Poser Pro Game Dev?

Does anyone have any experiences with Poser Pro/Game Dev & Unity 3d? It has been years since I've looked at Poser. It would be nice to hear about people's real world experiences with it. The Kinect mocap and lipsync feature is intriguing.

I can't seem to find out when the half off sale will end, though. EDIT: sale ends 10/31.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/20703

 

Well, I assume that Poser Figures have a very high polycount and not (without modification) usably on gaming especially not in mobile gaming.

 

The problem i have with Poser and other software like Daz is that there is almost no tutorials.

 

I noticed that as well about the tutorials. The newest version seems to have a poly reducing and mesh combining function as one of the options. I'm still on the fence about getting it. It's a lot of $$$.

 

I don't understand how Poser can sell on the Asset Store, considering that the Asset Store doesn't have a system to allow discounts to users that already have previous versions of a software. That means that if one day Poser Pro Game Dev 2 comes out existing users will have to pay full price again (and we're talking about a fairly expensive piece of software). It feels pretty messy.

 

I've used both Poser and Daz. Generally this software is used for 2D rendering, many professional artists use poser and daz figures as background distance filler, they're high poly and are fairly good detail, but only much use to fill crowds at a distance. The Daz decimator I found hard to use and not so great. Can't speak for the current poser one but the poser I used which is version 7 did use a lot of the daz plugins to provide lip syncing and decimation which is why I mention Daz here. Poser has quite a few books available at amazon, it is a fairly mature piece of software and there is no problem getting tutorials. The couple of books I read were pretty good. Not sure how great the lipsyncing is now. Poser did use the Daz lipsyncing kit at one stage and it took some effort and time to achieve results You're not going to get the kind of results shown by the new mixamo plugin but then it's a one time purchase and not an annual extortion. Reallusion is much better for lipsyncing but iClone is not cheap.

However, the main problem with both Daz and Poser, and not really mentioned here, is that a great many of the models bought in their content stores, and for which this asset is of use, cannot be used for 3D games. Both Poser and Daz have this thing about not being able to use 3D geometry in games, unless one buys a game kit, although any rendered scenes made from 3D assets and exported as 2D can be used for whatever purpose, i.e. for a lot of HOPA games this kit is not really needed. It could be that the 5 GB of content that comes with Poser Pro game kit is all you will be able to use. It would be better to query with the vendor directly. The license usually only covers 3D models created by the makers of Poser or Daz3D and not the content sold in their respective asset stores.

Daz also requires a gamekit to be able to use Daz3D models in Unity, I have this kit, it cost about $200 I believe and that has been available for some time, but the versions of both software I used were not user friendly, they take time to master and quite some time to achieve commercial quality results in.

Whether this poser pro kit being sold here is a vast improvement and has been built specifically for use with Unity you would need to dig out some more details.

You should also be aware that poser, Daz3D and Reallusion always cost more than one expects, it is possible to achieve good facial animations and lipsyncing or good walk cycles for characters but invariably this means buying something like Animate for Daz or Poser, or buying additional animation plugins for facial animation in all three, in a lot of ways these match Unity in that they are a skeleton on which to hang a variety of plugins to speed up the process or else. they become a time sinkhole

All this software can become as much of a money pit to produce a professional commercial quality game as Unity 3D itself.

 

There will always be an upgrade path available directly from Smith Micro.

 

I hope so. But "buy on one marketplace, upgrade on another" still feels pretty messy.

 

Yeah I almost got the impression that it was meant for first time buys and any future upgrades would have to be through Smith Micro, as right now that's the only place you can enter your serial number to get a discount (as far as I can tell).

 

SmithMicro is running the same sale price at their store, and upgrade prices can be applied there....

 

Caveat Emptor.......

I just acquired Poser Pro Game Dev and spent a whole evening playing with the polygon reduction feature etc. (after carefully watching their various Youtube offerings). I then exported the resulting figure, to which I had applied a pose, then baked the pose on export to fbx. The resulting fileset in Unity is messy, the textures look quite unlike they did in Poser, and the supposedly baked pose came through rather different from the pose I set. I repeated this exercise with various figures, and various poses. In each case the results in Unity were unusable - far below a professional, marketable quality.

Also, the polygon reduction tool makes a real mess of the original, nicely symetrical mesh. Poser does not allow you to deselect or mask areas of the model to ignore when doing the decimation either. So you can't protect the face for instance. If you try decimate the head separately to retain a higher polycount it ends up shearing away from the neck mesh.

All in all the Game Dev bit seems every bit like a half cooked product rushed to market to jump on the Unity bandwaggon. It's really just a handful of poorly implement algorithms bolted on to Poser Pro. Infact I'd go as far as saying it's not fit for purpose as the all important fbx export function simply doesn't work properly. I'm afraid it's back to the long pipeline using ZBrush and 3DS Max - I guess I was naive to think that something at this price would replace the hours of hard work to do the job manually. If they ever really do get it to work properly I'm sure they'll make a killing, but at this moment in time its crapware.

I have requested a refund from Smith Micro - but the support call I logged hasn't been dealt with yet so this is seeming more like a drive by shooting by the minute.

 

Thank God I read this review I was going to possibly buy it but after hearing that I am definitely not going to fix all those bugs

 

I use poser game dev to build a character then use the fbx exporter to bring into max and then use Wrapit to build my game topology... if I use skinwrap on my lower poly topology I can use all the morphs that I brought in to change the poser model which then changes my game character then I copy and collapse and at that point I can rapidly create different characters, I can also render to texture my diffuse from poser and my bump and specular maps then tweek in Photoshop.

At least that's what I do for rapid development, make one girl and one guy, then skinwrap, morph, collapse, bake textures and your ready to rig.

I use skin Utilities to transfer skinning info from one model to another.