Is poser pro used in the video game industry alot? Im looking for a program that has fast and powerful animation tools but can't afford something like motionbuilder. is poser pro good enough? What do you think is the best animation tool for 1000 dollars or less.

Quote: Original post by bearanimations
Is poser pro used in the video game industry alot? Im looking for a program that has fast and powerful animation tools but can't afford something like motionbuilder. is poser pro good enough? What do you think is the best animation tool for 1000 dollars or less.

Do not spend a CENT on poser. It really isn't good for much of anything. You get a few preset figures and a bunch of junk poses that you can loop through, and then render them out, very slowly. There really isn't much clothes there to use, and the default figures suck. In the end it ends up being just a store where you go buy premium figures and clothes and then render them out for no real purpose.

You can get some good looking human meshes to animate from MAKEHUMAN. A free program similar to Poser. Then you can export those meshes out and then modify and animate them in trueSpace 7.6(free), Blender(free), CharacterFX (Free), or Fragmotion (~25$).

You might also want to check out Daz Studio, which is free, but mostly only exists to sell you stuff. I'm not sure you can make any good game animations in there.

Essentially the only thing you can do with Poser in game development is render out sprites, images or movies. Poser's licensing basically makes it impossible to use it to generate any 3D content that you can use in a game. If you have a 2D game planned, then it can be used quite easily to generate sprite animations, character portraits, etc.

In terms of professional use, I know of only one professional game that used Poser to any degree: Planescape Torment, which was also a 2D game.

I purchased it a long time ago and really only used it a few times. There are websites where you can get more models, cloths, props, etc. (I have five CD's full of different objects) but it's still not worth it. Even if you were allowed to use the 3D objects (I didn't know that... makes it even more pointless), the exporting of them is tedious. I tried exporting to many different file formats and they all got exported wrong. When I would import them into 3D Studio Max the normals where all wrong, there were holes in the mesh, etc. I would highly advise you to stay away from it, not worth a cent.

ok then so what do you think would be a good animation tool for me. like i said i would love something like motionbuilder. but can't afford it. I still need something with power and speed though. Whats the next best thing. also is the animations capabilities of lightwave up to my specifications

Try Lightwave and Modo. They are the most affordable programs right now.

Modo is a fantastic modeler and renderer, but has crap for animation.

At that price range you're looking at the following options for commercially viable animation capable products:

Lightwave v9.5 (complete package)
* with PDF Manuals - $895
* with printed manuals - $995

Messiah Studio 3 (rigging, animation, and rendering) - $399

Do you already have a strong modeling tool? If not then here are some good choices:

Silo3D
* Core - Sub-D polygonal modeling with some UV layout tools - $99
* Professional - more tools plus displacement painting - $159

Modo 302 (modeling, painting, basic animation, rendering) - $895