Does anyone the status of the Max & LW plugins for P5? I know some features will be disabled, but geez! throw us a freakin' bone here.

So far the SDK is what is needed to develop these plugins and there hasn't been any infomation that the SDK is done, released, or being worked on. Waiting on Lightwave plugin myself.

Attached Link: http://www.kaydara.com

it can't be really a big deal. max4 can already import p5's pz3 but without texture information. i've looked into that pz3 and found that formatting of the text is different. where you have LF in ppp, p5 gives you some other character. i didn't have time to search & replace that thing, but it could work. funny thing is, that when i texture, pose & save v3, for instance, in p5 textures are illegible for max. when i load that pz3 in ppp, change pose and textures and resave it as something else, it still won't read correctly in max. the same figure, this time coming from ppp, with same textures and pose, loads with no probs in max... it can't really be a big deal to adjust those plugins for p5. i don't want all the fancy texture sub-tree from poser converted, max' and lightwave's own functions are much more powerfull then posers, nor do i want dynamic hair (yuck!) or clothing, i just want the geometry with the basic level of textures transformed. i guess this would take 10 minutes max to rewrite. just a plain customer service (cl: what?)...

what's fbx?

what's fbx? It's just another 3d format, but it contains geometry, textures and animation. The big deal about it is that there is plugin to read it for almost every major 3d app. So the idea is that they would only have to keep one export up-to-date instead of 3+ plugins. Also, the format works on windows, mac, and linux. More info at the link above.

I was reading on the Electric Image Universe message board where there were rumors about EIU incorporating the fbx file format in their program. Since I'm a real fan of EIU, I'd love to see them do it and I'd really love to see CL code the export. Could be the way of the future.

would it be possible to convert the pz3's via python to fbx?

I never say impossible, but it's a binary file format so it would be difficult if not impossible. Also, the specification of the file format is not available unless you license the sdk from Kaydara. This really needs to be implemented in the app using C++. Since there isn't a publicly available sdk for Poser, I think CL will have to do it. Maybe Daz can consider it for their app...