Hey ... I love poser for posing, but I've been using Bryce for rendering ... but I hate having to reimport to tweak my poses. I've been researching (and dreaming about) buying some other software package. Here's what I'm looking for: - Something that I can do my basic posing in poser, then do minor adjustements to pose in final program. - While I'm at it, I'm interested in learning modeling figures, too, so if possible I'd like it to be a killer app for creating model figures. I've put my toes in the water with Maya PLE, Amapi, Wings 3-D, and have just gotten the Cinema 4D free version from the a UK magazine. I've tried loading from Poser 4 into Cinema 4-D, but can't find a format that exports the body connections properly. So, my questions are: 1) Is the lightwave export in Poser 5 going to be worth the money just to allow me to import into Cinema 4D V6? 2) What program would give me a decent renderer, good outdoors scene creation, allow importing of some poser export format (and still allow posing after import into that program) without a lot of hassles, and (hopefully) have some decent modeling tools? (Okay, so I want my cake and eat it too ... can it not cost $3000?) 3) If I can't get this all in one package, then what would be a good program for modeling (I hate AMAPI's interface) and a good complimentary program for rendering? There are too damned many programs out there and I can't (yet) afford to buy them all. Thanks! -DL

What you really need is either Vue D'Esprit 4.2/Pro or one of the versions of BodyStudio2 & your favourite renderer. With Vue you save your scene as a pz3 & import it into Vue, but you'd need to open it again in poser to edit it. I'm not sure how BodyStudio does it's thing, but I'd guess it's pretty similar to how Vue does it. www.e-onsoftware.com for Vue www.reiss-studio.com for Bodystudio2

I bought Digit Magazine, october issue to try Carrara Studio v1,1. It's a full version without any limitation and without any bug. The documentation is in PDF format and you can find many tutorials here and at 3D Communes. You'll find a lot of similiarities with Poser cause both came from MetaCreations a couple of years ago. I love it and it is really for newbies. Take a look at the company, it's eovia.com.

Whatever happened to dynamic linking and embedding? It would be nice if you could insert a Poser figure into a Bryce or Vue scene in such a way that double clicking on it allowed you to open the embedded object in Poser to adjust the pose. But (I think this is at least partly the reason) because so many of these programs are rooted in the Mac world, this principle isn't supported. On a passing note, if you don't want to learn a new program, it is possible to streamline the process of importing Poser figures into Bryce so that reimporting a figure with the pose adjusted only takes a couple of minutes.

Thanks for all the tips ... Phantast ... do you have the steps you might take to streamlining that process of importing from Poser to Bryce? I haven't taken the time to really focus on that process. -DL

Yes, see the full tutorial at http://phantast.comicbabecentral.com/tutorials.htm