I am a working on a one-person game project and I am not a 3d modeler. I need to create several animated mesh characters for use in the game and I was wondering if Poser can do what I need it to do. I need: - to easily create characters with different faces, heights, skin colors, hair, cloting... (duh, this in what poser is for... ;) ) - all characters should have several stock animations, such as walk, run, loiter, wave, maybe face expression animation, sit/stand, hit, use, die creatively - can be exported to the directx .x file format for use by my application with the animations The trick is the export to the .x file format. If .x is not supported, then can Poser export to 3ds while saving the animations? I can conver this file afterwards. Is there a better tool/way to do what I want to do? TIA for any help you can provide. -John

Most poser objects are too high resolution to be used in 3d games. You could reduce the polygons using a program like vizup but it would be a lot of work. Poser can`t save 3ds files with the animation intact.

thanks, xantor. high res isn't an issue these days. it is quite easy to take the high res model and trim it down based on polycount. if you don't mind loading a big model, you can even do it in your renderer using progressive level of detail. i plan to make the models as high res as the tool (poser or whatever) will allow, and have an automated tool to auto trim my assets to the correct count levels based on performance testing/tuning. my issue is that i'm not an artist. i don't have lots of money to spend on this project. i would like a tool that is relatively easy to use, yet can produce models to my spec without a great amount of hassle. there are a great number of poser characters for sale, so finding the base assets shouldn't be an issue, it's putting it all together that gets me. ;o)

With poser you can export a series of files. I.E. if you make an animation you can export each frame as a seperate object, that might work for your project?

There have been several other threads posted on this subject that can provide better detail on the pros and cons of the subject, but there is overall one key point that you need to take into account, and that is not the high polycount of the Poser models. Most Poser models are licensed for use in stills and animations. You may not redistribute the models without the prior approval of the original content creator, nor can you redistribute modifications (such as reduced resolution versions). There are some free models out there that may make an acceptable base from which you can work. One such example would be the Project Human figures which exist under an open source license. But other figures, such as the DAZ figures and the stock figures that come with Poser are out of bounds for such modification and redistribution, whether in .X format or otherwise. Such restrictions are not limited to the human figures alone, but also apply to the clothing articles as well. You may find some free items that are not restricted as such, but the majority will not be redistributable, even in modified form. There are a few games that have worked around such limitations by rendering images and animation frames inside Poser and converting these images to animated 2D sprites. I've even seen one that somehow manages to cleverly mask those 2D sprites such that they look nearly 3D. Something like that seems to fit well within the licenses of the commercial figures. There are other options available on the market, however. For example, there are a couple of DarkMatter content packs from The Game Creators which are already in .X format (though they are of very low quality) which may be used in your own project without restriction. There are also more and more content packs becomming available at sites such as GarageGames that can be of downright stunning quality. Perhaps not on the level of Poser, but then, by the time you reduce an 80K poly model to about 3K polys for use in a game, it won't be of the quality level of Poser anylonger either :) Hope this info is of use.

You might want to get the manufacturers OK before you export them from any software product. Of course, your chances of being "caught" are small, but it's best to stay squeaky clean legally, particularly on a commercial project.

thanks toolstech and kenyarb,

i hadn't thought about the licensing issues, but it is not surprising. i am not averse to paying for the assets, i just don't want to pay for something i cannot use. i will certainly become aware of the licensing of each and every asset i purchase.

fwiw, i'm not making an action game. my initial tests show an acceptable framerate on a low-end target machine with 30-40 actors (models) hitting about 10-15k polys each, so the detail level of downsampled poser models (i believe) should be quite high.

so, can poser export to .x format?

Message edited on: 07/19/2005 20:48

Maybe somebody will post images of some Poser 1/2 models for you, so you can see just how bad they look. But at least they are low-poly. The problem with cutting down the polygons on a detailed Poser model is that the decimation process is stupid, leaving you with a progressively more and more useless object every time you click "decimate". So you have to be a modeller and know exactly which vertices to delete. Either that or start from scratch and model it "de novo", in which case you don't have to ask Daz or E-frontier for permission.

so this "decimate" feature is part of the poser UI... things begin to make sense now. i would guess (and this is just a swag) that poser's "decimate" is a software algo to cut polys from the model. wheras, in directx, the progressive level of detail resampling uses hardware assisted functionality of current and previous generation videocards to downsample a mesh to lower levels of detail. when a mesh is loaded and marked for LOD, it is cached in system memory and the progressive LOD meshes are also created. when rendered, only the chosen LOD-mesh is pushed thru the pipeline and into world space. like i said, this is a complete guess, and would require extensive testing to prove if it is a viable strategy. the feature set of poser seems like a perfect match for my needs, but as the details emerge, the picture isn't so rosy. this is unfortunate, because one of the case studies or testimonials on their site is from someone using poser assets in a game rendered environment. that testimonial is what led me to beilieve that this would be a possibility for creating characters and assets without hiring out for expensive custom 3d work. so, can poser export to .x format? ;o)

I really don't think Poser is what you want. It can make sprites for games, but you can't use the 3d models in games. It's not what Poser is for. It doesn't export in .x that I know of, and the 3ds export is the static model only.

