I have some animals in 3ds max that I would like to use in poser as figures. I'm a real newbee in 3dsmax and might have reached an intermediate level of poser. My question is how do I make these things into figures that I can pose? Do I need to do something to them in max first before importing them? Once I import them what do I do in poser? Is this something way beyond a newbee?

Figures require bones, therefore, you need to know how to do bones in poser, once imported. I suggest searching for DR. Geep tutorials, and see if you can get closer to giving it a try after reading some of those. As far as what to do in max, the gwobjimporter / exporter plugin, it does a good job of poserizing your object.

You need to import the figure into Poser and rig it.  It is not trivial but you can learn it :)
http://www.philc.net/tutorialsIndex.htm  scroll to bottom, Phil Cooke has a series of excellent video tutorials on rigging in Poser available on Youtube at no cost.

Agree with all of the above. I would like to add you also have to worry about grouping and scale of the figure you import.

Hey. We were all Newbies at one point. No faster way to learn than to jump right in there and give it the good old college try!

Thanks all. I'll give it a try. I may be back for more help.

If your obj is grouped phi builder can speed up figure creation a little.

check out downloads at e-frontier , poser 3 downloads , document on figure creation using phi files.