Hey all, I'm actually looking at possibly using Poser with Vue now because I'm getting more into the animation side of things. Now, I think it's safe to say it will be mostly used for non-human animals such as whales, sharks, birds, ect, but I imagine I may get into a bit of human movement too. My question is, I read about how you can create characters from their library of characters. Is there any way to create from scratch? How powerful is this editor? What positives/negatives come with this software (I'm aware of the dynamic hair problem)? I'm looking for the best way to get some life into my renders. Poser seems to be the most used option. Thanks a ton in advance! EDIT: Also looking at DAZ models...but you cant import the animation into Vue to my understanding. In Poser, can you import a model bought at DAZ 3D and animate it there? -Ryan Spaulding

You can't create characters from scratch in Poser, you use existing models, that you can pose, and transform, provided they have morph targets created, or if you can create them yourself, using other software. If you need animals, some of them come with the program, but they are quite low res meshes. You'll need to buy some, at Daz or Content Paradise, or any othe site that sells such creatures. You can animate a DAZ character in Poser and import the animation in Vue, no problem. poser animation import in Vue works well, sometimes with, sometimes without the "quaternion interpolation". 2 issues I can think of in Vue are: The dynamic hair import. It's just too ugly to import it. OOM error message, due to huge hi-res texture maps used for characters. You won't be able to use too many of them in your Vue scene.

Thanks for the response Bruno. Is it possible to resize the texture maps after output somehow?

Yes, it's possible, but physically, in a paint program. Poser allows you to decide a max texture size when rendering, so if you have , say a 4049x4096 texture, you can tell Poser to reduce to 2048 when rendering, but it doesn't reduce phisically the image, it just creates a lower res virtual version in memory and only when rendering. Upon saving the scene, the real texture size is saved. But Vuedoesn't have this option, so you'll need to create lower res textures in a paint program, which is going to be quite tedious, since you'll have to retexture everything in Vue.

Ah, that should be fine. Tedious is my middle name :) Plus, if one saves out, lets just say a humpback whale with a simple looping animation, you could then just save the texture map(s) once and keep them on your HD. Last question I promise, but are animated objects able to be saved as vob? Say I looped the animation in Poser, resaved the textures in Photoshop, the import into Vue, reapply textures, save THAT as a vob...will the looping animation be retained? Thanks a TON for your help btw.

A better way might be to re-texture the humpack in Poser. Do the resizing (if necessary) in a 2D paint app, and save the new texture to a new file (be sure to maintain the aspect ratio of the original texture, tho..). In Poser, load/import humpy, apply new texture, animate it and save the animation (as .pz3 file). You can then import that animation (complete with texture) into any Vue scene... Cheers, Diolma (Still working on my avatar)...

Attached Link: http://renderfred.free.fr/fei_tuvinien.html

It's not quite as bad as that. There was a nice tutorial/'making of' called 'The Battle of Fei Tuvinien' by Frederic Louguet in which he showed how to get multiple Poser figures into Vue, including some excellent shortcuts for resizing textures without having to retexture everything. You can download the .pdf from his site (link).

So can one take an existing model in 3ds format (w/o bones) and add the bones in Poser? Or are there additional steps that need to be taken so that it can be animated and work in Poser?

"So can one take an existing model in 3ds format (w/o bones) and add the bones in Poser? Or are there additional steps that need to be taken so that it can be animated and work in Poser?" Yes you can. But (as always, being Poser), Poser's bone room (SHUDDER!!) suffers from some eccentricities. If you can, (given the new PHP forum), search out Dr Geep's (aka geep) tutorials for this... Cheers, Diolma

You can import the animated PZ3 (Poser file format) into Vue and save it as vob. You will lose the connection with Poser in the process ( no more reposing and reimporting).