That's unreal for games.I'm going to half to rethink the way I think about game meshes.

still think ryse went a little crazy with the polycount.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fv__G6KJQ8

time stamp ya can see the wiremesh.

 

 

I agree. (That was a COD:Ghost vid, btw.)
It's not just polys that are getting a rethink. Modern game asset textures are getting... ginormous, compared to what they used to be. I took a look at some ripped-out game assets the other day. (From some fansites and, yes, it is completely illegal to do that, but I deleted them after I realized what they were.) Texture sizes for some of these figures reached the 3kx3k+ mark, starting to rival the resolution of Poser "hi-res" character textures. And, these were not full body, UV-Space-Saving textures, either! These were material group textures! /boggle With several of these being incorporated into a game figure.

Admittedly, these were "main character/npc" figures, that people would see a lot of in the game and from close-up views, as well. And, the games I looked at were games centered around a player and npc moving through a world with not a lot of animation assets running around, like large groups of hi-def NPCs. So, it's expected to see large textures on assets that need the details, since you'll be staring at them all day, and smaller ones that don't, since you'll just be blowing up scores of them at long distance with a rocket-launcher... :)

But, because PCs and consoles are really pushing the limits, these days, and are extremely powerful machines in their own right, it seems as if game-devs have been able to break free of having to pay for every darn vert on the screen. With new culling techniques, on-the-fly sub-d, new rendering all around, some of both the polycount and texture size of mainline game assets are getting pretty darn big.

The question this raises is one that I think that everyone interested in Poser and animation/rendering needs to examine. It will determine the future for all such rendering/posing programs:

With game engines pushing the limits and being driven by marketability for third-party products that use them, what is the place of programs like Poser/DS and what will drive innovation in these sorts of products so that they can remain in a tier, all their own?

It's starting to get to the point where a game engine, like Unreal or Cryengine, is approaching the capability in regards to rendering and useability, that Poser/DS offer. Before, Poser/DS sort of stood in its own niche as user-friendly hi-resolution rendering/animation programs.

That is starting to not be the case... Both Unreal and Cryengine are either free or extremely low-cost. True, they are not as user-friendly as Poser/DS. But, what happens as their user-base increases and they start to get more assets that make them user-friendly? What happens to Poser/DS as a result of these sorts of engines not only incorporating heavy meshes and textures, but actually make gains on rendering capability and blow away Poser and DS in terms of their real-time animating capability?

This is serious stuff. It's not just idle speculation. It's serious in the fact that Poser/DS may end up just being a market exclusively for old farts that are married to Poser/DS, not because these products bring anything to the table when compared to the capabilities of free or low-cost top-tier game engines.

Unless Poser/DS can start doing things to compete with the capabilities of these sorts of engines or unless they can provide seamless user-friendly environments that will work with these engines (which they're doing, so it shows some foresight on their part) then these software products that many users here love will be... dead. Deader than Adam's housecat and that's a fact.

Yes, Poser/DS are focusing on game asset and finding a place in a private user's pipeline to produce things for gaming rendering engines that are getting much better than their own. Why? Because, if they can't innovate in other areas, areas that may cost much more to discover a "killer app" to set their product apart, they will die.

When you can have a 50k+ poly game character (or even 100k!) in a next-gen game engine that renders better than Poser/DS and you can dump huge textures in there and play with particle effects and unique lighting, on-demand sub-d if needed, automatic asset-generation like plants and terrains, why in the heck are you going to want to foof around with Poser or DS's rendering engines to produce... still images that take a physics degree in order to make look good or animation sequences that take weeks to render compared to fracking real-time jaw-dropping animation in a game engine that looks much better and uses more complex effects?

Poser/DS will, in the future, become mere front-end, user-friendly, GUI's for game asset creation. That's their only path to survival, IMO. Unless, of course, they can find a killer-app sweet spot that game engines can't provide. A spot that I don't think will exist unless both Poser and DS radically change their software, which ain't gonna happen, 'cause... expensive and too darn difficult to worry with, considering their alternative choice.

PS - With this in mind, a discussion of licensing costs for Poser/DS assets would also need to be put in play. Poser/DS can not "price themselves out of the market" in regards to licensing costs for game assets. If they expect to generate sales with a new dynamic that focuses on game asset creation integration pipelines for Unreal, Cryengine and, to a much lesser extent, Unity (because of Unity's costs), they're going to have to pay attention to their licensing fees and adjust them as the market demands in order to remain competitive.