I would like to hear from someone who has had the opportunity to master Poser as well as any other high-end 3D application (3DSmax, Lightwave, Maya, XSI, Cinema4D). My question is somewhat complicated to summe it up, so I'll rather explain: I am myself a character developer, I use 3DSmax for this. I am mostly an artist, a techy artist, but mostly on the artistic side of it all. Recently someone asked me to create human figures with Poser, in order to accelerate the process and to keep the costs down. Poser seems to suit his purposes as he doesn't need me to invent any particular style or kind of character, keeping them somewhat generic is what he wants. Now, I must mention that I was having many reservations as to how much Poser could handle, therefore I was already contemplating doing much of the work in 3DSmax. The last time I had a carefull look at Poser was with version 4, and even then I didn't analyze it in total depth. Now after 2 weeks of learning Poser6 I am impressed at how much one can do with each figure. There is so much room for customization here! This potential client of mine, also needs the figures to interact, but I see Poser6 can also handle even speach (with included phonems) wow! At this point, and before I continue I'm starting to suspect that one may just be able to do everything (create the figure, customize it in any way, animating it, etc) in Poser6. Note I said "be able to", I think the most important question would be (and remains): Is it worth it? I mean to say, in my opinion "to be worth it", it means that every single task can be performed with as much ease (if not easier) in Poser as it can be performed in any of the high-end 3D programs I mentioned above. It is understood that one has had the time to become proficient in both alternatives to have a fair comparisson. I hope I was clear enough, but should more info or a clarification for anything be needed just let me know Thanks in advance for your time guys/gals :) JDL

Here's my take on this: You'll need to model your model in Max(or any modeler you like). But, "rigging" or "boning" the figure is where Poser shines! unless, you're a Master at rigging figures in Max, you'll save lots of time doing that part in poser. Also, it's much easier to organise your "morphs" for either 'shaping' or 'speaking'. Poser is a tool, so is Max. They each have their Pros & cons. The trick is to make the most of each... ;-) Hope this helps your decision making. But, my final suggestion is to try one! Do the rigging, morphing, etc in Max(Keep track of time spent). Then do the rigging in Poser, that should give you the best answer. God Speed with your client! Marcus

I find Poser's dials are much easier to work with than the tools offered by Lightwave. As far as figure creation, Poser isn't a modeling tool. If you really want something from scratch you'll need to model it yourself. However, there is a wealth of content available for Poser, and much of it is quite customizable. Realistic figures, cartoon figures, fantasy figures, sci-fi, monsters, and aliens and demons and dragons, all are available. Poser can do some great renders - if you know what you're doing. It's animation of characters works well but it doesn't have the sophistication that apps like Lightwave do. A number of people around here use Poser for working with the figures and then import the Poser files into Lightwave, C4D, Carrara or other apps for rendering.

what is the target 'look and feel?' Realsim? Stylized sketch? Toon? RealistcToon?

Ok, a few things that might be worth mentioning.

Poser's morph dials are indeed easy to use, and the plethora of content out there for it makes it very efficient. I won't get into the different arguments about rendering speed, etc., because as long as you're not using raytrace materials or volumetrics, 3D motionblur, or true DOF, then Poser 6's renderer is both useful and satisfactory in it's results. Keep in mind, however, you won't have any efficient means of network rendering from Poser. There are ways around this, but there's no true network rendering integrated into the app.

Now for some truths...

If you're using 3dsmax (like me), then you know about CharacterStudio. You must know of it's strengths, and it's weaknesses, so I won't get into those.

1. Morphs. The morpher modifier in 3dsmax works on spinners just like Poser. In fact, there's not much difference there at all. You insert a morph, and dial it up or down. Same thing.

