Poser models have very high polygon count. How can I reduce it?
I have Mac platform. 

Thanks 
Attila

Use the older figures instead of the newer ones!  Some have made nice animations with the Poser 2 figures.  I myself prefer the Poser 4 and 5 ones, which I even remapped in UV Mapper Pro to take V3 and M3 textures.  You can find these remapped figures here in my freestuff.
DPH

If you mean within poser, you can't. If you're trying to use poser figures inside an external application, then it depends on what you're using.

This is something I am trying to figure out myself for a model I am creating. Some one has suggested to me depending on the model and the tools used to model it, there is not allot you can do.

 This is actually not a figure but a Vinegrape with Vines, which counts 80000 polys. And thats just one. In my vinegarden there should be at least 40  vinestock.   Arouns the actors there should be real 3d objects, but in the distance I can create alpha planes of  the grapevines.

Currently I'm really excited about the lower poly Level Of Detail V4 that is distributed with DAZ Studio. It takes all the V4 morphs / textures and comes in four different resolutions. The "problem" with it is that it works best with a subdivision surface-capable render engine, which Firefly isn't.

In Maya, the polygon reduction tool pretty much destroys your mesh, and overall is useless. I am mildly interested in the Okino poly reduction tool but it seems like overkill.

The best way to deal with this is model something low poly and smooth it / subdivide it. Doesn't work so well the other way.

Use pictures of individual grapevines together with flat planes. Use the grapevine picture to texture and transmap the flatplane.  You can generate a transmap in photoshop (or some such app) by desaturating and then increasing the contrast until it is pure black and white.
Anything more complicated than that, and you'll find yourself in grief.
DPH

Quote - In Maya, the polygon reduction tool pretty much destroys your mesh, and overall is useless. I am mildly interested in the Okino poly reduction tool but it seems like overkill.

The best way to deal with this is model something low poly and smooth it / subdivide it. Doesn't work so well the other way.

Okino works nicely although it WILL triangulate some surfaces (or many). It doesn't do well on nonorganics however and, much like Maya, will collapse some surfaces creating an unusable mesh. But otherwise it is a nice tool for poly reduction on organics (if you don't mind an ugly mesh LOL). Bare in mind though that ugly meshes aren't usually problematic, just ugly at the wireframe view (and most of us modelers are anal about how our meshes look visually LOL). Now, with that said, it's the outcome and useability that is important overall.

As aside, has anyone ever looked at the production specs for Shrek (the first one)?

A generic character in Shrek (without clothes, hair, etc) weighed in between 600,000-700,000 polys. The clothing and/or fur and hair an additional 800,000-900,000. Now with that in mind, guess how many generic characters (with textures, etc) filled the pews and halls of the cathedral scene (wedding)? If you guessed approximately 1500, you win the prize! Imagine rendering just one of those characters without any scenery ;o)

I would make several BILLBOARDS of the vines and use them in the final render. Either that or render only the vine , including shadows , and merge them in photoshop. 

I dont remember if poser has backface cull in the render options , it may help if it does.   Vines and foilage tend to be high poly because you need lots to get smooth curves that render well.

you could always use zbrush and redo the topology and use a displacement map on it? Meats Miers has a good tutorial on it and it doesn't really take that long. just need alittle patience at first but its one of those things its not that hard its a little time cosuming but the more you do the better you get..

Hmm with the vines, what I would typically do is model  the vine, itself,  as normal but the leaves would be transmapped to flat squares that are only one poly each. This signifigantly lowers your poly count.

This is also nice if you want to have different leaf shapes and colors. You can create material zones of 3-5 (or whatever) for the leaves and have that many different leaf types of varying shape and color and it doesn't effect your overall polycount. You could also feasable get away with doing the grapes, themselves, this way if you aren't relying on a closeup of the vines. The leaves would be fine on closeups though since leaves are flat anyhow.

Blender works on Mac.  It provides some decent Python scripts, as I recall, for mesh reduction.  Recent versions of Blender also include retopology tools, although I haven't tested them to see how effective they might be....

 Thanks for the ideas, they are really usable. 
I created the vineplanes but when I move the camera I need to twist the to face the cam.

You can avoid this problem by using two vine planes together so that they create a 3 dimensional image.  Place two planes at right angles to each other so that they bisect one another.  Then texture them both the same.  That way, no matter how you place your camera, you'll always get an image.
DPH

just to agree with any of the above who may have told ya to use the "duplicate"
command in poser, attila.

p.s. in burgundy, attila was known as "etzel".  in case anybody asks.

Do you mean I could duplicate the grapevines without duplicating the polygon count?
Otherwise 40 grapevine mean 3 million polygon.  

I also did one grapevine on the alphaplane with shadows. .....but when the character walks by the grapevine, the shadows look unreal 

atti, my idea was to prune the grapevine prop into one section of 10k polygons,
save that section as a new prop with the customGeom stripped out (as in Daz props),
then load that and duplicate it 8 times to see if the memory load in poser 7 or later is
less than when loading a single 80k-polygon prop which has embedded customGeom,
as poser may become somewhat unresponsive when scene polygons total 3 millions.

 What does prune mean?  I suppose you ment that with the group editor I remove 70k polys, thats about cutting off a good portions of vineblades .

I couldn't find the customGeom strip feature in poser. I looked at the export dialog, the save dialog
and in the manuals.

Here is an image with the grapevine planes with shadows made in photoshop

http://atko.dk/Picture6.png

Thanks for trying to help

yes, att, it involves alotta advanced procedures which can be done in poser, or
with associated scripts and utilities marketed to poser users.  said scripts and
utilities have been mentioned in this forum several times in the past, and they
are not covered in the manual.  however, once poser scene polygon count exceeds
approx. 250k, poser 7 and earlier versions may become unresponsive.  some models
may be worse than others, if large numbers of morphs are involved.

http://www.thomas4d.com/html/t4d_rigging_tools.html

This plugin for Lightwave has been released free. Notice it includes a rig for the 17K LOD version ov V4.

::::: Opera :::::

Just found this soft surfing:
http://www.download.com/Polygon-Cruncher/3000-6677_4-10471701.html?tag=mncol
I do not know this soft but can be usefull.