Best Method of Posing Human Figures?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
in The Commons
My poses always look stiff and unnatural. I'm amazed at the beauty and intricacy of some of the pose sets I've bought and wonder how the artists ever achieve that.
What's the best way to pose your figures (other than spending 20 hours on each pose)? Are there techniques of achieveing great poses? Or products?
The ones I buy are brilliant, but they don't cover ever situation I want my characters to be in.
Thanks!
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I simply use the rotation dials on the parameter tab to pose each part while looking at my photo reference. But observation is the primary key. Both for seeing what is really going on in the photo reference and for seeing if what you have made looks right. I have often suggested to people that they look at tutorials on how to draw the human figure first before they try to start posing them in DS. It seems backwards but its the best way to learn how to observe the human body and learn how it moves.
Photo references are very useful.
I use them; also, the pose needs fit within the scene, and interract with other props and chanracters.
I usually start by finding a pose that's similar to what I want in content library. If I can't, I just position the hips and torso first, then work outward with the arms and legs and head. I can usually pose a pair of people in about an hour that way.
Practice...Practice...Practice. Then it takes minutes for a single-person pose, and a little longer for each one you add. Starting from a stock pose that's roughly what you want does speed things up.
Always remember that a pose does NOT effect only one body part ,just like an expression does NOT use only one part of a face
In addition to studying posing for drawing, use some animator tricks - get a mirror, and if possible make the pose yourself. (Obviously if it's an aerial pose, or something requiring greater dexterity than you have, you're going to have to imagine part of it, but there should be some elements of the pose you can copy - just maybe not all of it at once) Watch how your joint's bend, how your hips shift, etc. If they're holding something, try to hold something roughly the same shape and size, and in the same position - then look at how your fingers are wrapped around it and the angle of your wrist. (I do this with swords regularly. Yes, I have access to several different types of sword. No, I don't see this as weird.)
Though for expediency sake, I'm another that tries to start from something I already have and then adjust it. This is especially true of sitting and leaning poses when using them with sets and props other than the ones they were designed for.
Personally, I think poses take time. Though mine don't usually take 20 hours, I often find myself taking hours to do a single pose. I always use the parameter dials and frequently look at the pose from various sides and angles. Even using reference, I usually adjust part rotations, (especially with extreme poses) to make the pose look better with the figure it is for. I also try to divide rotations among different parts to alleviate creased and over twisted looks. Generally, I like to start with how the hip is rotated and work out, saving the finger poses for last.
Posing doesn't come natural to me, which is why I'm glad I'm a prop/environment PA. It has taken me full days on one pose though I am getting better at it and is only taking about 4 hrs to pose something properly without cheating (Loading a premade pose and adjusting to what you need).
Get a good number of different partial poses - either by buying or making them yourself - then dial in what is needed... some slight corrections usually have to be done, but it speeds up the pose building progress a lot (for me...)
As long as it looks natural to the camera that you're using, it can look unnatural from other angles.
So, I guess this is important...
#1, get your figures to the rough spot that you want them
#2, lock in a specific camera for your scene
#3, finish posing
It's keeping the one camera angle that prevents me from revisiting a pose over and over. I don't care how terrible it looks as long as it looks good in the one camera that I care about.
A very simple and intuitive way to pose is to use the puppeteer. You can pose your character and create a corresponding point on the the graph using drag and drop. Place two or three poses you like on the graph, then use your mouse twist and turn the body between poses. (Easier to watch than describe.) Just type puppeteer daz3d in to youtube and some very good videos will pop up.
I love my pose library. I tweek but can't be bothered to start from scratch. I also love the pose converters. I use poses from all V4, Genesis,Gen2,3 and 8. I also use expressions and tweek
Oh! Thank you!!! I didn't know about Puppeteer. I watch the youtube videos. It's amazing.
Making natural poses is tough.
It is one thing to have an idea of where you want the limbs to point in a pose, but that is only part of it, you also need to have a real good understanding of balance and weight and how the movement of one limb affects the weight and posture of other limbs and the body as a whole.
You also should be able to look at the pose from many different angles, and from all of them have a nice flowing curve to the overal shape that reads well in a render. That is the artistic side of posing and adds alot to how natural a pose will look.
I enjoyed some Dreamlight training videos about posing the female form and he had dozens of tips. Just viewing a pose from different angles bring s out femine curves or hard angles.
