one that comes with Poser 4 (and many subsequent versions). Figures, rather intuitively, are found in the Figures folder of your library:

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NOTE: Poser models in their base state are nude. If 3d polygons aligned to represent undressed people somehow offend you, don’t continue. For us sane folks, let’s move on.

That figure, and others like it, are made of body parts (shocking I know). Click on the head, for example. You will see that there are many options to edit it in the bottom right. Some are just moving, scaling, rotating, etc. Others have morphs designed into them, which depending on the body part, might allow you to change the face to look more asian or african, make your model fat or skinny, or give your female unit huge…self esteem. Yeah, let’s go with that.

By the way, Resist the urge to make R rated scenarios and get banned from the blacksmith if you will. Okay good.

By bending or rotating body parts, we can pose the unit. Let’s leave that for later though, and get some clothes on this poor girl. Clothes are sometimes harder to find. They can end up in either figures or props. This poser 4 dress I shall use comes from props:

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How very Cinderella. Wonderful.

Notice how perfectly that dress fits her? That’s because this is a tutorial, and not real life. There are often issues making clothes fit. Here are the steps:
1. Once you’ve added the dress to the scene, it won’t be on the woman (not really anyway). You need to click the dress, then go to Figure->Conform to… and select the name of your female model here. Poser will then do it’s darnedest to make the glass shoe fit her. If the dress was designed for the model (as this one was, both Poser 4 defaults) it will work like a charm.
2. If it doesn’t fit, then you get to play with it. Too short? Try increasing the length of the whole gown. If it is just too short on the stomach, click that part of the dress and try increasing the size of just one part. Lot’s of playing and tampering will usually get most relatively close models to work somewhat.
3. That’s another tip, watch what you have selected. Don’t click on an arm and resize it expecting the entire model to resize. Make sure you have selected the whole model OR the part you want, depending on your current need.

So your dress fits. On to hair. Hair is found typically in the Hair folder (so cool, man!), but once and a while a downloaded hair piece will end up in figures or props. Anyway, I’m adding some hair:

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There. I had to move it a touch so it wasn’t hanging off her head, but otherwise it was simple.

Hair, and props, need something called a parent. What that means, is when the parent object moves, so do the hair and props. For hair, the parent is the head. When I tilt the head, the hair needs to stay on the head and tilt with it. Props like swords will need to be parented to the hand, so that when the hand moves, so does the sword it holds. Let’s set the parent for the hair: click the hair, go to Figure->set parent… and choose the head of our female figure.

Last but not least, we are going to be sending this pretty woman into the barbarous, mmisogynist Middle Ages of AoE2. She’s going to need a sword.

Poser doesn’t have default swords. Poser isn’t going to have a lot of things you will want. But don’t let that stop you. Any free sword model on the internet will work. You can probably find 50 in 5 minutes for free. I make my own, something I’ll get to later. For now go download one. Make sure it’s in 3ds or obj format (most are). Got one? good, let’s go.

Go to File->Import-> and then choose the fil format of your sword. Click on it, there are some options and settings, blah blah blah. Leave the defaults and import your sword:

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For that screenshot, I’ve moved the sword to fit in her hand (just move it along the x, y, and z axises until it is in position, you may need to rotate the sword as well). Then set the parent for the sword to the hand, like you did for the hair. Finally I made her hand into a fist. Go to the hands folder of your library, find a fist and click it. Simple enough.

Congratulations, this model is done! Now we move to texturing and animation:

The Textures and Materials:
I’m not spending a lot of time on this. Click on the material room (top tabs) to edit the colors and materials of the model. If we change the color of the hair, we can make her blond. THe dress could be made to be any clor we choose, even player color (use a pure red with no green or blue, it get’s picked up well by turtle pack when the time comes to import frames and make slps).

You can also load jpg textures and materials. None of it is terribly complicated, but this is where you actually make the unit look like you want. You can take ordinary models and make them look completely different. You can even make parts of the model disappear by giving them transparent textures. It’s all very fun to play around with, and I’m sure you can all figure much of this out on your own. Questions, which will undoubtedly aris, may be asked here. I’ll try to help.

