Man, someone nees to integrate this with poser character posing tech. Say goodbye to D|S, AND PoserXX. http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

And someone needs to get the license fees down to meet my Poser budget :-D

I think part of the point you are missing, is that the editor comes with games based on the engine. We bought UT 2004, and got the deluxe packs with a version of Maya that works WITH their editor, and 80 HOURS ove video training. This is for a game that cost $50. Now imagine what could be offered, for something like poser that cost $200.

Having a poser type program based around this engine would be just amazing, shame it'll never happen though.

Never say never.. 2 years ago, we'd never have thought Bryce would be revived, that CL would survie, and we'd see a Poser 6, and that Daz would even think about putting out a poser clone with 3d acceleration for free.

:) Where's Veritas777 when ya need him(her?) :) Do we need an exporter for POSER content to the UE3 engine? (I think current license terms for Poser pre-empt this) Do we need the UE3 engine merged with POSER? This is what your saying. I agree it would be nice, but then somebody has to BUY somebody first. Then we have to have two(plus) sets of somebodies to sit down and agree on what to merge, then have another bunch of somebodies to do the work. More somebodies to test. Then you have the gamer bodies upset that very few games are coming out with that engine. They leave to get their gaming fix someplace else. The artistic somebodies are going to be upset that other apps have come and surpassed what they had before the merge, abandoning the app. It will be awesome the finished product but by then NOBODY is going to want it and that will be that. ;) POSER v15 anyone?

Do we need an exporter for POSER content to the UE3 engine? (I think current license terms for Poser pre-empt this) I don't see where they would. The problem would rather be finding content (esp figure meshes) that you are allowed to redistribute.

Err, it's a lot easier to sell video games ('specially that one, which I have) on margin to hordes of gamers, a demographic far larger than Poserdom by orders of magnitude. I've also used UnrealEd (WFUT mod for Unreal Tournament.) UeD was (and in many cases still is) a raging bitch to do dev and script work on, and it was roughly as stable as a cork in a hurricane for model manipulation and level-building. If you thought Poser crashed a lot when P5 first came out, you ain't seen sh!t compared to UeD 2.0 (which came with the old UT.) A typical map-building session usually involved saving everything at least once every 20 minutes or so, and always saving a revision just before trying anything even mildly experimental. They've improved it a lot, but compared to P5/SR4, it's still damned unstable. Just something to keep in mind... /P

Pardon my ignorance, but what is an engine in this sense? A stand alone application like Poser? A hitch along app like MetaForm and other Python based apps? Some hardware?

The engine in this case is the game engine - a huge bit of software to determine player placement, in-game physics calculation (for jumping, flying, ballistics, etc), and graphics apportionment (Unreal uses "zones" to determine on-the-fly rendering quality of each area within a map, coupled with on-the-fly field-of-depth rendering as well...) There is one other thing I neglected to mention as a possible downer as well - the Unreal Engine is limited in the number of polygons it can handle at any one time, according to the player's set FOV. I haven't looked at the specs for this engine, but Unreal Tournament 2003 was limited to 10,000 polys per animated model (assuming a set-piece animation and not in-game rendering), which would mean that Vicky 3 would choke in a hurry unless someone, somewhere did something to improve the game engine by a sizeable percentage. /P

A few things... they stabalized the editor a LOT for UT 2004... and even bundled a version of Maya for modeleing along with it. That one hell of a FREE combination.. and I can't honestly recall anyone at all having the newer editor crash on them, though I'm sure it's happened with the new editor. Heck, my wife has even created a map with it, and she can't hardly even run poser. And the screens they were showing were from an even newer editor they are working on. And properly presented, a poser application with even an almost realtime engine could sell very well.. tap the "sims" fans for it, and add premade animation scripts and some indoor sets. (The UT bot control could even possible be enhanced, since it has scripting abilities. The model poly limit was raised quite a bit in the 2004 engine, and the new engine was showing a character with 22,000 polys I believe.. but the whole magic of the new engine, is that you don't need high res main characters.. you use a lower res character, with what looks like a higher res displacement map, and the engine sorts out the difference. (Much like what Zbrush 2 has been doing this last year.) So a 22,000 poly character looks like it's actually a 200,000 poly character. (That's the exact example they were showing.) And keep in mind, that it can handle 16 characters moving in realtime online control, with karma physics effects, 3d positional sound, AND anuimated world effects like water, lava, rain, ect.. and if all those extras were removed, that's lots of processing time for animation or positioning code. It never hurts to look at what else is out there.. and there's no telling what's "just around the corner" anymore.

"A few things... they stabalized the editor a LOT for UT 2004... and even bundled a version of Maya for modeleing along with it." But that's the point - Maya PLE doesn't use the Unreal engine - it only makes meshes. UnrealEd uses the Unreal Engine. I'll have to fire up UeD for UT 2k4 and see it for myself, but I've been hearing from friends still doing the MOD dev thing that the editor still has some bugs in it. And if the guys who wrote the engine still have problems coming up with a good enditor for it, what chance does CL have? Don't get me wrong, you are right in that it never hurts to see what's out there, but there's more to it than just taking the engine and tacking on a UI to it... /P

All too true, but if Maya PLE could be bundled with the game, it could also most likely be bundeled with a posing application. (much like shade le and poser 6) And I don't think the ut editor could be used at all..maybe as an enhancement utility. You'd need a new main posing appication specifically created to utilize the new tech. People have created many new models, effects, maps, and total conversions already, and you'd have vehicles, weather effects, and could possibly even use the existing maps as sets. Heck, there's even a toon shader built in as well. I'm not saying that it will happen in the new few years, but eventually, I think we'll all be using tech like this. Lightwave, Maya and 3ds users alike. As graphic cards become more powerful, and the prices drop on them, it's really making 3d creation much more accessable on many levels.