There is a wonderful free program called Design Doll which can be used for practicing posing as well as for easily trying out figure proportions on a little mannequin-type model.
As a user of Carrara, DAZ Studio, Iclone and Poser, I would say that none of these compare with Design Doll for ease-of-use when it comes to posing.
There is no way to transfer poses to DAZ Studio or anywhere else - it is only a little stand-alone program but is a fun way to practice posing and to create different versions of poses very quickly. There is a paid version but that only adds a couple of features (Also the program seems to be in development Limbo, so be cautious - the free version is capable enough and I haven't investigated further).
I cannot see this program being in any way a rival to DAZ because there is no marketplace of any kind but it is probably better not to provide a link to the download site.
I've uploaded a video which I put together a while back. The description explains what it consists of. If you want to skip to the last minute or so, you can see the first few scenes I made. These are nothing brilliant but show the kind of things which can be done.
WARNING: The figure is only a little mannequin but it comes without any clothing and the default is female. The final few moments of my video show a few scenes I made when I started out.
https://youtu.be/NsqUSx5HZ_g
Another video from someone else gives a commentary as well as a demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMV4mK5LGhc
That's very cool. Thanks for pointing the program out to me. Maybe I'll be able to make use of it.
Man, thank you so much. I am absolutely brand new at this, and that instruction has helped me so much. Best regards.
You can buy poses here at DAZ, too. I find the easiest solution to a lot of posing situations, is to apply a pose I've purchased, that is similar to what I want, then use the Parameter sliders to change it to exactly what I want. In the Scene palet, if you select the head of the character, you will get a list of whatever facial poses/expressions you have installed.
The ironic thing is that Puppeteer was been around long before DAZ switched from the V4 generation to Genesis, but for some inexplicable reason they almost completely stopped updating it and advertising it again until recently.
Insert a photo reference on a plane behind the character you are posing helps, and having a second side view will give the pose some depth. Thinking about gravity and center of mass body balance, adds to get some realism.
So has anyone tried the “AI posing from photographs” feature of Clip Studio Paint? As with Design Doll, I don’t think there’s a way to transfer poses from CSP’s 3D mannequins to Daz Studio, but it would be great if somebody could come up with a plug-in for DS that would take a reference photo as input and output a corresponding figure pose. So instead of mo-cap from video, it would be pose-cap from image ????
It doesn’t even have to be exact – something that got you pretty close to the final pose could be a real time saver.
I am playing around with 3DUniverse's Pose Architect. Quite nice to position your character in a starting pose and fine-tune from there.
I haven't found out if there's a feature similar to this in Studio but in Poser you can enable a 'shoulder to hip' guidelines that will display the line and angle of both the shoulders and hips which made posing and getting the balance right very easy and natural.
Since I haven't found something like that in Studio I've fallen back on simply feeling what it's like to be in the pose I want my character to be in. Can I stand like this/is my balance right/does this feel comfortable/is there a reason I'm in this pose? If the answer to those are no, then I rethink the pose until I can say yes.
I honestly don't like the majority of Pose sets sold for DS/Poser figures, I find them very unnatural and awkward with no thought put into hip/shoulder relations and weight/balance. But there are some awesome sets that look very natural when they take into account balance/weight distribution and limb weight. I suggest that you take a look at some of the motion captured/animation sets sold here. I've gotten a lot of usage out of those, especially when I need someone who's in mid-stride or mid-action... since they're based on actual human motion already, there's almost no need to adjust anything.
This tutorial is worth a look: https://www.daz3d.com/the-art-of-posing
I tend to start with a pre-made pose and then tweak it to my requirements. I use myself as a reference for posing - adopting the pose I want and then seeing where my joints go, I'm glad nobody is here to watch when I'm working!
How much do those suits cost that Hollywood movie studios use on human actors to transfer poses and movement when they are animating something?
I did a quick look and you could get the suit (the cheapest part under $500), sensors, cameras, and cables under $20,000 Us if you are trying to capture complex things like facial expressions. This is assuming that you have the computer hardware, techs to run the software etc...
I think the new MAC iPhone does it just by converting a video of a person moving around into an animation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kzaFxqgxpo
Is there any reason that stick figure couldn't be a DAZ figure?
you could create an obj and then use that as a 3d reference to manually pose