When your heroine looks like you want her, move to animation.

Animating your model
Remember that first screenshot? Along the bottom, you see the animation controls. We can select how many frames this animation will have (set to 15 in the picture), and we can play, pause, step forward or back, just like any video. There’s a few more tricks, but that’s the idea. Let us set the frame count to 15.

Now, the painstaking stuff. Poser has two things of use to us here, poses and animations. A pose is just that, a one frame posing of our model. Select the first frame in the animation controls. Select the Female figure (the base, not the clothes). Load any pose onto her from the Poses folder of the library:

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This is a good starting pose for an attack animation. Some poses you can load, others you may need to make by bending or twisting body joints. For an attack animation, we would want a pose like this for the first and last frames (so it repeats smoothly). The middle frame should be the actual strike. Anything before that is the windup of the chop or thrust, anything after is the return to the starting position. That means, for a typical 15 frame sword attack animation, you need say 4 poses.

1. Frame 1 is the starting pose (see the previous screenshot
2. Frame 3 or 4 is the apex of the draw back for the sword
3. Frame 8 the sword fully extended in a strike
4. frame 15 is the starting pose again.

Poser, in it’s infinite goodness, will automatically try to fill in the other 11 frames you never touched. Check each on and maybe tweak it to look more natural. Sometimes Poser will do a near perfect interpolation. Sometimes every frame needs some work.

Cryng yet? The good news is there are already animations for dying, attacking, walking, and standing already made and done out there on the interwebs. So for many simple units, you will never have to do the actual frame by frame animating except to do touch ups. I’ll get to these goodies on the interned near the end.

So, you’ve animated your fifteen frames. My guess is the clothes are going to be screwed up in some of those. For simple things that hug the body like shirts or pants, there are few problems. Skirts and dresses are a nightmare though. Legs move in the poses and animations, and stick in and out of the skirts. It’s a huge pain. You will need to check each frame and solve any issues on an as needed basis. Here are some tips:

1. Use the morphs of clothes to account for body changes. Hopefully your piece of clothing has morphs. Otherwise it’s almost impossible sometimes.

2. If an elbow or other body part is being annoying and sticking through clothing no matter what you do, you can hide it. Just click the offending part, and on properties (in the bottom right next to parameters) set it to invisible.

3. Sometimes just resizing ever so slightly is all you need.

4. If you can, it’s easiest to stick with clothes made for the model you are using. They will have the fewest problems.

SO let’s say you haven’t quit so far. You should now have a nice animation which smoothly plays when you test. We are ready! Click animation->make movie. Use the preview renderer, it should have all the settings fine from my setup file. Things like antialiasing will be disabled, for example. Other things you need not know.

The settings are all very straightforward. You will want to make sure it renders all your frames, as image files (choose bmps), etc. The only concern you will need to worry about is size. Default is 100×100 (my default anyway). Depending on the size of the model, yo may need to enlarge or shrink that. Check your rendered frames against an aok unit and see if the size is about right.

So anyway, we click render, and voila. Poser will save 15 frames in a folder we chose. These are the first 15 of our 75 frame attack!. To get the rest, we need to rotate the model to each angle and render again. Here’s how:

1. In my template, I’ve an object called Rotate ball. It’s invisible, but you can select it in any object menu.
2. parent the female body to the rotate ball. Make sure you do all this while on frame 1 in the animation controls, or Poser will get funny ideas.
3. Now, rotate the ball 45 degrees clockwise. The female (and the clothes and hair and sword attached to her) will all rotate with the ball. Rerender, rotate, repeat until all angles are done.

And that is it! To review:

1. Place base model
2. Place any desired clothes and conform
3. Place props and hair and parent
4. Color and texture in the material room
5. Load or create animation
6. Check each frame for screwups in the clothing, pose, or other areas. Repair as needed.
7. Render
8. Rotate and rerender
9. Repeat #7 until all angles are done.

