This might be a total newbie thing, but I would appreciate any help anyone could give: Given my complete frustration with Poser's renderer, I figured I would try to export some of my "problem" scenes into another 3D application, as I've heard many others have done. I exported the PZ3 as an OBJ and got a program to extract the textures to the same directory as the OBJ and the MTL. The problem is, if I open the scene up in either DAZ Studio or Shade, the whole scene just comes through white - no textures or anything. Am I totally missing something? I really don't want to have to manually re-texture everything in another program - I'm about to jump off a cliff as it is. Basically, I'm just looking for an easy way to render some scenes that Poser 6 itself can't seem to do without crashing on me. I'm still pretty new with the 3D stuff - Poser is my first and thus far only program of this type that I've used much (and it's just a hobby). DAZ Studio is free, but I've found it to be kind of buggy (it's still beta after all) and it doesn't support some Poser magnets. I ended up with a copy of Shade 7 when I bought Poser 6, and it seems to have good compatiblity, but I HATE it - it's not the most user friendly program (Side rant: CL - how about a REAL manual and help files for once instead of just PDFs?!) Is Bryce a better option? Is there an easier way? Someone please talk me off the edge!

Don't know how much money you want to spend, but I bought Vue Infinite and it imports Poser PZ3 and PZZ scenes in directly and flawlessly, no need to save it as an object file. All the materials are all there and even the hair transmaps are correct. As an added bonus, I can run Poser and Vue at the same time, and if I want to make a change in a pose, I change the pose in Poser and save it - and here comes the great part - Vue detects that I have resaved the scene in Poser and asks me if I want to re-import the scene, and if I do, it brings the PZ3 back in with the changes.

but I HATE it

Me too!

Side rant: CL - how about a REAL manual and help files for >once instead of just PDFs?!)

Yes, CL (or E-F), that would be great. I wonder whether these PDFs have been translated from Japanese. They are gramatically correct but in a horrible stile :-((

I remember there were some threads about crashing Poser 6 recently. Like a too large virtual memory file.
Because there seem to be many P6 users (like me) who don't have any problems at all. (Which might not be a great help for you right now ...)

Vue D'Esprit can import Poser-5 scenes with texture, as long as you don't use shader nodes. It only accepts textures (tif, jpg, gif ...).
And by the way, Vue is really a great program (although I am still using Vue 4).

OBJ file exports do not take the material information with them. If you want to preserve the material info then export as 3ds.

That is not entirely correct. The Poser-exported .obj file contains nothing but the raw mapping zones (as well as the UVmap data); however, Poser also exports a seperate .mtl file at the same time. This .mtl file WILL set up many of the proper texture channels in most .obj importers -- including pointers to texture maps. Some problems, however; the exported .mtl file does not handle transparency (it doesn't even list the transmap), it does not use the full file location (meaning you have to point your importer at the texture maps), and, of course, different 3d packages have different ways in which they divide up the basic surface qualities. The best import will always start with putting the .obj, the .mtl, and copies of all the texture maps in a new folder, then pointing your importer at that. The other advantage to doing it this way is that when and if the importer boggles on something (like a transmap), you have all the correct files in a convenient place to fix it.

Nomuse - Is there any way to get Poser to write the transparency? Is there a utility to do this?

Yes, there is. Of course I've forgotten everything about this utility, what it is called, where it is found. But then, it was a PC-only tool (sigh). I do know that both Vue and Carrara have decent render engines and provide (for small extra charge, depending) a realtime Poser importer. Nice thing about that, besides the import ease, is that you can make changes in Poser and have them reflected in the scene you are building in the other application.

And transparacies ARE imported into Vue. One of the big selling points of Vue for me was that it will import Poser scenes directly, instead of having to go through that stupid DAZ studio for Bryce.