Poser to Torque Workflow Resource

This is not the resource... YET!
It is an announcement and a confession.

My team has talked about this for a long time and it's time to start walking the walk.
This wasn't an easy thing to post about, but I'm an indie at heart so time for the dirty laundry!

If you don't know about Poser, go to here and have a look...

My team and I will be posting a resource soon that explains the work-flow of exporting Poser characters to DTS for use in your Torque TGE and TGEA projects. The work-flow has been a guarded secret here at BAG for a long time now. Recent developments and joint efforts from Smith Micro, PhilC and BrokeAss Games now allow this to be done fairly easy. This is part of how we created our MACK and FACK characters.
There are actually many ways this can be done, but not all of them preserve the weighting, rigging, animation and other properties of the character. Some of the methods are VERY costly and out of reach to the indie developer (for example 3DS Max, Motion Builder, TrueSpace and my favorite, ZBrush!) and can also be a real pain.

We will be focusing on using very inexpensive software that is commonly used for game mods and indie games (such as MilkShape, FragMotion, and others).

Going forward, we are looking at the Collada export from Poser Pro, as well as a custom Poser-to-MilkShape Exporter plugin we're working on with PhilC.

Originally we used 5 separate applications, exporting, importing, saving, converting, re-weighting, etc. It was a pain, but it worked, we were able to get our characters, animations, textures and rigging out of Poser and into DTS format. Best of all, it was a solution that cost less than $500!

Poser handles the BVH file format for animations which is an industry standard motion capture standard for animations.
Nearly all of the rotoscope apps, body-suits and camera -based systems we have researched support this format and natively support Poser as well. Two of the most important ones to me are:
OptiTrack and PhilC's Rotoscoper.

Thousands of BVH animations are available on the web for sale and for free.
www.truebones.com from Joe McPeak (aka Mr. Bones) has over 2000 BVH motion capture animations alone. There is a free tool called BVH Hacker that can edit the animations and also help fit them onto non-standard skeletons. For $25 you can have the same functionality as BVH Hacker via a plugin directly inside Poser with PhilC's BVH Helper. PhilC has developed many models, plugins, tools and tutorials to make Poser very powerful and easy to use and all of them are indie priced and indie EULA friendly. He also has made a very powerful python scripting tool for Poser (Ritter? Anyone? Anyone?).

These can be found on Content Paradise which is the main commercial site for Poser content.

Chris Calef (a new member of our team) has released a resource that allows BVH animations to be loaded into Torque in realtime via script commands. His resource can also fit these animations onto custom and non-standard skeletons. Mixing Chris' resource and some voodoo from the Torque DTS SDK you can export these animations into DSQ files from within Torque.

We're currently considering merging this resource into our MACK pack and adding new GUIs to our character editor to make it a nearly turnkey solution for adding new animations.

One of the most heated arguments about Poser has been EULA and legality of making games with it. Smith Micro has been very interested in our work with Poser and game development and has been VERY supportive to us. Poser is already great to make characters and animations for games with, and future versions of poser may actually be geared towards them.

The only real remaining EULA issue with Poser... is the content. In Poser Pro there is SOME artwork that is royalty free and indie friendly (medium and low poly versions of the male and female included in Poser Pro are open source). Personally, I didn't really like those characters, but that is just my opinion. But it shows and they have confirmed to us that they are starting to "think indie" and understand that royalty free artwork would bring Poser to new heights.

So before you load a default poser character or run to Content Paradise and buy the latest Vickie or Jessica characters to put in your game, be VERY careful to read the EULA of the specific art you are using. If the product doesn't clearly show the EULA, contact the vendor! Its better to be safe than sorry.

PhilC's characters and models are very indie friendly in terms of EULA. The M.A.C.K. character includes source art that is Poser-ready and is recommended to get started with if you own the pack.

When we post the resource we will describe how to import your own or royalty free character meshes into Poser and avoid ripping off your fellow artists without their permission. So basically the age old battles and myths about using Poser for games is over and has been debunked. We are hoping this resource and our character pack will fuel a new genre of modular/dynamic character design.

The point of our efforts wasn't to get rich (and trust me, we haven't), but to change and inspire the way characters and character packs are made. After the resource is up we will be hosting a portal dedicated to our art and how we do it. Maybe it will evolve into something bigger, and not just "a character here, a character there" that is seen in most game dev communities.

Honestly no one team has the time to make enough characters to keep everyone happy, heck maybe not even 5 teams, so we hope by empowering our community it will create a flood of cheap/free character packs/addons/methods.

I would love to talk to any GG staff about what we are doing so that I don't wind up with basket of oranges at the apple festival.

Two of our current goals are to purchase a lowcost 3D scanner (we almost have enough from pack sales, keep them coming!) and a low cost motion capture system. If we achieve both of the goals, we'll be able to bring "the big guns" as fast and as cheap as we can and maybe I can even finish a title as an indie. ;)

I hope this sheds some light on the subject for anybody interested and gets the juices flowing for what's to come in the near future. There is alot I can't cover in this post but I am hoping for input and ideas from the community before we start our final release of this project.

Shout outs:
Jondo
Moe
Rex
Chris Calef
PhilC
Mr. Bones
Smith Micro, Inc.
Konrad Kiss
Chris Robertson
David Mathews
Brad Bolthouse
Erik Madison
Dave Young
Ashtara
GarageGames
The dozens of devs that tested and reviewed our work.

Thanks for your time and support, we couldn't have done it without all of you.