I'm looking into purchasing Vue but I would like to know if it is possible to import poser characters with animation? I've just started testing Vue 6 PLE but wanted to ask this question before I spent hours searching for the ability to do this. You're help would be greatly appreciated. Steve

give it a try - the PLE is a fully functioning version of Vue with a couple of restrictions, watermarked renders and the files you create are locked to your version of the PLE. 

Vue 6 Infinite can import Poser characters. I have done it with Poser 7 and Victoria 3 and successfully rendered it. Once in Vue you can't do anything with the character or animation without going back to Poser.

Quote - Vue 6 Infinite can import Poser characters. I have done it with Poser 7 and Victoria 3 and successfully rendered it. Once in Vue you can't do anything with the character or animation without going back to Poser.

I've been able to import characters and their associated textures into Vue so that issue is solved. However my biggest question is can I import Poser Characters with animation data on the characters into Vue? If not then I won't be purchasing Vue. Steve

Yes, Vue accepts the animation data. You may or may not be able to use quaternion interpolation; but there is a checkmark to ignore this on the import panel. When you import the Poser pz3, you have the option to select a frame for single import, of the entire frame range. If you are planning to animate with Vue as your endstage renderer/environmental generator, you will want to take advantage of some tricks: Use global ambience whenever you can, and bake the illumination into the static parts of your scene, to speed up final renderspeed. Plan from the start to render out as uncompressed frames instead of rendering to codec. You will have far more control over your final video output if you assemble the frames in a video editor (not to mention that with the uncompressed frames, you can do postwork and still have the originals to go back to if you goof. And by using a video editing program to assemble the raw frames, you can experiment with codecs and pixel size and formatting to your heart's content without having to re-render the scene if you don't like it). Look into assembling yourself a small rendergarden. The Hypervue module for Esprit, and Infinite and Xstream, ship with a 5 node liscence; so you can install up to 5 rendercows on remote computers (Vue itself can not render anything when it is acting as the Hypervue controller, so you either install a cow on your main system, or just plan on not adding that load to what the app already will place on your system and use totally remote nodes). With Poser figures, plan on reducing the size of the skin textures by a -lot-. The 4000x4000 jpegs cause memory issues unless you are running the 64 bit version and have lots of RAM. If you plan to get Infinite or Xstream, you should check out SkinVue....which uses Vue shaders to generate skintones for Poser figures. Make sure you have a battery backup on your main system; a good, beefy one. Vue has the capability of resuming a render, or doing the final conversion of an aborted render....but a power induced crash can mess that up.

Quote - Yes, Vue accepts the animation data. You may or may not be able to use quaternion interpolation; but there is a checkmark to ignore this on the import panel. When you import the Poser pz3, you have the option to select a frame for single import, of the entire frame range. If you are planning to animate with Vue as your endstage renderer/environmental generator, you will want to take advantage of some tricks: Use global ambience whenever you can, and bake the illumination into the static parts of your scene, to speed up final renderspeed. Plan from the start to render out as uncompressed frames instead of rendering to codec. You will have far more control over your final video output if you assemble the frames in a video editor (not to mention that with the uncompressed frames, you can do postwork and still have the originals to go back to if you goof. And by using a video editing program to assemble the raw frames, you can experiment with codecs and pixel size and formatting to your heart's content without having to re-render the scene if you don't like it). Look into assembling yourself a small rendergarden. The Hypervue module for Esprit, and Infinite and Xstream, ship with a 5 node liscence; so you can install up to 5 rendercows on remote computers (Vue itself can not render anything when it is acting as the Hypervue controller, so you either install a cow on your main system, or just plan on not adding that load to what the app already will place on your system and use totally remote nodes). With Poser figures, plan on reducing the size of the skin textures by a -lot-. The 4000x4000 jpegs cause memory issues unless you are running the 64 bit version and have lots of RAM. If you plan to get Infinite or Xstream, you should check out SkinVue....which uses Vue shaders to generate skintones for Poser figures. Make sure you have a battery backup on your main system; a good, beefy one. Vue has the capability of resuming a render, or doing the final conversion of an aborted render....but a power induced crash can mess that up.

Thanks for the information Dale. So far I've been able to import Poser characters as .obj files with textures but without any animation data attached. So my next question would be does Vue have the ability to import poser characters and animations as .pz3 files or does it only import .obj? Thanks. Steve

Importing Poser obj's is doing things the hard way. Just go to 'File' and select 'Import Object' and select your chosen pz3. Poser and Vue's render engine does things in different ways, so you will have to adjust the material settings after import; transparency is the most common glitch, as Poser uses a grayscale map in the exact opposite way than Vue does (this isn't a consistent glitch, either). Both dynamic cloth and hair imports, but be ready to do some experimenting to get the strand based hair looking decent. Poser's D hair is a runtime effect, and again you run into the differences in render engines (do a google search for Adorana; s/he's on a german site, and makes some of the best dynamic hair props I've ever seen). It can be done, but it takes some tweaking and testing. In Poser, unselect the 'use pzz' option, and use the python srcipts in the app to uncompress the content (uncompressed content imports much better. You will also have to watch out and make sure that your content pathnames are accurate. Poser has a recursive search function and can hunt out files for its own use; exporting content depends on the pathnames being accurate)

You don't even have to use the special 'import object' order.

I load any Poser 7 (5, 6) pz3 file - with or without animation - directly like any other object with the 'Object load' button - no special import to choose, because Vue handles this automatically, since it knows, what a pz3 file is (surely in the options settings you have to have the Poserimport configured and set).

(... and the usual thing to set in Poser Preferences - under the Misc. tab - select 'use external binary morph targets')