peevee opened this issue on May 07, 2006 · 4 posts
replicand posted Sun, 07 May 2006 at 1:46 PM
Short answer: no.
Long answer: It depends on what you really want to do. As mentioned, there's Trinity for Maya (www.rendermagix.com), which is what I use. There's the Greenbrier plugins and there's Reiss Body Studio. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
With Reiss Body Studio, you animate in Poser and the plug-in creates a "poser engine" inside of Maya. Two major disadvantages are that the animation can ONLY be modified in Poser, and you're still using Poser spherical dropoff zones, so all the weirdly deformed knees and shoulders will still be there.
I haven't used the Greenbrier plugin, but it appears that it's the same as Trinity For Maya. With T4M, you create a script (very easy if you're used to cr2 hacking) to import whatever Poser content you want - characters, hair, props whatever. If you're importing a DAZ character, it will import the mesh and skeleton and you must "semi-manually" convert textures and materials.
T4M is a blessing for artists looking to animate rather than create content, plus you've got complete access to Maya's animation toolset. There are two major disadvantages with T4M. You must adjust the skin weights after binging the skin and skeleton. This is a real problem with the DAZ meshes because they are very heavy and their topology is not very clean / orderly.
By the time you get a few DAZ meshes weighted properly, a Poser artist has already rendered 150,000 frames of animation. If you plan to use Maya, you may want to learn to use its modeler. It took me ten months to figure this out.