Spent last weekend working in Poser's cloth room (P5). Much unexplainable behavior: Sometimes half the model would be missing on import, sometimes the model would import but not the dynamics..., had many many crashes which corrupted a Carrara file (which now crashes Carrara, boo!).... when I hit these problems it was usually easier to start over from scratch rather than figure out the problem... ;(

Fortunately there are lots of Poser tutorials on the web, so learning the cloth room isn't difficult....

One hint I came across (but now can't find) was an issue that the NAME of the cloth item can not have any spaces in it. If I hadn't read that I would have given up in frustration -- Transposer imported the cloth but not the dynamics. (I never discovered why half my model would go missing, just had to build it again...)

Any other tips for a pre-Transposer check list? Maybe this is more of a Poser topic, but for now at least I think Poser5 is the cheapest plugin for Carrara to make dynamic cloth and hair.

holly

Hi Holly, When it comes to naming conventions/practices, I kind of stick to what works in Java. It's really simple and uneccessary for most programs but sometimes if it's not followed, the files bite back. The naming conventions I use that always work in every program show like this: myFileV1a No capitals in the first character and no spaces in the names. The only times I've had issues on import is when I'll change a dynamic but the .dyn file doesn't update correctly. Then when Carrara does the import, things get goofy. So, I rework the Poser file until I'm certain that I like the motion of the cloth and then use that. If I have to change the Poser file later on, I do a Save-as and create a new directory for all the related files to go into. I haven't had the Carrara crash issue that you mention but I have had Poser zaniness. Mark

Can I save a PZ3 and it's .dyn(s) in a folder for later import into Carrara? These files are starting to clutter my desktop, but I'm scared to move them...

Definitely. As you start getting into more 3d integration, keeping a project file with sub files for every project program/process is a best-method type of practice. In fact, most of my assignments look something like this: -Project X x_aiFiles x_psdFiles x_carFiles x_hxnFiles x_vueFiles x_ap3Files x_textures x_movFiles etc... It keeps me out of trouble. It seems like a hassle to set up but is worth every second later on.

Holly, 
     When you run dynamics in Poser-5 it creates frames and naturally in Carrara it will import at frame 1. So the dynamic cloth imported is often mistaken for "not working" when in actuality the draped cloth is at frame 32 in Carrara... I know it sounds kind of obvious and goofy, but a lot of people overlook it. 

Steven