You might want to try Poser again. It is designed for what you are
describing. Unfortunately, it is difficult with any tool to generate
human-like animation - good animation takes a lot of skill and practice.

Your best choice might be to buy/acqurie motion capture data that
represents the motion that you are interested in. Many companies sell
motion capture data, which can then be imported into many tools
(Poser, Maya, DANCE) and displayed and played back at various speeds.
If you can't find it for purchase, you can always capture the motion
data yourself in a motion capture studio.

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

--- In dancedev@yahoogroups.com, "Gregory Bleiker" <gregory@...> wrote:
>
> Hi dancedev Group
>
> I am starting a project that should be a virtualization of Karate
> katas (a predefined movement sequence, perhaps more people know Tai
> Chi, very similar). The main aim is to help students learn the
> movements, so they should be able to do trackball turning in the
> render window and also be able to control the speed of the animation.
> Furthermore, a scripting interface should be provided so that
> movements can be put into a sequence and transitions get caluculated,
> so that patterns can be reused. As timing is paramount, an intuitive
> way of editing the timeline would also be quite important. I tried
> Poser, but it started to mess up pretty quickly and rotate arms and
> feet of the dummy arbitrarily. I had a go at doing it in Blender,
> however that was too time consuming.
>
> My question: is DANCE the right tool for this? The pieces that are
> used look right (ie. python, imagemagic, povray) If anyone has done
> anything similar (maybe for dancing or an other martial art) I would
> be very interested in your experiences.
>
> Gregi
>