I think that's a very important difference and something you really need to consider when deciding which application to use. Poser Pro 11 is 500 USD (unless you're upgrading from a previous version) and it includes A LOT of content that you can already use.
#POSER PRO GAME DEV LICENSE#
So far, it's like Daz Studio is winning, and while some may be tempted to say "a free app turned out to be better than a paid one" remember that, while Daz Studio is free, Decimator is 100 USD (and the indie game developer license is 500 USD). On top of that, each morph is stored in its own Blendshape node (if you're using Maya). To give you an example, if you decide to bake morphs, your custom character is exported with no morphs that can be animated, but if you decide not to bake morphs, you end up with the default character and a bunch of morphs, even morphs that were already changing your character's shape and face.
The problem is you can't decide to bake some morphs and export others (it's either all or none). This should be useful in cases where you want to be able to animate the face, for example. If you decide not to bake morphs, you will be prompted to pick which morphs you want to export. This may not be a big issue, but it would be a good thing to have that feature. The creation of the texture atlas is also automatic, so you can't control how much space a texture takes (unlike Daz Studio). In the export window, you can choose to compile a texture atlas, so all your textures are combined onto a single texture. When exporting, you can select a preset that fits your needs, or you can select the options manually. Poser Pro does offer a "Morph Target Analysis" option that will be used to retain some detail, but in my opinion, it's not a replacement for a fully featured reduction tool that allows you to control optimizations per body part. This is useful when you want to retain as much detail as possible on the face, but you don't care that much if the legs or arms have a smaller polygon count. Meanwhile in Decimator for Daz Studio, you can actually configure "weights" that allow you to preserve details in some areas, and reduce other areas more. You can only decide how many polygons you want, and leave the rest to the software. Poser offers a polygon reduction tool so you can reach the desired polygon count.Ĭompared to Decimator for Daz Studio, the Polygon Reduction tool is pretty basic, though. Depending on the game and platform, you may get away with a 15K-to-20K polygon character (higher number of characters appearing on the screen requires lower polygon counts), but in some cases, you must strive to reach around 5K per model. Above all, keep it simple, and don't try to make something too complicated, especially if you're either a solo developer or part of a small team.Īs you know, Poser figures are very high resolution to be used in a game (even if they have lower resolution than Daz figures).
As I said before, I focus on 3d games because we don't have many 2d artists, so to us making 3d games may be slightly easier than making 2d games. I recently got myself a copy of Poser Pro 11, and now I am able to make a comparison between the two. At that moment, I had not tried Poser Pro for game development, so I couldn't compare them. A couple of months ago, I wrote about using human characters from Daz Studio in your games.