Okay, this is a method I use to ‘cheat’ a bit making poses, so it’s faster and easier on myself. I don’t know if anybody else uses this; but this tutorial presumes you know a little bit about using Blender and S4S.
There are numerous resources out there to get you started with pose making, like this video or this tutorial.
It’s a bit long winded for Tumblr, so I’m sticking the rest of it under this cut. My tutorial assumes you know how to make a pose .package in S4S and focuses exclusively on the actual pose-making part of it.
I call it ‘frankenposing’ because much like frankenmeshing for clothing, I actually take parts of EA clips, expressions, gestures, etc, and put them all together to create something new.
Step 1: Open a blank rig in Blender. Just trust me on this one. You’ll need to have a blank rig sitting somewhere in your recently opened files.
Step 2: If you don’t already have a desired EA clip sitting on your drive somewhere, you’re going to need to go grab one. Go into S4S as if you’re making a new pose, head to the ‘clips’ tab and select ‘EA Clip’ and the desired frame before hitting ‘export.’
Step 3: I’m doing a walking pose, so I look up ‘loco’ in the list of animations to find the walking clips. I look for one that seems pretty good for what I have in mind and then I export it.
Step 4: Save your EA clip somewhere you’re going to find it again. I have a bit of an EA animation library going now.
Step 5: Go back to Blender and your blank rig. Go to File>Open & find that clip you just saved. Open it up in the same instance of Blender. Now you can roll through the animation clip by using alt-mousewheel and find part of the animation that best captures what you want. I want good walking legs for this one, so I try to find the best part that expresses the energy of that motion to me.
Step 6: I hit ‘B’ and select the area of the pose that I want to grab. (In this case, the legs.) When those points are highlighted in blue, press control-c to copy.
Step 7: Go to File>Open Recent and find your blank rig. You have to do this in the same instance of blender, or the copy/paste won’t work. That’s why we’ve been working only in one instance of Blender so far.
Step 8: When the blank rig opens, press Control-V and voila! The legs are now in a walking pose for us! You can, of course, tweak them at this stage if you need to do that for your pose.
Step 9: This one is important. If you forget to do this step, you’re going to have to go back to square one. We press ‘i’ to bring up the animations interface and select ‘locrot’ to lock our joints into place on the timeline. Then we go to File>save. Save your new .blend clip as something where you can find it again later to put into S4S when you’re ready to create your pose pack.
Step 10: Now we’re going to go to File>Open and find another EA animation clip to blend! I’m going to go for a talking one that grabs the emotion I want for this pose. In this case it’s a ‘debate’ clip.
Step 11: Once the new animation is open, we find the point we want to copy again and then hit B to select the area we want. Here I’ve just gone for the whole upper torso, but you can zoom in on facial expressions, grab a hand position, whatever you need. Once the joints are all highlighted blue, press control-c to copy it.
Step 12: Now we go back to File>Recent Files> Your working file and open that back up in the same instance of Blender again.
Step 13: Once that file opens, just press Control-V again! There we are! It’s an instant pose of somebody arguing a point while walking. Of course you can tweak it further at this point; maybe move the eyes to look another sim, or even add another facial expression altogether if you’re not happy with this one.
This method works very well with multiple sim poses or you can use it to augment a pose that you’ve made from scratch - like if you don’t know what to do with the hands. I frequently open clips of sims just chatting to each other to grab hand gestures or boxing (for closed fists) and ‘cheat’ the hands on a pose using this method because they’re fiddly as hell.
Do NOT forget to locrot and save when you’re happy with it. At this stage you can carry on blending more clips into your pose, or just leave it as it is and save it.
That’s it! It’s that simple!
