anyone have a good pipeline from Poser to Unreal Engine 4.2? and what must I do in Poser to make it flow better.
thank you
It really depends on what you want to do.
What do you want to do?
say character that I made with rigging plus models of stuff I’ve have done through the years.
Say maybe a statue I’ve made.
Rigging is easy enough to export, just make sure to choose cm as the export unit… BUT
You are better off collapsing everything to a single mesh for the character. What I mean is, sort of how Poser6 James and Jessi casual figures have their clothing embedded to the body. If you do a wireframe view on either of them, you will see they lack the body parts that are obscured by the exterior clothing. This makes for a more efficient figure polygon-wise. AND, if you don’t, then when importing in UE4 you will have on your hands a different skeleton mesh thingy for each clothing-etc.
You can export the animation too. You can even export multiple animations and apply them in UE4 to the same figure. By default, Poser always exports geometry alongside animation data, so what you can do for efficiency’s sake is animate a bare-bones figure that has the same rigging as your “hero” figure, and just apply that animation to your previously imported hero figure in UE4.
As to static props, it is even easier, as you don’t have the problem of worrying about skeletal animation and stuff.
Just remember that check whether what you are importing into UE4 from Poser has a license that entitles you to do so.
I’ve done a little prototyping with DAZ figures, so i can speak to a few things here.
There are a number of issues to be aware of with Poser and DAZ Studio models. Any of the content from DAZ (Victoria, Michael, Genesis) are NOT licensed for use in games. They have a separate license you can purchase, but it only includes their models, not those created by third party artists. I’m not sure what the current license is for the official Poser content, but I would investigate before putting anything from Poser in your game.
Except for figures from very old editions, Poser/DAZ models are very high resolution. Unless you are targeting only high-end machines or “next-gen” consoles, they are probably too vertex heavy for your needs. You can decimate them, but decimation creates bad topology. It’s fine for distant LOD models, but not for your main model. Your best bet is to retopo them to a more reasonable vertex count, but that is fairly work intensive.
Poser/DAZ models use multiple textures to cover the body, and the seams will show up in UE4. To address this, you really need to bake new textures or repaint the seam area.
Both Poser and DAZ use fairly complex vertex weighting and morphs that will not export 100% to FBX. For the most part, this won’t be a big deal, but if you export clothed models, for example, you might find body parts poking through the skin or deforming oddly.
There are similar tools that are better suited for game work. MakeHuman and Mixamo Fuse are the two that jump to mind, though neither has the quality or amount of content that Poser and DAZ Studio do.
Honestly, your best bet is to hire a game artist who knows how to create game-ready models.
Any way you choose, as things are right now, there is no magic bullet solution. There will be lots of tweaking involved in order to get nice results.
thank you everyone for the info, it was lots of information here.