Walk Designer

The Poser 7 Walk Designer is one of the best things in Poser. Creating a realistic walk cycle is usually a long and tedious process. The Walk Designer does all the hard work for you and you can have a realistic walk cycle with just a few mouse clicks. Let's have a closer look at the Walk Designer and how to use it. You need to decide beforehand whether you want a stationery walk cycle or whether you want your figure to walk along a path (a hand drawn spline). After creating and applying the walk cycle to your figure you can of course export the animated figure to CINEMA 4D.

Here's what the the Walk Designer looks like in action after pressing the Walk button. It's a bit slow as I disabled the the Skip frames option so that every frame is drawn. Poser 7 really puts a load on your CPU. I would have expected the walk designer would run at full speed and display all frames since I'm running an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz with 3gb of memory and a nVidia 7900GS graphics card. You can see I've changed the walk into a Power Walk. Getting the style of walk or run is just a matter of playing around with the settings until you get something that you like.

Rather than write about using the Walk Designer here's a short video of me using it. Click here to watch a 2min 48sec 7.5mb streaming Flash format video or click here to download a zipped version for offline / repeat viewing (7.5mb)

To get the walking character into CINEMA 4D is just a matter of saving the scene in Poser 7. Then in C4D you just fire up the InterPoser Pro plugin or the Body Studio plugin and open the Poser Scene file. The animated character complete with textures then loads and you can press play and watch it walk. More on this later. Here I've used the InterPoser Pro plugin.

Imported Poser character with walk cycle