any good video game engine which we can export poser models and do bone animation? i want to creating a fighting game using poser. any ideas help?

Most game engines aren't designed to handle the polycounts of your typical Poser figure. The latest Quake and Unreal engines can handle about 3000-5000 polygons per player model, but for a fighting game you'd only have two figures onscreen at a time, so you might be able to push it a bit further without serious loss of performance.

The upcoming Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 engines may support higher polycounts; I haven't heard exact numbers yet. The footage I've seen of HL2, however, looks very promising.

Still, even the standard P4 figures have over 16000 polys apiece, and that's not counting clothing and hair. It'll probably be a few more years before the real-time software and hardware is ready to handle that level of detail comfortably.

You'd have to completely re-bone the meshes, since Poser's skeletal system doesn't translate into any existing game's skeletal animation features.

And if you plan to distribute the game in any way, there are all those nasty legal issues ....

thought i replied guess not... is there anyway to reduce the polys down? How hard is it to re-bone the meshes and what is involved in translating it. I dont mind doing the work but currently i am clueless on how to get started. What about exporting into discreets gmax? Many games are made from 3dstudio max, if the poser model is entered into gmax can the skeleton model be transferred with it> Thanks for the reply

I doubt if that is possible. I think the short answer is, that if you have to ask these questions, the task is beyond your resources. There isn't any simple system that will allow you to take a Poser model and with a few simple alterations turn it into a 3D video game. On the other hand, you could possibly do a lot using 2D Poser renders for a sprite-based game.

is there anyway to reduce the polys down?

Yes, most modeling programs have some sort of polygon-reducing function. The results are rarely as good as one might hope, though.

How hard is it to re-bone the meshes and what is involved in translating it.

Depends upon the figure and the software. Fairly simple to set up for something like the Half-Life 1 engine, using MilkShape's bone system (which resembles Poser's Setup Room). More complex if the engine has advanced features like weighted vertices. It's not the actual process of re-boning the mesh that's time-consuming; it's the prolonged period of tweaking the settings afterward to get the best results.

As far as translating is concerned, as I mentioned earlier, nothing else uses Poser's bone structure, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has really attempted to write a conversion utility that can translate it to other systems.

What about exporting into discreets gmax?

You can load the mesh into gmax, but not the skeletal structure. And aside from Quake, Unreal, and a few simulators, there aren't many other game formats supported by gmax yet.

Some utilities and websites you might find helpful:

chUmbaLum sOft, home of MilkShape 3D
Caligari.com, home of gameSpace
LithUnwrap and Ultimate Unwrap3D (lots of game formats supported)
polycount (game model central)