Poser elsewhere

Just wanted to check. How far does Poser's usefulness stretch? Can BVH's be imported to say, Unreal? Or HL2? I've heard of people animating in 3DSM, is that what you have to use if you're going to start modelling outside of SL?

Poser is a software toy compared to any full bodied 3D package out there. You can make some amazing renders with it though-it has a decent shader network and lighting setup option in the version 5. There is no modeler to it and the animation setup in it is not very intuitive if your used to working with something like max or maya.

Hmm. Well, I'm just looking for sheer skeletal animation here. But it's harder to use for that than Max? Seriously?

That depends on your definition of "harder" Poser is simpler. Getting high quality skeletal animation is easier in a more full featured product, but would have a much steeper learning curve than Poser.

Sorry for bumping this thread, but I've got another question on this topic.

How do you go about making the leap to 3DSM from Poser? Are there any good tutorial sites?

www.3dcafe.com has some animation tutorials...but the main emphasis in on modeling with 3DSM.

I'd rate it 6.5 / 10

Ford, learning Poser would help you only so far as gaining a good understanding of keyframe animating and function curves. Max is a completely different Beast. As higher end animation packages go it's probably the easiest to learn, but the curve is still pretty steep. If you're thinking in terms of doing things for SL Max wouldn't be very useful to you. For example there's no way to export a .bvh file from Max so you can't use it to create animations for use in SL. If you're wanting to learn 3d modeling and animation then it's a great piece of software. You might want to consider dowloading GMax and playing around with it. It's basically a stripped down version of Max for doing game Mods (also not useful for SL) but has a lot of the modeling tools in common with Max.