Poser8 animation to Kineme3D plugin?

A nested 3d structure is the best approach. Load 3D objects as structure

.md2s are really nifty.

For Poser export to Collada see DAE Export.

Blender will export .md2 BTW.

wow cool I have been looking for a md2 Mac plugin for a bit. seems to be an archaic format not really sure why k3d uses this format but probably for the speed.

I am mobile right now and can not find the link because Im in the non 3G vortex at the moment but, 1024 posted a facial blend shape patch to the forum and I responded with a walk cycle that can illustrate how to use k3d blend shapes to animate a walking figure like from poser.

I will tel you how I get poser to work. I use poser pro 8 with a Maya fusion plugin. I'm not sure about e differences between the systems. with Maya fusion you open your poser file in Maya and then export etc.. but that only works half the time. like cybero mentioned the way poser works is that all e parts of he model are structured out. ad far as my tests have been concerned getting a usable dae directly out of poser is not going to happen. even though there is a dae export function, even with the pro version and a fusion plugin Every time I get a model from poser into quartz it is missing pieces like essential pieces like the head etc....

the way poser works is basically a compressed obj format. now there are licensing issues with using poser content anyways. so unless you made the model and animated it in pposer you are not going to be able to use any of there models in any of your work. there are no exceptions. in any event if you actually made your model in poser format then you wouldnt be asking this question anyways.

poser is made to render particularly higher end sort of models anyways so working in realtime you are really going to want use the low poly dev object model, which I do not if it is included know if is included in the regular poser. either way this model still gives issues once it us in qc from the direct dae export. however do not worry there still are ways to get this working.

first off if you do not know how you should really learn how to rig your own model, skin it and paint weights etc... in the end using poser is no shortcut. so it is imparitive that you learn how to rig your own models up. once you get them hang of it it really isn't that hard but it is a rather advanced topic that wasn't even covered in the intermediate Maya class I took. ok with that said I will tell you how you can take some short cuts and get your animations into qc.

first off your going to need blender, Maya, or cheetah 3d. ideally all of them is grand. in poser you will want to export your model as an obj sequence making sure to weld your body parts, that's an obj export feature. let's say your animation is 30 frames you need to export all 30 frames. now you could just multiplex through those 30 obj files with & k3d but that's a bit over kill as the whole point and what ima saying is that a poser model has a ply count that is to high for realtime anyways unless you use the low poly dev models. it is still possible though to use a g2 poser model etc... it's just not optimized for realtime. game engine packages like unity will not even render a poser model unless it the dev object. that is irrelevant as we are talking qc.

so after you have exported the 30 frame sequence as a welded obj model you then need convert just a few of those models not all of them to fbx, or dae. this is why you need Maya blender or cheetah etc.... lets say you have a sequence of 30 and it is a cycling in place animation looping animation. you will lets say only need a few of the 30 files poser creates. this is going to vary depending on your animation so you will need to experiment. open up model obj weld for frame 1 then export that mesh as fbx, making sure to add a uv texture but not embedding the texture in the dae or fbx file. you just need to generate the texture coordinate data for the file so you can the texture in qc. this step is particularly I port when using dae with stock stuff, not sure if it's Impartive for k3d use but good practice all the same. now open up frame 15 and do the same thing. so as example you have 2 models. you will want to use the k3d blend renderer and set model frame 1 for object 1 model frame15as your second object and then use model from frame one as your 3rd blend render blen object as the idea is to loop and end where you started. you can then interpolated the blend values to make appropriate animations.

I have a 3d reactive dancing gogo dance model thing I made in the repository on kineme if you want to see an example. although that whole system is a bit messy but was made out of a walk in place cycle from poser pro 7 a year or so ago. the model isn't optimized but the animation isn't that smooth but was all accomplished with the above mentioned methodology.

so don't fret you have other options as well. as I have pretty much streamlined this whole poser to qc process. Qc will take a poser model but just remember it is not optimized will heavily tax your system so like I said it's best to really learn how to do this all on your own as realtime modeling is very imparitive to optimize things so you can add more objects etc...

so if you are wanting to use just the poser rig you will want to export your model animation in collada then open the model in blender and export the motion capture data as fbx and then do what you will with the mobcap data. even though sometimes poser will make a smooth animation for you in think you will feel much better if you use "make human" a free poser like human model creator or find a low poly human and just rig animate your self then save and export out your animation for blend rendering in qc on frame by frame basis. I highly suggest if you do not know how to rig a model to use cheetah 3d. I am proficient at this rigging thing with Maya but find cheetah to way faster even though it doesn't have as many options. although it does have the essential options as well as a material node editor that looks just like qc 2 or 3. I have blender and do not really know how to use it although I should commit the commands to memory as it seems from YouTube it is just as easy to model rig and vertex weit paint your model with blender once you get by the interface and the inn standard short cut keys. actually the new blender has a much nicer interface and worth learning if you are not familiar with Maya or mud box etc......

other than that you will have to write a custom poser script with python to do what you want. I say forget it roll your own. nut do try and export as welded obj sequence and mess wi this obis as blend rederer objects and you will be happy even if not as optimized. I have no idea the final output or intent of your poser project so maybe the methods above will work fine for yr project just remember you can only blend models with the same vertex count. although I think GT has found a way to blend models of different vertex counts with open cl etc...

KnM 3d does not support meshes animations.

One possible workaround is to export each keyframe as a separate model. I would suggest using FBX format, 3dsmax (but i assume maya does the same) has a FBX script export that let you do this.

