Does Lightwave impore Cr2 figures? Just wondering because I Really want lightwave but that's the only thing holding me back. (That and Money)

Not on its own - there are (paid for) plugins available from greenbriar to do that, I don't have them though. It will load .obj files, but of course they will be unrigged.

Attached Link: http://www.greenbriarstudio.com/3D/

Greenbriar has a CR2 Loader and Rigger plug-in that does a great job of importing CR2's into LightWave. Nice thing about the plug-in is that it will also load all of the character morphs in as endomorphs, so you can add associated morphs to clothing in as you build them.

I also use Greenbriar, it loads the cr2 and creates the bones in Lightwave, but you have to create the weight maps yourself, it's not the easiest thing. If you can afford Lightwave, it will open up a new world of creativity for you, Poser is quite limited compared to LW. It has a learning curve, but you can do so much more with it.

Attached Link: http://www.fotoonz.com

That is very true! If someone invents a direct translator for complete Poser scenes to Lightwave, they're going to make a lot of money. I'd buy it in a hot minute. Gordon

This is why I still use Poser Pro Pack (and Lightwave 6.5). I don't want to have to rig/weight map. I love the Poser dials for animating. The Lightwave Import plugin that comes with ProPack allows me to do just that. If the only reason you're interested in Lightwave is to be able to interact with your Poser scenes (at a higher quality) there are other options. Wolf359 has had good success with Cararra. If I were to start now that's what I'd probably use. It's a direct import of Poser scenes into a quality renderer (and animation and modeling app). He's a Lightwave user as well. Shade, made by E-Frontier, also appears to be able to import Poser scenes directly. There's a free demo download available at E-Frontier's web site. Both of these are less expensive than Lightwave. Please don't take this as a slam against Lightwave. I like it a lot. However, these are viable options worthy of consideration both for budgetary and quality reasons. I know what it's like to not be able to afford things. All too well...

I count Bobasaur as one of the lucky ones who got that plug-in to work. And those that did swear by it. Once I upgraded to LW 7 it went from sort of working to not working at all. Currently I use the Greenbriar plug-ins and Lightwave 8.5. While I have the plugs that rig the cr2, the weight map issue is a bit daunting for every piece of new clothes you want to add. Mostly I use LW for characters I've created in LW. The poser work I use the Greenbriar plugs for sets and vehicles in LW and render the people in Poser 6 and then Comp in PS7. Not the perfect arrangement but currently it's what I do. I really do love Lightwave for it's professional interface.

Attached Link: http://www.fotoonz.com

Can Shades or Cararra do network rendering? I am sort of biased toward LW. I love the rendering engine. Lighting set-up is a snap. Posing a well-rigged figure is easy. Poser has one HUGE draw. Availability of content. For what I'm doing, that is key. I use the Greenbriar plugs to move stuff into LW, but frequently use Poser for reasons of expediency. I wish I had a month or two to convert all the Poser content I have into LW format.

Attached Link: loose top animation

HI i too use poser for high quality content but render in other programs for very short a while Curiousl labs provided a free plugin for export of scenes & animation to lightwave and cinema4dXL but abandonded us after on version After years of frustration I moved to carrarpro4 which has import of poser scene & animation as an included program feature. and comes with two free render clients for network/batch rendering i have no interst in manually setting weightmaps in Lightwave with the greenbriar *"solution"* the problem with relying on third party providers to give you a seamless bridge from poser to high end render apps is that they never keep up with the new version of the target applicatioon leaving you stuck using and **OLD** version of Lightwave ,MAX C4D etc. just to keep your poser compatibility. Carrara/VUE will always have poser import. hers is a simple poser cloth animation rendered in carrara pro4 i still use cinema4D studio bundle for stills modeling /effects but i will stick with Carrara pro for rendering poser animtions

Are Cararra's rendering times faster than Poser's??? P6 seems unbelievably slow, when it doesn't crash.

Lightwave is Awesome! If you are going to get it you will probably want to learn rigging anyway?

Getting Poser animations into is a pain though. I also use PPP.

Here are a couple of samples. I rigged Grim for limited movement without using weight maps.

And the 2nd shows Reflections

Grim rigged

Vicki3 and reflections

but i agree, try the demo's. And let us see some of your work! ^ ^

Not to digress from the subject but... @jerr3d, What aspect of getting Poser animations into LW do you find to be a pain? The only thing I find kind of tedious is having to go through all the textures and alter them a bit. Oh, and I have to wait a couple of seconds for the Lightwave window to redraw when I move along the timeline. Other than that I find it pretty smooth.

Well Bobasaur, I mostly use P6, but to get an animation into LW I have to switch my P6 file to PPP, then to LW. ; . ; btw How is your Poser/Lightwave project going?

Ah. That would be a pain. I build it in PPP in the first place so I don't have to worry about that. The music video that I'd been working on is basically stalled out. It took so long that I basically lost steam on it and it's kind of hard for me to get back into. I'd still like to finish it but there are a couple of other priorities now. Of course, I've learned so much since I started that I might end up re-lighting and texturing and rendering everything I've already done again. -grin- [Note to others: this was a music video that included a 4 member band, a baby, 2 dancing girls, and six warriors engaged in swordplay - all animated in Poser. It's quite a handful!]