There are obviously shortcuts, depending on the modeling tool. If you're willing to go through all the commonly used tools and figure out the best workflow for each, more power to you. In principle, I think, one could even include steps 3 through 5 in a morph loader and write a special export plugin for Poser that omits any grouping information (or maybe, it's enough to tell Poser not to generate any group names on export). That would solve the problem once and for all (or so I hope).

I have written a Scala program that takes two .obj files and creates an output file with all the grouping and the vertex ordering of the first, but the vertex positions from the second. Of course, the mesh topologies must match for that to happen. I actually managed to make this work even if the mesh topologies differ a little (because accidents sometimes happen somewhere in the workflow), but that slows the whole process down quite a bit. So porting it to Python and integrating it as a Poser script while keeping it at a practical speed might be a bit of a challenge, but it could be tried.

But that sounds more like a project for the future, I guess. :laugh:

PS: Yes, people fluent in Unix command line tools could just use sed to get rid of the grouping.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.