2. Poser's character animation tools are weak. Sorry, but compared to what you are getting in Max, you're going to find yourself working twice as hard to get the same quality motion from Poser. If you've ever done character animation before in 3dsmax using CharacterStudio or even standard bones with a good rig, then you will know what I mean right away. I use CS mainly, so one quick comparison would be using IK/FK. In Poser, IK is either on or off. No in between, no blending. In CS, you can use IK/FK blending, so posing and animating a rig from any point in the hiearchy is much more efficient. In Max, you have motion mixing and blending, in Poser you have Python scripts that can do some of this, but the results are sketchy. Poser's WalkDesigner vs. CS Footsteps mode is no contest. Try both, and you'll see the difference instantly. CS Footsteps allows you to adjust for terrain (inclines/declines), and the character will respond automatically. Not so with Walk Designer.

3. Poser's learning curve is MUCH easier, that much is true. Some of this has to do with the fact that so much pre-made content is ready to go for it, all you have to do is "plug and play" in most cases. Pre-made motions, morphs, clothing, etc. are available for immediate use.

4. 3dsmax has the ability to use softbody dynamics or flex dynamics on a figure if necessary (for secondary motion on soft body parts or things like ponytails). Poser has no softbody dynamics system, but people have been experimenting with the cloth room for such things. Both Poser and 3dsmax have cloth and strand hair dynamics.

5. Wiring parameters. If you want complex animation, or interaction between characters/objects, then 3dsmx offers excellent means to accomplish this fairly easily through controllers and parameter wires. Poser's python scripting can accomplish some of these things too I'm sure, but only to a certain degree.

"But, "rigging" or "boning" the figure is where Poser shines!
unless, you're a Master at rigging figures in Max, you'll
save lots of time doing that part in poser."

I find just the opposite is true. Rigging in Poser is not exactly easy, otherwise characters we purchase would all have great rigging. ;-) However, the parametric skeletons used in CS Biped are extremely easy to rig. Just "fit" the skeleton into the mesh, and place a skin modifier over it. Then adjust envelopes, and you're done rigging your figure. Sure, takes some practice, but I find it much easier than using Poser's setup room. Plus, since the skeleton in CharacterStudio is parametric, this means any poses or animations you create on one figure can automatically transfer to another rigged figure of different size/shape. In Poser, you need a to purchase a seperate Python script for that.

Bottom line, I think, is this... Poser will definitely get you from point A to point B faster if you purchase all the content you need. That's not always a good thing, but it certainly works. If your ultimate goal is to animate something as quickly as possible, save time on modeling or tackling a learning curve, then Poser will DEFINITELY get the job done for you. Results, as always, will depend on YOU.

Just beware of app propeganda. When people say it's "easier", or "better", that's not always the case, and in fact, isn't true a lot of the time. If it were, I absolutely wouldn't have spent the money and switched to 3dsmax for character animation. ;-)

