Whatever external tool you use, my observation is that the geometry side of things tends to work fine. Camera and lights sometimes work great and sometimes don't work at all, and materials take an intermediate position. Essentially, the best use of those tools require you to redo the lighting and texturing, and preferrably use the (ligts and) materials that come with the pack itself.

This principle also holds within variuos environmens themselves. I don't use MAX myself anymore, but if I recall correctly one has to choose a renderer first and then pick from the accompanying materials collection. After that, one has an issue when switching renderer because the one cannot handle the materials from the other.

As a rule of thumb, most features which can be handled through the Poser Materials Room SIMPLE interface make a good change of getting transferred, although not even all of them. Any material feature which requires the ADVANCED interface doesn't have a change, with perhaps an exception or two.

This holds for Vue, Octane, Reality/Lux (I dit quite some research on those) and exporting to OBJ/MTL, COLLADA etc.

Diffuse_Color does, Diffuse_Value does not, Alt_Diffuse does or does not, from all nodes only Image_Map transfers but procedural and math nodes do not, and so on.

This external interfacing creates issues with those tools and method that build great node-trees into the Alt_Diffuse slot, or alike. EZMat, EZSkin, MatMathic, many examples in this forum, you name them. They are great, but not for the exporting part of the game...

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though