Mac said: Is it worth my while using the 'weld vertices' option on everything too? I check frequently for degenerate facets and never seem to find any. But will welding first, then splitting, help in any way, either in model improvement or file size? Technically, welding identical vertices will shrink the OBJ file a bit, but it's not something you want to do generally speaking. Consider the shape I demonstrated with... in MAX, I detached the facets (polys) for the cylindrically-shaped extrusion bit, as well as the facets on all sides of the 'beak' looking part. Detaching liek this splits the vertices where they were shared before detaching (I then re-attached them). You can also select individual vertices and click 'break' in Max to split them. However, I avoid that because I often don't want a veretex split from from all the facets it takes part in, but only some. 'Split vertices' splits all of the facets and will make a Poser render look unsmoothed (like what happens in MAX when you add a smooth modifier without defining any smooth groups or using Autosmooth). Weld vertices will, of course, undo all of any splitting you do. That will make Poser try to smooth around square corners and such. You can actually get a good approximation of how Poser will render a mesh in Max by doing the following: 1) add a smooth modifier 2) set it to Autosmooth 3) tick the no indirect smothing box 4) set the smooth angle to 180 When you render, the result will look much like it will in Poser. If you select all vertices and click 'break' and render, you can see what it will look like in poser with 'split vertices' in UVMapper. If you seelct all vertices and click 'weld' you will see what it will look like in Poser with the 'weld vertices' option in UVMapper OR with the 'weld vertcies' box ticked when you import it into Poser. Furniture will generally be okay split, but not always -- sometimes even furniture should have some orgnic or round parts. A papasan chair would be very organic and look weird faceted. Actualyl, most any chair will have cushions which are rounded and organic and should be smoothed. Sofas are obvious, as are chaise longes. Round tables shouldn't have faceted sides (though I'd certainly seperate off and reattach the tabletop itself, as well as the bottom). Actually, just looking aruond at my furniture in real life, I can see one cheapo Target bookshelf that split vertices wouldn't hurt, and that's it. Everything else has some kind of moulding, roundness, or cushioning. Even my computer's case and my desk lamp and the computer desk itself (which has rounded corners on top, plus 'button' type thingies over the screws). Been reading 'Stranger in a strange land'? L I use the word 'grok' all the time. Haven't read that in years. Great book though! Den said: but the OBJ may be better solution for some options in the MAXOBJ export dialog to have more control over export by the way, ability to interpret 4 vert poly s like quads (ie conversion of tri to quads) This is a very important aspect of it, in my opinion, not judt because it can as much as halve your polys, but also because it makes it a lot easier to read the UVMap projections. In addition, the # of digits control as I described above can give you much finer resolution that the 6-digit 3DS import in Poser. Finally, it's also a bit simpler because to properly distribute a prop or character, you do not want your OBJ data inside the PP2 or CR2 file, but in an external file, so you would have to re-export an OBJ anyway and it saves tyou a step. You also do not want to have a scale-keyed object in Poser because at the amounts of scaling required to import a normal 3DS object, unless you scaled it down in Max first, you will be dealing with a horribly off-kilter and misaligned prop for the rotation settings, whereas a 1:1 scale object will be much easier to set the rotation centre and such correctly on.