Those nine steps produce one slp worth of frames. To get that into aok, you need to simply convert the frames to 256 (turtle pack, photoshop, etc), and make an slp (turtle pack, mps, MWS). As we said, a unit is 5 slps, one for attacking, walking, decaying, dying, and standing. So you need to make a poser file for each. Each poser file will have it’s own animation. Simple, but time consuming work here. I probably should go through and render our lady warrior and post a gif. Thing is, I’m tired, and I have no use for this Cinderella with a sword. If you want to see gifs of units I made in poser, check out the ToME WiP spotlight. :p

And that’s the basics. I could go on for hours about each of the above steps, but this is enough info to get anyone started, and asking the right questions. Now that that’s all done, there’s just one big topic left:

Growing your library:
This all might sound difficult, but if you have exactly the right base model, the matching clothes, and a prop or two ready to go, plus ready made animations, you could probably make this unit in 45 minutes. For me, most units take somewhere around 1-12 hours. Why such a huge range? Sometimes, I have exactly the stuff I need, sometimes I don’t.

So where do you get this “stuff”? I make my own swords, helmets, shoulder pauldrons, etc in 3ds max. Most of you will not have that luxury. You will need to rely on models online, default library stuff, purchases, and primitives. Let’s go through each one:

1. Online- you might be shocked how many quality models are free. Start by looking for free poser stuff in google. For things like helmets, shields and swords, there are endless free models out there. Get the free stuff off turbosquid, for example. Best of all, go to the civ III forums, and get the wealth of poser stuff made and shared by modders there. Particularly, find their animations and use them for basic sword or spear attacks, walking, dying, etc. Those animations alone might save you dozens of hours. But it’s not just animations, there are models, clothes, weapons, etc.

Also check the DAZ3D website. Most of the stuff is for sale, but the regularly have specials where they offer a couple items for free.

2. Default library- this is the stuff that came with Poser. Use these, and be creative. Between textures and the odd prop, you will be suprised how many things you can create.

3. Purchases- there’s a lot of content out there for money too. If you really need to make a lot of units, a couple wise purchases might help. A simple cape and jerkin say. Those will be used on countless units, recolored to be leather or cloth or chain mail, etc. Don’t get caught up in buying useless stuff, but one or two simple adaptable pieces of clothing might help you make a whole line of units.

4. Primitives – in your props folder of the library, there are primitives. Not natives who attack you and boil you in pots, I mean shapes. Spheres, cones, cubes, etc. Use these to your advantage. A simple steel cap helmet for example is just a half sphere with a spike maybe (half sphere and cone). Remember AoK is really shrunk down. Sometimes simple low detail solutions like this work best.

Closing:
You will have questions. Poser is buggy and sometimes unnecessarilly complicated. Ask questions here, and I’ll do my best to answer them. I also realize this was long, wordy, and still probably not in detail enough. You will have to cut me some slack as I am very tired and typing this in the dark. I’m also sure there are many spelling errors. :p

I also realised I never explained where all the files go that you download. Suffice to say, for 3ds or obj props, save them wherever on yout hard drive. You are going to import those as discussed earlier anyway. For actual poser content (whether purchased or free or from civ modders) you will need to place the files in the right folders of you poser directory. Some stuff comes with an installer that does this for you, some stuff will have instructions. Ask me if your content has neither and I’ll try to explain where your content goes.

Finally, I have no idea if anyone will find a use for this, and I’m certainly not trying to coerce people into using Poser. Cut and paste units are a simple alternative and I’ve no wish to convert others. I have to admit that 3ds max is a far simpler tool for making units (especially since I basically make everything in max but then bring it over to poser), but poser is cheap, can be used to make units by people with no modelling ability, and is (somewhat) intuitive. It’s also the tool I used to make the units for Tales of Middle Earth. It can be a powerful tool.

Good luck and happy (or at least less frustrating) modding! 😀


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