Quote - Hi folks,
I posted here before about this before but since then I purchased Poser Pro (havent had much time to use it though) and a couple of other issues did arise. 
OK here is my predicament: I need to get my poser character into MAX 2009 (or earlier) for rendering, -that is a must.  I want to get the hair in to max so that it is strand like and not a poly mesh.  I am downloading the 1.2 upgrade (for max2009 from smithmicro at the mo) and I am hoping that this will import in the charater and hair properly,

I did look at DS as it was a cheaper alternative (but I have no experience of it and some experience of Poser), it appears that DS doesnt integrate with max that well. If I am wrong about this please correct me.

Final thing, can DS models eg v4 Load into Poser, which models are generally considered the best, poser's or DS's?,
thanks
Mike

Hiya Mike, yes it is possible to transfer Poser models to Max, however the "poser fusion" that comes with Poser Pro seems to have a lot of issues in this regard.  As I understand it it actually loads a Poser Object into max by running a copy of Poser to "interpret" the poser content for max, and that the setup for it is anything but straightfoward.  It appears to install quite easily, but it never seems to work after that.  I had a friend tell me that after installing it on his system first it couldn't find 3ds Max, not until he downgraded his 2009 copy to version 9.0, then once he did it seemed to find Max fine but couldn't find Poser until he reloaded version 6, which he thought was rather silly considering it came with Poser Pro and yet couldn't seem to find the software it came with.  From the reading I've done in various forums it's more or less a plug and pray type of thing, plug it in, pray it works, odds are good your prayers will not be answered.

I've had really good luck myself transfering poser Models to max by simply exporting my Poser scene to OBJ file and importing into Max from there.  The problem with this method is that Max cannot find the texture files on it's own this way, so you'll either need to point it to each individual texure (which can be a pain) or get a 3rd party program like Right Hemisphere's Deep Explorer, which can easily convert all the information from a collada file into a format that any version of  Max can fully understand with little muss or fuss.