Build an animation

Posing the ped

Pick a body part, then drag. Hands and feet you move to where they should be; everything else you turn with a ring.

Pick a body part

While you pose, every body part has a glowing dot on the ped. Click a dot, or its button under Body part in the panel. A second click on the button lets go of the part.

The editor right after Start posing: the ped stands in the rest pose with arms held out, with a glowing dot on every body part you can pose.

There are 17 parts:

Parts	How you pose them
L hand, R hand, L foot, R foot	Move them where they should be; the arm or leg bends to follow. Or turn the wrist or ankle.
Head, Neck, Torso, Belly, Hips	Turn them with the rotation rings.
L upper arm, R upper arm, L forearm, R forearm	Turn them with the rotation rings.
L thigh, R thigh, L lower leg, R lower leg	Turn them with the rotation rings.

L hand, R hand, L foot, R foot
Move them where they should be; the arm or leg bends to follow. Or turn the wrist or ankle.
Head, Neck, Torso, Belly, Hips
Turn them with the rotation rings.
L upper arm, R upper arm, L forearm, R forearm
Turn them with the rotation rings.
L thigh, R thigh, L lower leg, R lower leg
Turn them with the rotation rings.

The right panel while posing: Posing at 0.0s with a short how-to, Start from with four starting poses, the Body height slider, the Body part list with R hand picked, and the Move and Rotate tool.

A small dot on a part button means that part is changed in this pose.

Pick a hand or a foot, and a move handle sits on it with three arrows: green moves up and down, red moves sideways, blue moves towards or away from the camera. Drag an arrow; the arm or leg bends so the hand or foot follows.

R hand picked: a move handle with a green up arrow, a red side arrow and a blue depth arrow sits on the right hand of the ped.

With R hand picked, dragging the green up arrow lifts the hand. The upper arm and forearm follow on their own, so one drag raises the whole arm for the wave.

Drag slowly. The hand follows every step, and one drag is one undo step.
An arm or leg cannot stretch. Drag further than it reaches and it points towards the handle.
The small squares between the arrows move in two directions at once.

Turn a part with the rings

Every other part gets three rotation rings. Drag a ring to turn the part around that axis: for the head, one ring nods, one shakes and one tilts. Only the half of a ring that faces you can be grabbed.

Head picked: three rotation rings in red, green and blue around the head of the ped.

Turning a part also turns everything attached to it: the torso takes the arms and head along, a thigh takes the lower leg and foot.

Move or Rotate for hands and feet

With a hand or foot picked, Tool offers Move and Rotate. Move is the arrow handle above. Rotate gives the wrist or ankle the rotation rings instead, for pointing, a waving palm or a tilted foot.

R hand picked with the Tool set to Rotate: Move and Rotate side by side under the body parts.

Start from a ready pose

Start from replaces the whole current pose with one of 4 ready poses, taken from real motion: Stand (neutral), Crouch (hands up), Lean forward and Wide squat. A ready pose replaces every part of the pose, including changes you made before.

Known problem

At the moment, Crouch (hands up), Lean forward and Wide squat turn the ped round, so it faces away from the camera. Between a ready pose and a pose you made yourself, the body then spins half a turn. Until this is fixed, build your poses by hand, or use a ready pose for every pose of an animation and check it from all sides.

The Wide squat from Start from: knees bent wide and hips low, but the ped now faces away from the camera.

Stand (neutral) is the rest pose of the ped, with the arms held out at an angle. For a relaxed stand, lower both hands as in the quick start.

Body height

Body height sinks or lifts the whole body, from -120 to +50 cm. Use it for sitting, crouching or kneeling: lower the body, then bend the legs so the feet are back on the floor. Each pose has its own height, and the builder glides between them like everything else.

The rest pose with Body height at -40 cm: the whole ped sits lower in the view and its feet sink below the floor.

Sinking the body alone pushes the feet through the floor, as above at -40 cm. Bend the knees or move the feet up after it.

The faint copy and Reset this part

From the second pose on, a faint copy of the ped shows the pose before. It makes it easy to see how far a part moves between two poses:

Pose 2 of the wave: the right hand swung outwards, with a faint copy of the ped showing where the hand was in pose 1.

Reset this part appears under the part list when the picked part is changed. It puts that one part back to its rest position in this pose. To undo the last drag only, use Ctrl+Z.

Look around

Turn the camera: drag on empty space in the viewport. Check a pose from the side before you move on; an arm that looks right from the front can point backwards.
Zoom: scroll in the viewport.