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

V4 is not a DS model.. she is poser content. Daz Studio is a poser "clone" application that uses poser content.

It is growing, and while it lacks many features, it also has a few features available now that even exceed poser's capabilities.

Daz poser products are required to work in at least Poser 6, unless otherwise stated. (Some products are application specific, like carerra content, or poser or DS plugins.)

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.

DS also does not have dynamic hair at all, so you'll have to either use poser dynamic hair on a figure, or do the hair in max separately with it's tools available.

I would second exporting as a scene. You would have to usually load some textures anyways with any scene in Max so that doesn't bother me. But you are going to have some issues with the hair I think, if you are looking for strand. I'm not for sure, but I think you are going to have to create that in Max...but that is a tool readily available in Max.

Also, strand hair in max is gonna look a hell of a lot better from anything coming from poser.

Does Max Support Collada ??

I often send DS figures to Cinema4D as Collada Rigs

Oh and Garee  is right!!

if you are a serious MAX license Owner You won want to bother with poser Hair .. or poser shaders for the mater

thanks all for the feedback, i was able to get the Poserfusion working after contacting smithmicro support, I think I had the same problem as you buddy Digger,  wouldnt load in the .pz3 file until i pointed to the correct poser executable (within max),
Do you really think that the hair in max (using hair & fur wsm) will be better than what can be created within Poser? I am not qualified to discuss the merits of either,, its interesting that both opinions point to Max's hair. Ultimately I need the best looking hair.
final question : how come when I go to Content paradise /poser pro I dont see any victoria 4 modles for sale just addons for her?
Thanks again
Mike

Hmmm.... let me mull this over.....

Could the hair in a low end consumer application be better then one in a professional application costing thousands of dollars, and being used by television and movie studios?

Hmmmm... I'll have to think about that for a while before I culd come up with an answer....

i think it was a fair question, I have purchased both and have used max for almost 10yrs, specifically for product and arch viz visualisation hence i I do know many features of max and its associated rendering engines, so satire aside you can forgive me for not knowing how good its hair & fur is....

PoserPro being  a $500 character application (1/6  cost of max) one would obviously  think that it does characters (inc hair) to a high level., considering the vast amount of features that MAX has compared to Poser , Poser seems expensive, hence therefore my thoughts were that what it (poser) does do, it probably does it well.

Mike

If you want good dynamic hair, you're better off doing Max hair, then trying Poser hair imports.

Personally, to get things into Max, I export via Collada from D|S, then import into Max.  Brings in Rigging and morphs. Again, hair, you're better off creating Max's own dynamic hair then trying to import from Poser.

I never bought Poser Pro, can't figure out why I'd need it.