You'll end up with a big FBX file with all the exported poses as separate meshes. Then you'll want to use KnM Mesh Blend to smoothly interpolate between meshes. Hope this helps.

Note that i would personally advice to stay away from DAE, and stick to FBX when possible.

Thanks all. I just need a 3D model of a hand animated into QC. The fingers should be controled by a midicontroller. Blending between 3dmodels with the Kineme Mesh Blend works best for me now.

@franz, why do you prefer FBX over DAE? Any particular reason for that?

I'm not franz but, the Kineme3D loader historically has supported fbx and md2 with the greatest amount of speed. DAE loading may be more robust now (?), but there have been times that it has been hit or miss. It has been in the past that if you loaded 3ds, obj, and some other types, that Kineme3D converted them to fbx internally (not md2 though), so fbx would be the most optimized for speed. I don't know if smokris has changed this or not.

As for DAE with the apple stock patches, no one has posted anything that warps between meshes quickly enough, publicly, though it is possible.

@slof: FBX is: - smaller in size - more portable - works nicely between all autodesk products (and they own the market today, unfortunately) - faster in loading (who knows why ?).

well i wrote a simple maxscript that converts all the mesh Vertex pos to XML structure and then connect the xml to a kineme gl quad structure and it seems to be quite fast for me.... without any 3d whatsoever.... and you can animate vertex pos throughout the structure.... i 'll see if i can track here on my comp.... but maya certanly can make this quite fat im MEL

this leads me to ask if xml wouldn't be a good way to import 3d to qc ? and since it is a markup language one can process the structure so that it becomes similar to a parent child relation and thus render a similiar IK or inverse kinematics bone structure to make mesh animations inside qc? just a thought

bern

Quote:

this leads me to ask if xml wouldn't be a good way to import 3d to qc ?

It would be a way, it would not be as fast a way as the various 3D Object renderers available through Kineme3D , or Apple's Mesh Importer [.dae only of course].

It would be one way of loading an otherwise unsupported file format's structure members and positional member sets.

Thereafter Structure from File uses .plist [basically XML], XML Importer allows any XML of standard format to be read with .xml extension.

Once one has a working process in place and a suitable structure sorting setup [index members / key members, etc, then one would be able to reliably output XML of a particular format and then have that XML structure be re-collated or presented by index.

The big deal is getting all that structure sorting [tools or scripts] sorted. There are so many XML exporters and importers nowadays that making the XML is the trivial part, although further editing might be needed when seeking to get an easily read and useable XML file .

It would definitely be worthwhile doing if you had a whole raft of such files, getting all that down to a batch processing pre composition XML creation routine would save a whole lot of time, thereafter the next big step would be the aforementioned Structure Tools or JavaScript based processing Macro before getting appropriately presented to the various 3D or 2D structure object renderers available in QC.

By and large, IMHO, if you can output to a well supported format, you'll save yourself a whole lot of time.

yeah cybero i know what you mean. but still i think its kinda independent format whort checking out... i'll follow the path

you might get annoyed -- QC's XML parser uses an O(N²) algorithm to parse XML, which get really slow when you parse data with lots of elements (like 3D stuff).

I really ought to clean up my animated DAE loader...

no way your dae loader loads animation ? wowngoimg to have to check that out

I just checked and I don't see anything new in the repository. I'm really looking forward to any kind of progress for QC in that area.

It would definitely be cool to see an example of that. For me, it's one of a few missing links out of what can be done w/QC right now.

It would be nice to expose skeletal animation (not saying through this plugin necessarily, because I'm not sure if it's feasible), even if it left a lot of inputs to manage. Being able to deal with a skeleton hierarchy so that manipulating a joint moved the child pieces would be excellent. It doesn't seem inherently complex, though implementing it in a plugin is over my head.

It's a drag that QC can't be more efficient in structure level manipulation sometimes. I've figured out how to take multi-obj stuff that would normally be static (like a skeleton), and move around limbs, but performance is somewhat variable because of the sheer amount of number crunching that has to happen in QC (I'm assuming this is a big part, as well as iteration).

It would be really cool to be able to use QC for more machinima type stuff. I mean, one can right now, but it would be nice to be able to step the quality up.

What repository? You don't have access to my internal svn so I'm not sure where you might be looking?

I posted some example movies of it working a while back, current issues are the libraries assume resetting the model view matrix to identity is the right thing to do, so inheriting transforms currently does not work. Texturing, animation etc work, but some things need to be exposed to allow you to switch between animations and interpolate. No promises, but maybe ill hack around today while I wait for my girlfriend to come home, so I can actually open Halo Reach so we can play together :)

Oh, I didn't mean to convey a misunderstanding - I'm talking about the public code you put up that showed starting points examples of OFX based plugins for QC. I don't know why I thought it would make sense for anything like what you're talking about to be in there on second thought.

So, could you make multiple instances and have each object with it's own transforms currently? I guess what I'm getting at is, would a stereoscopic render be possible?

The thought of any kind of expansion is really awesome. I've always thought that QC would be really great for a new kind of machinima thing, because it has this cool speedy filter back end (stuff like your v002 zoom blur, for instance), and all of these great interactive control methods.

Thanks for the no promises/warranty implied nod of the head to this.

Not to get too far off task, but I suppose that to really see that work optimally, QC has to work a little differently when driving 3D stuff. Something needs to be able to tell it "hey lil' buddy, you don't need to render that now, b/c no one can see it".