Thank you, stewer! :)  I was just about to make mention of quads over triangles - and n-gons.

• Try to keep your quads flat (planar).  This will avoid strange shading side-effects.  Not a hard rule, but may uncover why some areas look funny when all other checks fail.

• Make sure that your polygon normals all point in the proper directions - this one has caused many a modeler grief.  Also be aware of the difference in polygon winding.  Cinema 4D and Poser are opposite (Left and Right handed coord. systems), thus your normals should be inverted either before export from C4D or during import to Poser.

• As noted, for sharp edges either chamfer/bevel or split vertices along the hard edge.

• Watch out for fanning triangles - these tend to cause bad shading side-effects.  Sometimes the Phong angle helps (Model->Smooth in UV Mapper).

• Check your model for degenerate polygons, n-gons, unused points, unused polygons.  Weld vertices (as already noted) - except where you are explicitly using the duplicates for a hard edge.

• Quickie on UV Mapping: there are always two goals here - reduction of seams (where mated polygon edges are not touching in the UV map) and stretching (distortion of texture map when applied).

• As stewer alludes to, what is modeled and what is texture needs to be considered.  Too much detail in the model will cause the obj to be polygon heavy.  Most small surface details can be achieved with bump mapping.  Where you need to have surface details that are more prevalent but would be costly to model in polygons, use displacement maps (but they'll be of no use in Poser 4 ProPack and earlier).

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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