Is there any way to import Shade Files? Or do I need to purchase Shade and export them as .obj files. Also, if I were to purchase Shade, has anyone any experience using it to render Poser Scenes? All I really want is to be able to use some of the Shade content, musical instruments in particular. (CP has a really nice CD with pretty much an entire orchestra;s worth of instruments. To the best of my knowledge, no one makes a Poser Tuba (as opposed to Sousaphone).
thanks

You'll need Shade.  Poser doesn't import these files - just the basics (3DS, OBJ, BVH, DXF, LWO).

I have Shade 7 Std and haven't used it much so can't answer to importing Poser scenes for render.

Or if you have Vue 5 infinite you can import the shade models and re-export them in another format.
I have shade 7 designer se (the onbe that came free with Poser 6) and for a while I had 8 pro (but I sold it). Both import Poser scenes pretty well. Mainly I hang on to shade 7 specificalluy for the purpose of exporting shade files.

I also have Vue 5 Infinite and didn't even know about Shade support - cool!  :D

Shade works very well with Poser but for some reason Poser lacks support for Shade.

I got currently Shade 8 pro and Poser 7. For some quick rendering and not to complex scenes I use Poser. If it's about production time and quality I use Shade.
You must change some material settings for using Poser content in Shade to make full use of the higher quality that Shade allows. The advanced material room settings will not be translated to Shade's native format. The lights you have to create from scratch and it can be useful to place some "markers" for special lights in Poser before importing the scene. Similar as with Max or Maya...

Beside the better render quality and flexibility with render & light settings, the best reason to work in Shade is the renderfarm support and low memory load. (about 600M for a scene that requires 1GB+ to load in Poser) Disk space needed for the naked app is about 100M. Another ~250M for libraries with textures, models, blabla.

The main drawback is that without reading the manual it might be a little difficult to handle.

Have you had a look at the Shade 8 demo already?
Maybe it allows you to export the models that you need.

AFAIK the Demo Version limits renders to 800x600, has no support for farms and puts some ugly watermark on the pictures. But for exporting meshes it should do...

The one problem with importing shade models into Vue tho is that for some reason the model loses all its materials and puts a mirror mat on everything. The material zones are still there tho so you can "fix" it, but it gets abit tedious manually resetting all the materials.