groundshaker opened this issue on Feb 13, 2002 ยท 8 posts
Penguinisto posted Wed, 13 February 2002 at 8:50 AM
As someone who has done this sort of thing way too many times for his mental health, I can tell you that you'll have some obstacles. First and foremost, repeat after me: "Hail to the Almighty Poly Count!" chant that about 22,000 times before starting. You see, models are broken up into polygons. The more polys you have, the slower game engines will react to them. Now for the really bad news: Vicky and Mike have roughly 100,000+ polygons in each body. Even the best games like Quake3 Arena and Return to Castle Wolfenstein can only handle player models of less than 1,700 polygons (for RTCW; Q3A on the other hand is limited to roughly 1100 before it soaks the game engine on a computer slower than 1GHz.) Even Unreal2, which is due out sometime real soon and is touted to be the most advanced game ever, can only handle 2,500-3,000 polys per character in-game before it slows down (the cut-scenes and movie clip models are roughly 10,000 polys each.) BTW - Unreal Tournament models also have a practical limit of 1,000 polys. Now - this does not mean that you should give up hope! Au Contraire! There is salvation to be had. First, you're gonna need Carrera, AC3D, 3DS Max, etc... basically, a modelling program. Import your poser character into it as an .obj file, and immediately begin removing vertices and fixing the results, or look for a plug-in that will reduce polys for you while maintaining the same object shape. ...You'll find that once you get into Q3A range, the guy starts looking pretty choppy. Once you cut it down to The Sims engine ability (800 polys, I think? No, wait - that's Half-Life I think... The Sims is stuck somewhere at 500 polys if memory serves.) Anyway, the guy is obviously going to look real blocky once you get to Sims level. Next, you'll need UVMapper or something similar to skin your new character with. Once that is all done, you can import it into Milkshape and bake it into a character. So the answer is yes, you can do it, but no, you won't get the same smooth-looking character you see in a Poser render. Sorry about that, but 'tis the nature of The Beast :/ /P