I found it ironic, after all these years of certain "high end" software users looking down their noses at Poser, that the idea of pre-fabricated character creation has come full circle.  One of the largest developers of professional 3D software, Autodesk, recently launched a cloud-based application that allows anyone, from hobbyists to studios, to instantly create and customize pre-fabricated, generic characters.  It's very similar, in basic principal, to older versions of Poser or Daz Studio, but even more simplistic.

http://lesterbanks.com/2014/02/autodesk-introduces-online-character-generator/

Character Generator, as they call it, allows you to instantly create, and customize a canned character's features, textures, etc., then export, with rigging, to Maya, 3dsMax, or Unity game engine.  It's actually far more generic than Poser or Daz, and clearly only intended for secondary characters.

Next time you see some Maya or Max user discredit the use of Poser, you can point to this, and have a good laugh.

slow clap so. it's worth carrying on the hostility then? no.. I think I'll do what should have been done all along.

 

not give a shit if they look down on it or not. I don't need their approval to do anything.

As John McClaine once uttered,
"Welcome to the party pal!!"

If I'm going to switch to something inferior to Poser, I'll go for http://www.makehuman.org/
and support open source, as well as open standards.

Quote - Character Generator, as they call it, allows you to instantly create, and customize a canned character's features, textures, etc., then export, with rigging, to Maya, 3dsMax, or Unity game engine.  It's actually far more generic than Poser or Daz, and clearly only intended for secondary characters.

Next time you see some Maya or Max user discredit the use of Poser, you can point to this, and have a good laugh.

 Uuummm they have had this ability since Max 5 or earlier... but as being on the level of Poser 1 or 2 ...Bleeeeh! No comparasion... Poser 1 or 2 is or was more advanced than Max 5 in character creation at the time. Now I don't care. If there was a morphs and mat for, say, Stan Lee, Poser would run rings and then some around them today. Unfortunately, that ain't goinna happen in RL.  Don't have to point this out to them... They know. It takes degree of skill and expertise to utilize the software to approximate the different characters, riggings and all, in their software... No biggie, tho. We've got it made! :m_laugh:

This is from Project Pinocchio. It was called something else prior to that, but I don't remember what thou.

It is designed to allow you to make base game characters very quickly. But there is more to it than that. There are other companies adding to this in different ways.

Side Effects has Houdini Engine, which can be used for creating game levels just about as fast as you can create the characters now. It drasticallly cuts down on the coding require to build a level. Similar to Posers material room, it is node based and allows you to drag and drop a lot of prefabbed networks into it. Once you have the networks built you can just drag them in and set them up per instance. It is really (extremely) quick compared to coding the whole thing manually.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2525&Itemid=66

In the end, this is a double edged sword. It will allow for very fast game creation, but that doesn't mean that the content and play of the game will be worth playing.

This also has little to do with Poser, and lots to do with cranking out games and some CGI stuff. But that may change.... As the gaming hardware gets better, it will be able to do more and more. And at the rate that is going it may not be to long before games will look better when played than even the best renders of a single scene do now. Both will progress thou, and single frame renders that take hours will still look better than games on the fly do... They probably will years from now as well, but sooner or later both of then will look "real". Once that happens there is little left to do in the appearance department.

When it comes to high end animations, the characters created in this need not apply. They are generic game characters. Very generic, and designed for speed on current hardware.

The scenes (levels) that you can create in Houdini Engine are another story. They can be simply stunning. But in the end, they are hardware limited at the end user as well.

I know people that do high end CGI and game stuff, and many of them think Poser (and/or) Studio are cool programs due to there ease of use. Just because a few say otherwise doesn't mean that all of them turn their noses up at Poser/Studio.

I would not worry about those "certain" people. Let them say what they want.

If you like your artwork, it can't be wrong. If they don't like it, oh well....

Attached Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBZxDMfL44Q

"As the gaming hardware gets better, it will be able to do more and more. And at the rate that is going it may not be to long before games will look better when played than even the best renders of a single scene do now. Both will progress thou, and single frame renders that take hours will still look better than games on the fly do..."

 

Modern game engines already look more realistic in realtime than 99% of hour-long Poser renders do.

Not least because the models used are much more accurate.

Poser was originally a tool for still image artists, if I am not mistaken.  Consumer preferences seem to have pushed it to evolve into an animation tool as well.  I don't think it set out to be in the same space as "high-end" 3D CG software.  I prefer to think of Poser as a tool for artisanal purpose.

