I know, probably I should RTFM. (tried... gave up.)

Why would I want to do it anyway? Weightmapped chracters are so much better.

And they are. But...

Interposer Pro, a low cost plugin to get your Poser scenes into C4D doesn't support Poser's funky new weightmapping.  The fabulously gifted coder who wrote it can't continue development because he's broke and has to pay the rent.

Why would I want to export to C4D? Because it renders around 50x faster than Firefly - I'm not knocking Firefly, I actually quite like it, but C4D's native renderers give me better results an awful lot faster. So I've gone down that road...

So can I easily turn WM off? - even if it creates bending anomalies or whatever - I could probably sort that by hand seeing as my figures tend to be fully clothed.

So. WeightMaps off. How?

(Perhaps the mighty Ockham could write a script: Unweightmaperizer... or similiar...)

You can't.

Weightmaps contain a lot more information than a falloff zone does.

You can convert a falloff zone to a weightmap, but once the weightmap has been edited to improve the bending, you can't just convert it back and still have a functioning figure.

All you can do is delete the weightmaps and add new sphere zones instead.

Which will load in their default positions and so be useless until you edit them to match the bodypart you are rigging.

Basically you have to re-rig the figure from scratch again to make it work without weightmaps.

There are what five or nine wieght mapped figures Allison Roxie Antonia V4WM Ryan Rex and some Gen 3 DAZ figures. right? So if you don't use those or the Poser 8 capsule rigging then interposer should just work

If all else fails, you could pose the figure in Poser and then export it as an OBJ and render that in C4D. But you'd lose the posability of course.

Thanks for the answers.

It's what I feared.

I would have liked to have used Miki4, Anastasia and Tyler.

Not to mention Dawn.

Well, at least I will be able to use Dawn in DS and use collada export - which sadly is broken in Poser.

Quote - If all else fails, you could pose the figure in Poser and then export it as an OBJ and render that in C4D. But you'd lose the posability of course.

Ah well, you see, I neglected to say, I only do animations...

If you own Poser Pro I believe it comes with plugins that allow you to host a Poser scene inside C4D. Are you using that?

collada export is broken?

Quote - If you own Poser Pro I believe it comes with plugins that allow you to host a Poser scene inside C4D. Are you using that?

Strangely enough, I recently got PoserFusion to work, for the first time ever (to be fair, the PoserFusion plugin for Lightwave always worked rather well, that is, if you like rendering bald people).

But the 60$ InterPoser Pro plugin for C4D, not only imports Poser strand hair - I think I'm the only person on the planet who actually likes the Poser hair room - but also allows me to bake Poser characters/props into native C4D objects.

In comparison, PoserFusion for C4D is, errrrr, a bit weak. (And Poser strand hair looks like crap.)

Please don't even mention transmapped hair, it's OK for background figures, but I can use DAZ collada export for that.

Quote - collada export is broken?

To quote SM:

"Conforming figures in Poser Pro do not reliably export via COLLADA"

source: http://poser.smithmicro.com/collada.html

I can confirm this 100%. Or rather, they are totally reliable, as in it is totally reliable that conforming clothing will look like crap.

DAZ collada export has the same problem, BUT they have the option to combine figure and conforming clothing into one mesh (I'm fine with that) and then it works OK.

And as of PP2014, Poser has so far crashed on every attempted collada export.

So, although I'm not generally the kind of person to be disheartened, I think that because "so called high end app" users are not the kind of people to moan on Poser forums (apart from ME!), nothing will ever happen.

Ah, so you are asking, DAZ collada export works, why aren't you using that?

I'll tell you, because I'm the one person in the known Universe who actually likes the Poser hair room, and who thinks that the results, once exported to and simmed in C4D look absolutely brilliant...

CaptainMARC, "I'm the one person in the known Universe who actually likes the Poser hair room, and who thinks that the results, once exported to and simmed in C4D look absolutely brilliant..."

Make that two of us please. Ánd C4D render about 50x faster - correct. So if you want to render a 20 sec 600 frames animation you can apply the math...

But unlike you, I am sure of that the Dawn team will deliver a version for all versions of Poser back to 7, or even earlier.

you can remove weightmaps from a poser figure if sufficiently motivated. You can clip them out in poser live, or in the cr2. I'm nto sure what horrible things will ahppen to your bends however.  You will still have capsule zones on most bends.

