I am seriuously thinking about buying this plug in, but I don't really see many people talking about it or supporting it. I want to do some serious animation using Poser as my Character Animation and Max as my renderer. Any info would be appreicated.

1. Is it stable?

2. Do the animations from Poser read into Max well?

3. Does it make a difference in workflow?

Thanks ahead of time.

Hi DV, I use the plugin on a daily basis. For the work I do, I animate in Poser and use the plugin to render scenes in Max. I couldn't do my job without it. 1. I have found it to be very stable. 2. The animations in Max look identicle to what you see in Poser. 3. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by question 3. The workflow changes only in the fact that you import the Poser scene. Everything else is the same. I like that I can use the plugin with Poser 5 or 6 and Max 6 or 7 or 7.5 My guess is that you don't here much about it because there isn't much to complain about. :) It is not just a welcome addition to my Max plugins, it is essential. Cheers, Joe

If you can afford it, it is the only official route to go. GestureMax, for its longetivity and pricing does not support poses, animations, or proper deformations. There is also pCharacter over at Daz3D, but it is also pricy and does not mention pose and animation support.

1. Yes and no. It creates a Poser engine inside the host program. I had difficulty loading a single figure on a P4 3.2gHz 2.5gb RAM machine. Once I got the plug-in to work (read: not crash the host) the rendered images were far superior to P6 (although P6+IBL is a formidable option) 2. Animations are the same as they are created in Poser, with the possible exception of scale. Again, RBS creates a Poser engine, so for all intents and purposes it's Poser inside of your host. 3. Not much difference in workflow, except praying for the host not to crash. It's not a bad solution for those who it works for flawlessly; I'm learning to rig DAZ figures in Maya. Not as "turn key" type solution, but far more powerful.

Thanks for the useful information. As far as workflow, I guess I was speaking mostly about the following things I have read on this forum. What about the "long" load times I have read about? Does it really take 3-5 minutes to load a scene? If you update a Poser scene, do you have to load for 3-5 minutes again? What's up with the materials? I have read that they can get all funky if you use Max materials? Thanks again.

My experience with BodyStudio is about the same as replicand has mentioned. The plugin tends to make Max unstable under certain conditions, and if you save the scene with the bodystudio host intact, it will totally screw up your multi/sub-object materials on all your objects beyond repair. Some people have said the workaround to this problem is to rename the materials in Max, but I found that didn't even help me most of the time. It's a good solution if you just want to import a Poser scene and render, but beyond that... I'd rather rig a figure using CharacterStudio, and spend the time importing morph targets for it.

Max: pCharacter may be a good solution for you. You will have to re-rig or fix the rig that it imports but at least you get the morph targets and materials that import with the figure.

Message edited on: 07/26/2005 01:54

"Max: pCharacter may be a good solution for you. You will have to re-rig or fix the rig that it imports but at least you get the morph targets and materials that import with the figure." Thanks, LawnDart. I'll to look into that. I started getting interested in CS recently, since the parametric biped rigs it uses are so damned simple to set up or modify. CS does have it's limitations compared to proper bone rigs, but keyframing accurate motion and getting good walk cycles, etc. using the footsteps feature is really cool. I think GestureMax can transfer everthing to a biped rig, which I found interesting. Thanks again for the tip though.

I have Poser6 and Cinema4D R9. I think on buy the Body studio. Are someone here have know something about that?