Message edited on: 02/25/2006 16:58

Well im someone who started with Poser, went on to Lightwave, and currently work in Maya, but im not a master or anything like that so take my post as a 2c take on this... I agree with all that is posted above and IMO your choice of poser or something like MAX/Maya/XSI/etc really depends on what you intend to do with your chars. ie are they destined to be standins in an archi viz, or are they leads in an animation, or extras in an ad or what ? Also just what level of realism are you looking for ? And what is then final destination of your chars, will they be rendered in poser itself or do you intend to export them into MAX ? Poser is generally a great app for creating lots of customised chars in a fast and easy manner. Just twist the dials around and you can quickly build up the kind of char you need. Posing is a snap, as is simple animation. The latest render engine has lots of featuers, rivalling high end apps in this and you can do a lot with its node based materials (which even MAX doesnt have IIRC) You can buy lots of inexpensive content for it (like clothes, props, armors etc) so you dont always have to waste time creating something boring or tedious. I often buy poser content just because of this, even though i may not ever use it in Poser itself. However, even with all this, Poser is not : 1. An animation app, it has nothing like contraints or controllers, and any kind of complex animation is painful to do in it. 2. A dynamics app, it has no real particles, and its hair/softbody/cloth systems are weak at best. Maya and MAX are a lot lot better at it in this area. 3. A content creation app, it has primitive modelling tools, and anything original you need, you are gonna have to create in a 3rd party app, and convert it for use in Poser. Which for organic type characters is a very convoluted/painful process. 4. A fast renderer, even with all the nice features, firefly and the native renderer are several magnitudes slower then mentalray, VRay or renderman etc. The nature of posers skinning and content also leads to situations where post work is a necessity for decent results. Which may or may not be feasible for your project (eg you cant paint away elbow joint errors on 200 frames of an animation) 5. An app for complex scenes, or at least not for single layer complex scenes. To do a scene with lots of characters and such you are gonna have to render your stuff in layers and comp them later on. Which may or may not be an option for you. Cause unlike both XSI and Maya, Poser doesnt have a native layer manager. In Maya for example you can setup multilayer scenes with overrides and passes per layer (like shadow, diffuse, reflection etc), use different objects/lights/cams/materials in each layer and so on. And have all the layers render and composite into one image on the fly with the click of one button. XSI also lets you do something quite similar. In short even now when i'm pretty proficient in Maya i use poser plenty of times, but only where its appropriate. Like i recently had to do some work for a diet tonic ad. And rather then waste time creating and morphing a human from scratch, i just used V3's morphs to setup a before/after type animation in Maya. Rendering was done in Maya so i could use its advanced SSS shaders and its fluid system. Which gave me fast and flexible results, as in the best of both worlds. I could have done the whole thing in Maya, or maybe even in Poser, but both these options would prolly have taken longer and been harder then the hybrid approach.

"The latest render engine has lots of featuers, rivalling high end apps in this and you can do a lot with its node based materials (which even MAX doesnt have IIRC)" Hi, tekn0m0nk! We meet again. ;-P Actually, Max doesn't use node-based shader structure, this is true. However, it does have all the necessary math maps and procedural maps, etc. to reproduce just about any shader Poser can do. In fact, I did a fairly good translation of the realskin shader for Max. The only thing it's lacking is a speedy displacement renderer, but I use raytrace mats more often anyway. ;-)

The only thing I'd add to Maxx's post above is this: there is an add-on network render product for Poser, Pose-Net. I have not used it, but I believe it to have strong tools. The biggest downside I see is cost....you have to have a license of Poser at each node. The app itself costs only $75.00. ::::: OPera :::::

"The only thing it's lacking is a speedy displacement renderer," Maxx..'Final Render' MTD displacement seems to be the fastest of all of them.(& I've heard Vray is even faster)

I am so impressed with the amazing and very elaborated responses here :) Needless to say I appreciate so much your valuable time and effort put into your replies. I do agree with pretty much everything that's been said, as it confirms much of what I had suspected. It's great to learn about other aspects I hadn't thought about too. Based on the consensus, so far, this are my workflow steps, have a look and let me know what you think: Objective: To create animated human figures (body & face) backgroundless (with their alpha channels). Final File Format: Quicktime movie. Looks/Style: Generic Semi Realistic (Poser's figures will do just fine) Rendering: Speed would be a priority here, so it seems the Default 3DSmax Scanline Renderer will do. 1. Create the figures along with their respective garments in Poser 2. If there's a simple walking cycle needed, do it in Poser too. 3. Create Face morph targets in Poser too if needed (not animated though) I hope I am not leaving anything behind so far... 4. Import the above human figure to 3DSmax, with the help of GestureMax, which imports characters and automatically rigs them for animation using standard 3ds max tools or character studio. 5. Animate the figure in 3DSmax 6. Import the previously done Morph targets for lip-sync. I suppose these morph targets could be imported as .OBJ files. (just guessing here. Can someone confirm this?) 7. Finally render in 3DSmax, because it has the fastest renderer and because Poser 6 cannot render movies with alpha channels. I know I could render PNGs w/ACs in Poser6, but then I'd have to import'em somewhere to put them together as a movie, and that is already an unnecessary additional step. I think this is it. Please feel free to add/remove/edit as you see fit on/from the above workflow list. I would like to comment too that I had been using BodyStudio (3DSmax plugin) to import figures from Poser. It does a good job at it, it can bring them along with their animation if you made any in Poser. The main limitation I have encountered so far is that you cannot individually select limbs or any part of the figure to be animated. This is why Gesture Max appeals to me so much. Well, not only because you can animate the figures in max but also because part of the process of importing is to "automatically rig and skin" the figure, which would be a big time saver (assuming it does a descent job at least). On a separate yet still related note: I have recentely started learnig Cloth creation in 3DSmax with both its tools/mods: Garment Maker & Cloth. I am seriously considering the possibility of creating my own garment patterns (eventually). I know, is like becoming a virtual tailor to a great extent. Now, I just learned about this plugin for Poser called Clothing Creator by Phil C. I know these 2 solutions don't work the same way, but if only looking at the final result, would you say that Clothing Creator would be the winner? (again, for it to be it'd have to offer shorter working times while producing the same results). Back to you... JDL