You might at that point be moderately better off investing the work in setting up a non wm version of the figure, starting with the base obj.

theoretical workflow:

start with obj, Create PHI with PHIbuilder. import obj and convert PHI to a rig.

Now load the existing wm version. manually copy endpoints and bend parameteres from wm to nonwm. (This stage could in theory be done by making a JPsetting pz2 file, but most people don't know how.)

At this point you should have a figure that is morph compatible and more or less kinda sorta everything else compatible. But most likely with nasty bend issues. I would suppose at this stage you could start adding in your joint adjustment morphs to fix the worst bend issues.

If you felt like distributing this chimera without the obj, jpg or any of the stock morphs included, you should be fine legally. If the aly2 morphs are included then you would need to RTE code it. For anastasia compatability all the blank channels Anastasia needs would also have to be in your chimera figure

or you could skip all that, and get the official poser to c4d plugin thing, which does just fine with aly2 from what I can see

Lyrra

Sincere apologies to Vintorix.

It appears that I am one of two people in the known Universe who actually like the hair room.

And if Dawn can slot into our workflow it would, of course, be fab.

Quote - or you could skip all that, and get the official poser to c4d plugin thing, which does just fine with aly2 from what I can see

I have PoserFusion and it indeed works with weightmapped figures. It doesn't work well with hair though.

So for me a figure can have either weightmapping or hair!

And thanks for the info in your answer.

CaptainMARC,

Create the animation in Daz Studio and export everything, avatar with cloth and animation to C4D R14 with fbx. If you like you can enhance the animation in Motionbuilder.(Daz-MB-C4D). The first frame should always be a T-pose with a soft transition to the start of the animation.

In C4D pick up the hair with Interposer and bake it, then parent to avatar's head.

Then if you really want a killing final touch, export the whole thing to Marvelous Designer (with pc2 or mdd) and add some dynamic cloth. Export back the cloth in the same way.

No need for Poser at all.

 Edit: If you really want to try, there are some details you need to know.

Ha! Strangely enough, I actually do my cloth sims in MD! (and I would highly recommend this to anyone!)

I had considered exporting figure and hair separately as you suggest, but I was worried I might get scaling issues.

And since we do everything else pretty much the same, you've got me curious about Motionbuilder. I'll have to look into that...

The hair do not really need to be real figure. Just parenting works just as well. In fact the Poser hair that comes as "Hair", as opposed to "Figure" is just that, an obj parented to the head.

When you export from Daz don't forget to check for "Merge Clothing Into Figure Skeleton", you don't want every item of cloth to be separately rigged. (Will not work in Marvelous Designer among else). Also when you export direct from Daz to C4D R14 do NOT check "Frame Rate" in the import settings. It breaks the import.

But one of the drawbacks with importing directly from Daz to C4D is that you get the parameters of every little finger and other unnecessary garbage. Motionbuilder is ideal in the context because for the first you can enhance the animation in a professional way and for the second it allows you to export only the parameters you want. You do that by constructing a skeleton avatar with the bare minimum of joints that is exported together with the animation. This skeleton drives the full figure in the final animation.

Thanks for the tips.

I'm downloading the Motionbuilder demo right now.

I like Poser as an animation tool, and find Daz Studio rather difficult to use, (That's just a personal preference and absolutely no comment about the quality of the respective apps.) though Daz does have its uses - like the fbx export.

If you don't mind me asking, what, in your opinion, does Motionbuilder bring to the table that Poser and Daz doesn't?

I am no expert in Motionbuilder, I only learned enough of it to use it for retargeting. There are tons of free motions out there and it seems such a waste not be able to use them for Daz/Poser figures. MB is really good at that sort of thing. 

Actually I am not certain of what the best tool is for key frame animation, C4D or MB. But I know that nitty-gritty key frame animation in Daz or Poser is a total waste of time. But C4D or MB? I don't know because I don't know any of them enough. Creating animation is not really my thing I only want to use what exists out there.

What Daz is good at is building fast animations with aniblocks and the Puppeteer. It also can use motions from Poser for example the walk designer. But again, it has to be cleaned up the seams between the blocks is almost never perfect and the feet are dragging on the floor, that sort of things.

DAZ does sell an aniblock importer for Poser.