This just sort of has me wondering, for anyone out there that cares to read, and knows about or has played the mmo star wars galaxies. It seems a lot of the characters/figures in SWG resemble very closely the figures used in poser. Not to mention the slew of various clothing pieces and other accessories in SWG. So it makes me wonder if sony used poser, or a progam very similar, to create their models for SWG. Anyone out there have any opinions or info about this?

Well, SWG is a combination effort of Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts. Most likely their own proprietary software was used in making the game, but it's possible they may have used one of the "big 3" highend programs as well. LucasArts has been known to use both SoftimageXSI and Maya (I believe) for their movie FX. Most of these large studios use whatever software integrates best into their pipeline, and Poser doesn't have much flexibility in that department.

However, you might get a faster and more precise answer over at CGTalk.com. Since many industry professionals frequent that website, you're bound to get the answer there. I don't think Poser was used at all in the creation of that game, since I'm sure CuriousLabs would be boasting about it somewhere on their website, and I couldn't find anything there. Software developers thrive on endorsements like that, since it brings all kinds of attention to their software, and this being one of the biggest games ever would certainly do that.

Message edited on: 08/12/2004 21:24

Good point. And thanks for commenting. I wasn't really thinking about the concept of lucas arts or sony probably creating/using their own programs to make swg. Seems with two companies that big they wouldn't need to go to a 3rd party for creating base models of their characters. But it also all boils down to the same polygons and laws of physics that apply to those polygons, regardless of what program is being used. (they did use the dials concept, if i remember correctly, for customising character features, height, wheight, etc. I don't know enough about all the details to really know tho).

At my house Poser loses 90% of the time to SWG. Which is why my gallery is empty lately ;) From what I've read all the models were developed in house, by the Dev team. After I first started playing I tried to extract the model format, to find away to import some of the items into poser. Didn't get too far, mostly due to lack of time.

that's part 2 of what i was thinking, but i dont have swj installed anymore. (due to space and the fact that i was not impressed with the game/story content, but the figures, items, clothing, etc are beautiful) - if there are obj files in swg then they should able to be imported, but their scale would proly be way off. importing into another program like anim8or might work... btw, would that be illegal?

Heh, for the past year, most of my nights were spent playing SWG. Though lately, I've been taking breaks here and there, and trying to catch up on some poser projects (missed a lot of deadlines of some contests).

hehe, cool. did they ever make it easier to unlock the jedi slot? i played for the first few months of its release, and then again a bit later just after they incorporated mounts, but still... i got to a certain level of weapons handling and couldn't really do anything else. the lower level creatures took forever to gain any serious ammount of xp and the higher levels required more than one to take down. it was always virtually impossible to find anyone to hunt with, as by that point everybody had formed their own guilds/parties, so they did their own thing. i really liked my character tho. :)

Currently being tested is the path to be "force sensitive." After that, there's supposed to be several quests to go from "force sensitive" to jedi padawan, then more quests to jedi knight or jedi sith. A couple of months ago, test center was copied over to test center 2 and jedi revamp was tested. Of course, I came back to test center just right after they flagged over a period of time who gets to get a jedi in test center 2. DOH! And to tie in this thread, at the school I work, several instructors had worked at ILM, and one had once told me used poser to do storyboarding.