GIMP/GTK? Heh - you ARE a masochist, aren't you? :)

(kidding! Err, almost.)

Yeah - the whole texture switcheroo thing is what I was getting at as a major obstacle. You get one or the other, but not both... and no app alive can make another app do both (at least not without an SDK and a metric shedload of exposed goodies in it to facilitate such things).

ROTFL... Dale! You bastard -I forgot all about the invisible mystery bone! :)  I guess I hadn't seen one in so long... 

I agree that FaST couldn't hurt to have its own file format. Then again, hell - FBX and COLLADA are open, and they both have very generous specs as to what kinds of stuff you can store in them. D|S originally built the .daz binary format because 1) .obj is too limited, 2) .3ds sucks to write for (in addition to being almost as limited as .obj), and 3) there wasn't really anything else at the time that filled the bill, unless you wanted to pay some corp a ton o' cash for the privilege of writing to theirs. But... back on the first hand: with your own format, it's hella easy to read-in and write-out your own files, your way. Call it sixes?

Renderdog... a LOT of what you're describing is already present in D|S (insofar as Poser compatibility), but they stopped well short of direct export of .pz3 files outside of testing- and I haven't seen anything reliable come of anything in that direction last I checked (this may have changed, but I'm not holding my breath). Pose, Char, Lights, files like that... no prob. But strangely enough,  .pz3 (the entire self-contained scene-in-a-bucket) is a royal screamer to construct - at least in a manner that can be consistently read-in to Poser. That is, unless you use Poser itself to write it. I wish I knew why that is.

/P