Why don´t you use a complete package? I mean, poser can be fun, but eventually you´ll want to do your own modelling/animating/texturing... I´m not familiar with poser4 but from what I know the "poser" look is pretty easily recogniseable. Poser4 seems to have a modelling tool as well, I´m not sure if its any good.

I know the animation part of Maya, which is *really* good in release 4, you can do a semi-decent walk cycle in under an hour, if you know something about animating.

quote: Original post by Hase
I know the animation part of Maya, which is *really* good in release 4, you can do a semi-decent walk cycle in under an hour, if you know something about animating.

Yeah, but you''re talking about several thousand dollars for that piece of software and that''s out of reach for most of us.

I fool around with Poser some.

I looked at the Dorsh site and it looks like you are buying a texture pack? If you are handy with a paint program, it''s not that hard to make your own textures. There are some free utilites that make a flat texture template from an obj file (tjhe format that Poser uses). But YMMV.

Poser does not have much in the way of modeling. It lets you distort an existing shape, and you can do a lot with the models that come with it, but if you want to create something really new, use of another program is probably required.

Example: to make the werewolf pictured here I ended up using a bits and pieces from a few models that came with the program, but pushed polys around in Ray Dream 5 to get everything to connect smoothly.

Compare to the preacher which was straight Poser work.

Poser is ok for making animations. They can export to avi or as individual frames. I have made some walking characters for placeholder art by exporting individual frames and combining them in a paint program. It can read bvh (motion capture) files, which is nice if you have them. I know of at least one company that offers a set of bvh motion capture files of generic action motions (punching etc) for poser users, mostly aimed at the amature game crowd. I don''t have the product, so I don''t know jhow good it is.

Rendering speed obviously varies by computer, the program doesn''t use any hardware acceleration. I''ve got a 400 MHz machine that renders a 15 frame basic walk in a minute or two, longer if there are a lot of complicated transparencies or a very high poly figure. Fast enough to get it done, but slow enough that you twiddle thumbs for a bit.

I''m not that good at animation, so I can''t really tell you how easy it is to create new motion. Most of my attempts look pretty bad, but I suspect it''s the limits of my talent rather than the program.

I think that it''s a valid criticism that much of the poser artwork looks alike, especially the human faces, but I don''t know if this is significant for a game, given that the figures are usually pretty small by the time you''re done.

JSwing