I no longer render in Poser, using Cinema 4D XL v7.3 instead. I still do all my modeling and animations within Poser, but once a scene is finished, I import it into Cinema 4D using the Cinema 4D plug-in available on the Curious Lab website. This gives me much faster renders using much better lighting.

A few tips:

(1) make sure you have your initial C4D scene configured to have as many animation frames as you'll be importing.

(2) you have to reverse your trans maps. Now all my Poser characters have inverted transparency maps by default (a one-time pain to go through and invert all the relevant trans maps using Photoshop, but now that they're all done, no problems). Bump mapping seems to come over fine. Reflection setting has to be reset manually once the Poser PZ3 and materials are imported... though perhaps others know some trick of which I'm not aware.

(3) create a generic C4D template which has a good initial lighting and camera set up and plenty of frames. I have a basic setup which includes three circular arrays of dim no-shadow lights at different heights to give a global illumination effect, plus a main key light, fill light, and back light all casting soft shadows (some people who, unlike me, are actual experts recommend only letting one strong light cast shadows but I disagree, at least for my scenes). I also parent the global illumination arrays to one null object at the x,y,z origin and parent each of the strong lights to their own individual null objects also anchored at the x,y,z origin. This lets me swing the various lights around the center of the scene with ease just by rotating the null object parent. Finally, I have several pre-configured animated cameras parented to null objects. Those null objects can then easily be parented to the Poser object so I have fly cams ready to go as soon as I load the Poser file.

(4) my C4D template and all the Poser scenes in my library are set to a reference floor height. This keeps me from having to adjust the Y Tran setting of the poser animation once it's imported.

It all works great!

good luck... TGuyus

Message edited on: 10/26/2004 13:43