So a 22,000 poly character looks like it's actually a 200,000 poly character. (That's the exact example they were showing.) Which makes you really wonder about the hi-poly obsession in Poser world. You can do the same texturing and shading tricks in Poser, yet still many characters only ship with a simple color map.

Displacement mapping is still pretty new to poserworld, and I don't think we can quite achieve what they are doing yet in poser. Maybe P6's enhancements to the material room? Jolly troll is really the only good character I've seen yet with displacement mapping as is should be being used. If he wasn't so dang expensive, I would have bought him when he came out, but I don't have much use for a troll. Daz's came in at the right price.

Ah, the big thing that the Unreal engine uses that makes the figures look fantastic is "normal mapping" - which is not possible with Poser. Displacement mapping is great, but the normals are still what make lighting look as good as all that. The other thing one has to consider is that Unreal 3 is running on the absolute latest hardware. I know people that are still usinig P5 on a basic Pentium, with no 3d graphics card. No way in hell one could run Unreal 3 on one of them. Still, normal mapping being exposed in the Firefly engine for us to use would be fan-frigging-tastic!!!

The dead computer behind me has the alpha version of Unreal Tournament 2's game engine (the company I was working for had a development deal with Epic Games). If you want to talk about bugginess, instability, irascibility, and an entire horde of really foul words, I'll tell you about using the engine to try to make something usable in a world. What their inhouse guys could do was almost miraculous. If you don't hit the space bar, you can walk around UT2 and just admire the scenery. I hope they left that feature in. (I don't play shooters, not even to check the architectural wonders.) We were going to have to run my Poser figures through SoftImage or something else to get them into a format which would work with the engine. The background artist was using Maya, and couldn't build in UE worth beans (she was mathmatically challenged). I could build in it (drafting background), but I was supposed to be creating the actors. None of the programs talked to each other despite the horrendous hours we spent trying to get it to work. It was hell and we burned out badly in the combustion. Note for the copyright conscious: we would have commissioned special figures for this project once we had proof that the technology would work. It would have been big. But it was so misguided and misdirected. :sigh: I'm going to get a cup of coffee and think about something more pleasant. Another note, I'd worked with some of the guys from Epic years earlier, when they were doing shareware games such as Xargon and Jill, and they are nice fellows and very creative... their success is deserved. Carolly

If you get a chance, Hawks, wander over to Atari's UT 2004 forums, and look at all the new content and the number of maps that have been created for ut2004 already. I think my UT folder is now something like 6 GIG of content, and the original install was just over 1 gig. I couldn't even count the number of new vehicles, new weapons, and new characters that have already either ben ported, or created specifically for ut2004.

Ah, the big thing that the Unreal engine uses that makes the figures look fantastic is "normal mapping" - which is not possible with Poser. Displacement mapping is great, but the normals are still what make lighting look as good as all that. I have to disagree here. Normal maps, just like bump maps, only bend the normal of a surface as if it were displaced. But as we have displacments in P5, why not use the real thing? It looks much better when looked at from the side anyway. Normal maps are a great trick for real-time game objects, but for non-realtime rendering we have techniques superior to that. BTW, P4's BUM maps work almost the same way as the normal maps used in games do.

Attached Link: http://members.shaw.ca/jimht03/normal.html

Message edited on: 02/28/2005 06:54

Yeah yeah yeah....yadda yadda yadda.... What do the Skaarj look like these days?

I stand corrected. I didn't now that BUM's were actually normal perturbing maps. Good to know. Still, normal mapping in the Firefly engine can still bring out MUCH better results than displacement mapping (must try them in combination now). Why? Because of the 8 bit's per channel limitation in the image loaded. This limits the "smoothness" of the displacement that can be applied (and in general makes the displacement look pretty crap at high levels). Yes, I know there is a workaround - but it only applies for those of us that actually own Photoshop. I use GIMP, it works for everything else BUT the hack used to convert 16bit displacement maps into an RGB image for multi-channel displacements.

Attached Link: http://206.145.80.239/zbc/showthread.php?t=20310

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1740708

Ah, OK. I see what you mean. :( If it was after me, every program would support OpenEXR as in- and output format.

While you can load an 16 bit tiff, my experience suggests that the output of the image node is still only 8 bit
Bingo. Poser internally quantizes the results to fit into 8 bits resulting in the usual quantization problems (steps where there should be a ramp).

Quinlor I think was the one that came up with a good material room setup for getting that 16 bit smoothness back, but it requires a preprocess in Photoshop (which, as I mentioned, I do not use). I think the only thing left is for one of us Python-developer types to write a little script to make the conversion for us... Shouldn't be that hard either, might work on it if I get the time this week. Message edited on: 03/01/2005 18:46