HartyBart posted at 10:56AM Thu, 22 October 2020 - #4401914

As for buying rigged FBX figures not made for Poser, that's a bit of a false economy. Usually they are low-poly for games engines, anyway, and also tend to expensive. You'd do better spending the time learning about how to find (a very important skill) and then adapt an existing Poser figure or robot etc to your needs, with morphs etc.

It would be useful if you could say what your end goal is here: graphic novel, game, animation, and with what types of figures and in what genre.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I'm going to do just yet. Part of the reason I'm playing around with the software and learning it is because I need to know the limitations, not just of the software, but of myself. Can I get good enough with this to make something (at the very least) decent? You can give me the materials used to create the Mona Lisa, but that doesn't mean I have the skill to do it.

At the moment, I don't really have anything that I think 3D would benefit. Any project I work on, I consider what will help me best achieve my results. And frankly, some things simply work better with 2D animation than 3D (South Park comes to mind -- when they made the first wave of video games with 3D graphics, I thought it looked horrible. The construction paper 2D look worked so much better).

Part of the problem is I'm a tinkerer -- I learn mostly through experimentation. So I approach things as, "Here's a quick exercise, how do you make this happen?" One thing I thought of as a quick test was to find models of DVa and Soldier 76 from Overwatch and use it as a short video goofing on the "You are my dad boogie woogie" meme (if you're confused, don't worry. It's an inside joke in the fandom). It seemed a perfect way to test importing models, camera movements, backgrounds, etc. without having to delve into things like walk cycles and stuff just yet.

(And this is just working with stuff that already exists. Making my own models? I wouldn't even know where to start or who I would talk to. But I'd rather wait and see if I can work with 3D before I start delving into something I might not end up doing.)

My artistic ambitions grow with my progress. So I have no doubt the day will come when I'll hit on something and 3D is the way to go. But before that point, I want to learn what I'm dealing with so, when the time comes, I can do it right. I know I need the basics first.