With varying degrees of ease or difficulty, you can move geometry from just about any 3D application to any other.

Rigging (how figures bend and move) is not so portable.

Materials (how figures and props interact with light) is rarely portable.

Moving things to Blender is not what people are suggesting. You asked how to make things from nothing - and that requires a modeling tool. Blender was suggested because it is free.

Once an object (such as a chair) has been modeled, it usually needs to be UV mapped. UV mapping assigns a second set of numbers to the geometry. The first set of numbers is the 3D X/Y/Z coordinates of every point (vertex) and how they are connected. The second set of numbers defines where the vertices exist on a 2D image, for the purpose of drawing what color all the parts of the object are. This is UV mapping - the texture coordinates are called U and V. Most modeling tools supply UV mapping features, but some people prefer dedicated programs that specialize in UV mapping.

For most Poser users, this is the end of the use of modeling and mapping tools, and the object or figure is then brought into Poser for good.

If it is a posable figure, the rigging is done in Poser's setup room. For static props like a chair, no rigging is needed. Poser's setup room is basically a dedicated rigging tool integrated into the program. DAZ studio can do rigging as well, and this rigging is compatible with Poser - mostly.

Many modelers have rigging tools, but they usually only work with that program. DAZ studio and Poser are unique programs in that they start with the rigging step, not modeling and mapping.

What Poser and DAZ studio are great at is set design and posing, i.e. scene creation. Both have renderers as well, so you do not have to export the scene to render somewhere else. However, neither is the best renderer in the world and for many, rendering elsewhere is the main workflow.

Almost every 3D app has unique mechanisms for defining shaders for materials - these define how objects interact with light or produce light on their own. Only the simplest shaders are used in Poser when cross-platform support is desired. But Poser has a very powerful material system, and you want to use the advanced material room to get the most of it. Products that use it become Poser-specific and cannot be rendered as-is in other apps.

For most Poser users, modeling, mapping, rigging, and shading are not interesting or necessary activities. As said earlier, they use pre-made content produced by others. The typical Poser user (not all, of course) are concerned with telling a story. They will choose materials, tweak them maybe, but they will not model or rig. They will choose which morphs to use and how much, but they usually don't make morphs.

In some sense, the tool matches a community (defined by the desire to assemble scenes but not create content) and the community defines the tool. This community also defines the price that will be tolerated. As a consequence, Poser has become rather specialized at this specific use case.

 

 

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)