The Poser material handling is a pain indeed. But the posing can be done right straight in Poser itself.

I have fallen in love with RDNA Microcosm. It allows me to create the basic landscape where my Poser figures can walk/lie/sit on. The precision posing can be done very well in Poser itself.

One of the tricks I've learned is building the scene in Poser, using nude untextured figures, making sure Poser doesn't crash. Nude and untextured means Poser can easily handle 20 figures, even Millenium 3 ones.

For every scene I create a separate folder. This Poser base scene is saved in the scene folder as "All.pz3" Then I delete all figures except one (adapted a Python script by Ockham), I texture the figure, add clothing and/or har when applicable, and save it as ".pz3" Reload "All.pz3", and finish and save another figure.

Then I fire up Vue 5 Infinite, import one of the .pz3s, fix up the materials, save as .VOB. Import next .pz3, fix up materials, save as .VOB, and so on, and so on.

Vue suffers from memory leaks, so I occasionally quit and restart Vue.

Finally, when all .pz3s have been converted to .vob, I quit and restart Vue and start building the scene using the .vobs. Only then I add native Vue objects such as rocks and plants.

This method works very well for stills. I've created stills with over 20 human figures, plus complex ecosystems, this way. Rendering to screen usually crashes, but rendering to disk works pretty well. I must admit that Vue has a nice piece of hardware to play in, Athlon64x2 4400, 4 GB RAM, nVidia 7800GTX, 2x73 GB WD Raptor 10,000 RPM.

The Poser files can be reused for another scene.

The material issue is a pain. I'm seriously considering writing a set of Python scripts to do some standard fixups of materials.

I hope Vue 6 will have fixed the material import.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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