Hi All,
Just wondering if figures created and animated in Poser 8 will import smoothly into Unity. Thanks for the help :roll:
In theory, Poser files exported via FBX should work fine. However, the meshes and textures are very dense and are not ideal for real time use. The Poser figures are also not licensed for use in real-time, except for those included in Poser Pro.
Thanks for the insight. Are there any other tools for quickly modeling and rigging people and animals that are better suited to Unity (and licensed for use in real-time)?
any tool thats able to produce models with 3000 - 6000 polygons, be it Cinema 4D, Cheetah 3D, Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, … 
you potentially can even use poser for the animation etc, you just need to model your own characters that are targeted at games, not targeted at rendering
Thanks for the help. I’m new to the art pipeline and not an artist myself, so Poser seemed ideal, particularly since it does voice sync. Seemed like it might be great for cut scenes. Oh, well. I’ll probably try Cinema4D.
Thanks again.
lip syncing potentially wouldn’t have worked anyway.
only bone based animations can be used, no morph targets
Guess I have a lot to learn. I don’t really understand animation in Unity yet. I gather that morph animation means that the mesh has to deform whereas bone animation is simply bending at a given joint. Is this why it doesn’t work in Unity? Perhaps there’s a tutorial on all of this somewhere. I’ll look around.
The facial capture software looks cool. Seems like it may have the same problem as Poser however. It still requires the mesh to deform, or am I wrong.
I’m confused.
Thanks for all the input! :?
Morphs are vertices being moved, and animated, whereas bones are like parents to verticies, and a bone movement moves the verts. This influence amount is defined in a step called weighting the mesh.
Its probable that Unity could’ve supported morph animations, but as a better solution supporting bone based animation is far more important for general character animation.
zign track exports to .bvh, which can be read by blender3d at least. I’m 99% sure this is all about bones and not morphs. I think you can get a demo, if not ask the developer, hes helpful, we looked at creating an fbx exporter but it was too complex at the time, now that blender exports to fbx theres a solution right there.
AC
Thanks for the great explanation. You guys are great. Have to say, it would be nice if Unity supported morph animation if this is necessary for lip syncing. Otherwise, characters come across as a bit flat and story becomes difficult to convey. (I’m a screenwriter so this is important from my angle).
Thanks again for the help
Then add your vote here:
Added my vote. I was all set to buy Unity and now I’m having second thoughts because of this. It seems like the ability to achieve at least somewhat realistic facial expressions is critical as story becomes more important in games. I started out just wanting to know about Poser and now it’s made me think about what I need in a game engine. Of course, this may not be a feature in any of the engines in this price range. I don’t have enough experience to know.
Much appreciation for the input.
The most sophisticated facial animation software on the market is probably Face Robot, which Autodesk just announced will be included free with Softimage 2010, due out in September.
Having never used it, I don’t know whether the software exports bone animations or morph targets, but I’m anxious to check it out.
Find out more here: http://facerobot.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Overview_of_Working_in_Face_Robot
You can still use bones to do facial animation.
–Eric
I’ll check out Face Robot. Sounds great if it works in Unity. Didn’t know bone animation could be used for facial expressions, but then I don’t know much about the art end of all this.
My thanks again!
I have used facerobot and it is great for solving 3d faces(rigging) and definitely ideal for game animation and you can even export the solved face to maya for further tweaking…
The following video confirms how good it is.
The question is, is it easy to do motion capture with it, and more importantly, will it work in Unity?
Yes it is, you can import motion capture data to animate the solved face and key frame it very easily and it does work with unity…
Awesome. Sounds like Softimage might be the way to go for both modeling and motion capture.
Thanks for the help with this. I’m on a steep learning curve with respect to 3D modeling software and the art pipeline in Unity. I’m trying to put a small team together to build games, so I have to learn the basics in order to know what we need. Facial motion capture is definitely on the list.
One last question – is intermediate software necessary to go from camera to Face Robot?
Thanks again for all the help :shock:
You don’t have to the last time I used facerobot we linked it to an external camera but it was a custom setup but you could also us a software like http://www.zigncreations.com/zigntrack.html and then import the data into facerobot I haven’t had a chance to test it out as softimage comes out next month and then I will know more on how they integrate it into to softimage…