Btw... I forgot to include these links: GestureMax: http://www.digimation.com/home/?Content=ProductDetail&ProductCode=SD398 Clothing Creator: http://istore.mikrotec.com/philc/index1.html?page=catalog&trackerid=2021223212&category=a&vid=2080245373&pid=2116796703&oldvid=2143420604 BodyStudio: http://www.reiss-studio.com/trade/productview/48/3/

"Maxx..'Final Render' MTD displacement seems to be the fastest of all of them.(& I've heard Vray is even faster)" Hmmm. I haven't really tested the microtriangle displacement in FR, but I know Vray's is very fast (until you mix it with GI) hehe. MentalRay's seems several degrees slower to me, but more accurate than Poser's. I know there's a trick to getting 16 bit floating point displacement in Poser, so that could help it's accuracy, but it seems like a pain to do. javierdl, I've tried GestureMax and Bodystudio in the past, and quickly decided to learn to rig figures from scratch instead. I mean, both work as advertised, but they both have weaknesses I didn't like. For one thing, Bodystudio simply hosts the PZ3. That's fine if you want to animate everything in Poser, but you can't adjust the animation in Max once it's in there. It also screws with textures and stuff if you try to save a max file with the plugin still active. Gesturemax is promising in that it translates the Poser rig to a Max rig or CS Biped rig. It also imports all morphs, textures, etc., for you. Problems with this occur when dealing with envelopes, which Gesturemax likes to screw up if you are using CS, and adjustments are almost always needed anyway. Bodystudio also tends to make Max unstable in some situations, and crashes happen more often than I had liked. It also slows down the viewports even more than usual, and as you might know, Max is already notorious for that problem.

WHAT ABOUT HAIR! have you thought that through? Your point 7 bothers me.....you give two reasons for not rendering in Poser. The second is not wanting to have to composite an image sequence. If you are thinking of rendering to a complete movie from Max without going out to individual frames, that bothers me as a not-pro position. Don't you want that folder of lossless masters sitting in a directory, regardless of what app created them? It is SO simple to have Quicktime import an image sequence. ::::: Opera :::::

note: in items 1-3 you speak of "Creating" figures and "creating" morphs. What does that mean to you, specifically? Obviously you know there is no modeling in Poser.

I have to agree about the rendering to image files,you should never go straight to quicktime. for Hair..3dsmax 7.5 & up comes with a hair & fur modifier based on Joe alters Shave & haircut another downside to using bodystudio is it triangulates the mesh

I will come around full circle, just to be fair...if you DO render directly to Quicktime, you can export the image sequence from Quicktime, as well. However: if in originally rendering out to a Quiktime movie you engaged any type of lossy compression, you'll never get a perfect master back. ::::: Opera ::::: P.S. I've used this feature of quicktime to deconstruct .wmv etc., movies. Just find a converter to turn them into anything Quicktime can read, such as .mpeg, and you can get frames by exporting out of Quicktime. They are lossy images, of course. j.

