Best inworld animation tool

[Softpaw Sommer]

Which in world animation tool is the best?  I'm talking about huds like Animare Pose and Anypose . I just want to make my own poses for photos not sell them. I've got Anypose but it makes such stiff poses, or I'm not good enough with it to get anything but stiff poses. So I am looking into other systems.

 

[OptimoMaximo]

What these systems do is to build a pose out of sets of fixed rotations for each single bone in the avatar skeleton, then it collects your choices and outputs the equivalent animation file, a BVH i guess, i don't know really. To me, all you can get from that kind of tool is... stiff poses. The only solution to get 100% control over the poses look, is to use an IK enabled animation offline software AKA 3D softwares like Maya, Blender, 3DSMax and similar. If you really don't want to go with full blown 3D software, you may want to get QAvimator, which can give you better results than what you got so far for sure. It's free, it's designed for SL but it comes with its own limitations.

[Callum Meriman]

There really isn't much different (in terms of in world huds) for photo use. I've found the Anypose suits my needs, but it has some huge limitations around chest and head positions. The 4 arrows on the hud can also be quite counter-intuative. But for photos, where you can't rez, it does the task best (for me)

The stiff posing is mostly a result of unnatural joint positions, and that comes down to two things, your skill/technique, and the limitations of the angular steps provided between one position and the next.

For just photo use Blender is a bit of an overkill, plus you can't really use it on location and work your pose into the photo. What you may find of use is to practice a bit.

To practice , grab a photo or two of real people as references and copy the pose into world. Pay attention to feet direction, knee vs hip bend, rotation between shoulder and hip, and importantly where the head is facing. Get ther pose as close as you can, then work over each joint again moving it closer towards the pose. After a few practices you are better able to create one from scratch - although I do still use a wood artists model to help me get a reference quickly.

Drawing books such as https://www.amazon.com/Figure-Drawing-Essential-Poses-Natural-Looking/ and a million others like this also help a lot.

Normally I will work in the order of rought hips direction and position, rough shoulder direction, rough legs, rough arms, rought head, rought feet and hands, then go back over it all and fine tune a few times until it looks more natural. Many times though, it just won't translate into world, the tools are just too rigid.