Take a step to the left

In the latest animation sequence of the Flea Circus Film, the Ring Master turns to the left and takes a step closer to the table to peer over the ring.

This proved to be a rather tricky maneuver in Poser. Because the leg moves and pauses I knew that it was likely to be affected by the issue with splines that I had back in February. However the key issue was that to rotate a figure in poser, you rotate their hip and the rest of the body follows. When turning people rotate around the foot that is on the ground not around the hip. As per usual I sought help from Renderosity and as per usual LittleDragon and PhilC came to my help with some suggestions and ideas. One of these was to parent the actor to an object that was at the point of rotation and rotate that. One of the issues with this is that an object can't change parents mid animation. Also the IK functionality does not help here with the feet sheering off when rotated.

However these technique seemed a little too manual for my liking and I wondered if it could be done with Poser's Python scripting language. In a moment of clarity, I thought back to my A-Level Maths days and remembered something like the following:

"that a rotation, about any point, is equivalent to a rotation (by the same angle) about the origin combined with a linear translation"

The Poser Python documentation that comes with Poser6 is not very user friendly, I was hoping for a graphical object model but the document is just a straight list of values, objects and methods in PDF form. There's also no examples with it (although there are some on the web). So the net effect is that I've not had a chance to get coding. I'm not sure if the Poser7 manual is any better and there does not appear to be any books for sale on this topic although there are plenty on Python and Poser separately.

However in the process of investigating Poser Python I stumbled across PoserSpeak a Windows based product that uses SAPI to add voices to your poser characters.