Labrador Pointing Pose Guide
This is a new specialty pose I'm proposing. I probably still have a lot to figure out about it but I'm kinda bad at posing petz for shows anyway so this may take a while lol
So this is BG (short for Blessed Ground) and I think she's really cool. As soon as I got her I knew I'd want to pose her for shows, so when she was all grown up, it was picture time! But I soon realized that she really hated show posing, and would instead do this thing where she'd swing her paw at the cursor instead. That may not have been what I wanted, but it always looked so cool in pictures, so I had this idea to make it into a specialty pose. BG was the only lab I had ever played with so far, so I bred a few other lab mixies to see what it could look like. Here are some examples:
The pose has a dog looking confident, with their left paw raised but not too stretched out from the body, looking forward.
You will need to be very patient...
How to get a dog to pose
This pose isn't triggered by the camera flash, and actually can be interrupted by the camera reaction, so I'd suggest unckecking "petz react to camera" in PetzA first.
The paw swing animation is one of the things labradors can do when they jump to the cursor to ask for attention, like when they lick or rub the head against it. The cursor needs to be still, I keep it right in front of the dog. Sometimes I double click to call their attention a bit. Then they'll stare and then jump to the cursor (sometimes they basically just jump in place) and then either lick, rub, or paw at it. They can also paw with their right paw, but I didn't think that looks as nice as the left paw.
It might take a while for the dog to do the desired animation, as it seems that licking is the most common animation, and second is the head rub. Sometimes they'll just stare at you for a long time no matter how much you're calling their attention. I assume petting might help them do it more often, but BG is particularly stubborn at doing any pose whatsoever so I wasn't able to determine >:c
Sadly, this is wildly misaligned because I can't align a dog to save my life.
Which is the correct frame
The desired frame is at the very end of the animation sequence, when they're just starting to retreat the paw but still looking forward. Out of the dogs I tried this with, this particular frame seems to be the nicest and most consistently horizontal. With most dogs, I noticed that there's a little gap between the elbow and the chest on the frame right before the right one also. This picture shows the correct frame and the ones right before and after it in a sequence:
The line that I've looked at the most for the horizontalness of the leg is the underside of the leg:
It's not always 100% horizontal, so I'm not sure if that can be used as a requirement. I'm not certain if all those other dogz could've had a straighter underline if I tried a little harder or if that's just as straight as it gets...
Alignment
Now this is the part that I really don't know. I think ideally, you could align the pose at the eyes. Maybe the eyes perfectly even, or maybe the far eye 1 pixel behind. The dog with liver spots above is also 1 pixel behind. I might need someone else's imput on this.
I just wonder if it's actually possible to align them as one would normally align a dog for a show pose. Since the dog always jumps before doing the animation, do they get out of alignment? I'm not sure if it's the jump that misaligns them or if it's the other animations. When I pose petz, I almost never manage to drop them into 100% correct alignment and wait for them to run towards the cursor a bit (kinda like the out-of-door method for catz), so I don't know if this would be a dealbreaker for using this pose for people who are actually experienced.
Last edited: 2024-04-08