Always render to image files, regardless of the app you're using. In fact, you might consider rendering in passes (which means running a seperate passes for things like shadows, diffuse, specular, reflection, ambient, and a host of other things). Reason being, if the project is important, you have MUCH more control over how the final output will look if you can manipulate all of these elements individually as layers in a video fx editor. Max has a ton of options for rendering in passes (as does Maya, Lightwave, and many other apps). The mistake of many novice users is to assume rendering in multiple passes for compositing is a waste of time. Actually, it can be a real time-saver!

i know next to zip, but here are a few poser utilities you might be interested in. multi-pass rendering: glowworm by poseworks easy material management: shader spider by poseworks simple particle system: particles by poseworks basic ragdoll & rigid body (i think that's the right term) physics: poser physics by face_off real skin shaders & ambient occlusion management system: see face_off's store here. there are several skin shader threads in forums showing other solutions. all around swiss army knife toolset: poser tool box by philc there are many free python utilities in the freestuff here, especially by ockham. a lot of ockham's scripts deal with animation. while nothing can get around inherent flaws like an inefficient rendering engine, a lot of people have done a lot of work to advance poser functionality.

First off, THANKS A MILLION again guys! You are trully amazing. All this info is superb.

One thing I failed to do from the beginning was to be more specific as to the kind of final product this images will be used for, what kind of audiences are expected, and more about the final file/media format. I think is time I did that.
You see, this is not for a feature film, neither a short film, nor an intro animation for a game.
These images will be only part of an educational type of software. It's like a series of exams/tests, once you reach the last 3rd part of the software you are presented with these 3d environments (indoors in most cases), and you are expected to interact with them.
So as you can see the priority here is content, rather than quality of visuals.

It is not intended to CG people audiences, nor even artists in general.
In most cases the audiences will be executive and office type of people.
This should be yet another reason why not to be too demanding with the visuals.

As for the format, it is Flash. So far we have been creating the 3d elements separately, mostly in order to make them interactive. But it also saves us time and work, eg: if there was a problem only with one element (as opossed to the whole scene) then we just fix that element.

As for rendering to image files, well, that's what we have been doing so far. Not over the reasons you kindly offered, but simply because we need the alpha channel for transparency in Flash, and Poser6 cannot render alpha chs. in movie format (only in PNGs).
The programmers say it would be more efficient (from their stand point anyway) to work with movie files instead, as they could instruct the software just to look for frame num x in the movie file, and then jump to frame num xx, and so forth.

Although I was aware of the "multipasses rendering technique" I never got around to learn it in depth (much less apply it), many things you guys mentioned I didn't know, others I only knew partially.
One thing is clear now to me: Got to render to image files and multipasses - Not for this one (unless you give me good reason to do it), but for my next visually demanding project that is. - ; )

OperaGuy - "note: in items 1-3 you speak of "Creating" figures and "creating" morphs. What does that mean to you, specifically? Obviously you know there is no modeling in Poser."
By "creating figures" in Poser I meant: Not modeling for sure, just either use the default one (James or whatever his name is), or replace it for another one. I am sorry about the confusion, clearly I didn't express myself very well.
By "creating morphs" I meant: In Max, with the Morpher modifier. Using the "morph targets" (max term) previously created in Poser, import'em as OBJ files. I admit this is just a theory so far. That's why I was asking for anyone to confirm it.

CobaltDream,
Thank you for the interesting links, they may come in handy for sure :)

Ok, I hope I didn't forget anything.

Back to you again guys : )

JDL

Message edited on: 02/26/2006 12:45

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operaguy - I bought pose-net and there are issues with it. The creator is trying to sort it out for me, but it has taken a while.

yes, i noticed that thread about your trouble with it, but apparently you are the only one having issues with it...not everyone. I hope it gets fixed for you. ::::: Opera :::::