"Character Generator, as they call it, allows you to instantly create, and customize a canned character's features, textures, etc., then export, with rigging, to Maya, 3dsMax, or Unity game engine.  It's actually far more generic than Poser or Daz, and clearly only intended for secondary characters."

Actually this looks like a pretty good solution for Game and even previs artists,However consider that these rigs have a specific purpose
( game dev mostly),unlike poser content they will be ready PROPERLY FORMATTED for use in such pipelines.

"Next time you see some Maya or Max user discredit the use of Poser, you can point to this, and have a good laugh."

Actually to be fair they tend only "discredit the use of Poser" as a solution for THEiR specific purposes (Game Dev etc).

Poser content is largely useless outside of poser for anything beyond a still render in another programs engine.
Even with the excellent third party Interposer pro®
plugin that I use with Maxon C4D,
I still need to use poser and DAZ studio to effectively create useful motions and then apply it to my character in C4D before rendering.

And let be honest SM's "poser fusion" plugins are not really a character solution for any Maya or softimage game artists as you don't get properly formatted  assets for your game engine.
so I say kudos to Autodesk, as this is long overdue.

My original post was intended more as tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, but as some have pointed out, there's value to this tool for people who need to quickly populate games with secondary characters (as I mentioned in my original post) in games or crowd visualization.

Wolf, I've successfully rigged V3 in Max, and used it in some personal animation just fine.  I wouldn't use PoserFusion for such things, but the native figures aren't useless outside of Poser.  They animate just fine when rigged properly.

This character tool is only ported to Maya, Max, and Unity.  I didn't see any mention of softimage, as that app has been discontinued anyway.

"Wolf, I've successfully rigged V3 in Max, and used it in some personal animation just fine. "

Indeed you and many others may have successfully rigged the DAZ V3_Object file that is referenced in posers program specific "CR2" File.
This has been possible since the advent of poser

But if harvesting DAZ/poser figure-objects files was a viable solution for game dev etc  MAX/Maya users would have been doing in mass for years now.
However the hi res nature of the meshes and the copyright restrictions
of the DAZ EULA likely contributed to the "Dismissive" attitudes of the end users who will now benefit from this new Autodesk Character creator.
 
I know your original post was rather light hearted and "tongue& cheek"
and I am Not trying to be contentious here.

But I think that there still remains a mythology in this community that "high end users" hold firmly to the some nearly religious belief that "everything should be created from scratch"
thus poser usage is not valid.
they just dont see poser the application as a useful, non labor intensive, asset for their rather narrow pro pipelines

"I didn't see any mention of softimage, as that app has been discontinued anyway."

Yeah Shame about Softimage but we all knew  that feature overlap would force  Autodesk to kill at least one of those pro apps they bought over the last few years.

Oh well
** http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-softimage/overview**

Quote -
But I think that there still remains a mythology in this community that "high end users" hold firmly to the some nearly religious belief that "everything should be created from scratch" thus poser usage is not valid.  they just dont see poser the application as a useful, non labor intensive, asset for their rather narrow pro pipelines

Yeah, we're on the same page here, Wolf.  I don't believe there's ever been a prejudicial bias about using "pre-existing" figures or meshes in the professional industry.  Never. 

However, there is an undeniable bias toward displaying Poser renders in professional 3d galleries.  There's some places that simply do not allow work that was done in Poser (rare), and many others that require full disclosure if Poser was used.  There's many 3D groups on DA, for example, which require you to isolate Poser work in it's own category folder, so it's not confused with work done from scratch.  I understand perfectly why this would be useful in some cases, where the focus is learning to model or whatever.  But considering that even the most highly regarded professional software can now easily import fully automated, pre-fabricated characters, textures, and rigging, I think the lines segregating Poser from the rest of the 3D world have been blurred a little.

this. is. AWESOME. Why?

"You can use the characters you generate commercially; whether it is for a game, a film, tv commercial, demo reel, student film, youtube video, etc. If you are acting as a subcontractor, you can provide the character data back to your client. The full details are contained in the Terms of Service, but essentially you can use them without restriction. "

 

For many many figures available for poser, you cannot use them commercially. IMO, this is the reason this exists and is a god send.

 

As for the other topic of "Next time you see some Maya or Max user discredit the use of Poser".... I won't touch that with a 10 foot pole around here. There are many topics to talk on for this and many arguments that would be too generalizing to make a point either way, and my own stance changes depending on what I've had for breakfast.

... also see MakeHuman for free and easy usage terms.

In a very indirect way I managed to get a figure into Debut as an OBJ. (Normal map removed) (One has subdivision applied)

The free generator doesn't allow the medium or high res versions to be created but there is an even lower resolution offered!