Some people export Poser models to Max or other software, but they must be re-rigged if you want to animate them.

the case study mentioned above: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/290/1/387/ no mention of the rendering technology (i had read it many months ago and didn't recall it well)... sigh...

Yes, that case study looks doable. He/she was using animation clips, apparently, which is o.k. under the Poser EULA. It's O.T., but I wouldn't want to play that game. The description of the characters - yawning, face-scratching (and probably nose-picking, drooling, snoring, vomiting and whatever else drunks do at casinos) sounds like something they couldn't pay me enough to waste any time with. P.S. Poser can't do decimation or any complex vertex modelling. It's mainly for character posing and morphing.

If I recall that game correctly, it wasn't a real 3d game. You didn't actually walk through the casino; you clicked on where you wanted to go, and magically got there.

The Poser figures were just 2d animations:

And yes, the computer-controlled characters were very annoying. However, they seemed to realize that. You could turn them off. :-)

Attached Link: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/128/1/283/?sbss=283

I spent an insane amount of time trying to get Poser models into the Ogre 3d engine (which support DirectX9) for a rock climbing game. It was about 18 months ago - and I'm sure graphics card technology has advanced a lot since then, but here are some of the issues..... 1) Most of the Poser models have multiple material groups - this plays havok with DX9, since it needs to do a pass for each material - so if you are using V3, you need to merge as many of the materials as possible. 2) Textures - you will need to reduce all the texturemap resolutions in order to squeeze them into a 128k (or whatever your craphics card memory is). 3) Exporting - this was a big issue. In the end I wrote an exporter from obj format to Ogre's xml format. From there you could go to .x format if needed. The complexity of exporting is significant. Remember, you also need to export the skeleton if you want to animate. 4) Joint deformation - This was what killed the idea for me. I couldn't work out how to convert the vertex weights that Poser uses (derived from spherical zones) into bone weights than Ogre needed. Without vertex weights, animations look a little silly. And doing the weights by hand is ok if you are talking 10k polys, but for high poly poser models, it would be a significant task. A workaround exists today where you can get a Poser to XSI importer which does the weights for you - and you could export to .x from there. 5) Polycount - Doing 1 pass at 70k polys might be ok, but there are multiple materials in a poser model, and it will need 5 or 6 passes - which at 70k polys might be a problem. I was getting around 12fps on V3 on my old Geforce 4 card. The other issue is that I ended up having to do each pass with ALL the polys in the model - since each geometery object have have multiple materials in it. Poly reduction - I found no effective way to do this. 6) Animation - is possible - someone has extended the Ogre work I did to accept exported bvh files from Poser. In summary - for a game you really need 3d models which are build specifically (modelled, textured, rigged) for that purpose. So it would probably be quicker and easier to model the characters yourself than to use Poser models.

The easiest way to get to the .x file format is writing an exporter for Poser in Python. I wrote one a few years ago, but unfortunately it got lost in a hard drive failure.

i KNEW someone had tried this before. thanks face_off, your experiences are just the feedback i was looking for. i suspected that there would be hidden issues, but didn't know what to ask. thanks to all for the feedback and advice.

i asked the same question of e-frontier, here's their response: The end-user license between you, the user, and E-Frontier allows you to use Poser and all the figures that ship with it to produce art and other works of any kind as long as the final product doesn't contain any of the 3D mesh data that we have created. You may use the Poser figures to create still images, videos and even physical models; you can also create, distribute and sell modifications to the 3D geometry of the figures as long as those modifications require and do not include the original 3D mesh information (in other words, you can sell morphs and poses, but you can't modify and then resell our figures.) Use of our figures in a game engine, 3D simulation environment or 3D Web site requires prior written consent from Curious Labs. Our end-user license agreement can be found at www.curiouslabs.com/go/company/legal

The P4 models might be usable. The nude human figures can easily be reduced to a single material using a single texture map, and still look acceptable. The clothed figures might require some work, but I guess it's also possible to reduce them to a single material and a single map. Hair might be a problem though. The polycount could be pretty acceptable too, the nude P4 figures have about 10k polygons, not too heavy. Add some clothing and hair, and you'd end up with maybe 15k polys per figure. About a year ago I saw a game using human figures of about 30k polys. The models looked nice, the texturing was pretty lousy. It ran fine on an AthlonXP3200 with a Radeon9800, 30-40 fps. By the way, those were not Poser figures.

....and an animated Don, running at 1fps (not sure why it was so slow).

I believe you mean Posette and Poserdude, unless there's a "regress one generation" morph I missed :)