After a fairly long hiatus, I've fired up Blender to do a bit of arch-vis: designing a shadehouse for propagating seedlings. Building out of PVC pipe and shade-cloth, but I wanted to sort-of get a fitting count and would this work, that look okay, and all that. To the latter end, I've posed and exported some stock PP11 figures to sort-of get an idea how the shadehouse will actually be moved around in.

Which got me back to playing in Poser and finally, using other figures rather than the stock PP11 figures. And have discovered some very interesting features that make a huge difference in making Poser and Blender work together better. If you already know about these, you might wish to move to another thread, but anyways, here's what I discovered.

Copying multiple materials from one figure to another

If the figures have exactly the same material zones, and you've laboriously set up all the shaders and everything for your first figure, it is now trivial to copy all those shaders and everything over to the new figure. Simply select the figure you're copying the shaders TO first, then the figure you're copying the shaders FROM next; then in the Material box, next to your list of mat zones are the customary add / delete + and - signs, and under that is the magic:

...a little dropdown with tons of goodies. Simply select "Copy material to Selected" and voila! 23 mat zones - with complex shaders - all faithfully copied from figure to figure!

Okay, so folks are probably going: "yeah, so? we already KNEW about this!" Granted, most folks probably already have. But do you know about shape-key pose transfers? 

Blender 3.1 sort-of's got me doing the "kid-in-the-lollie-shop" thing these days... forgot just how much fun this was. Blender development is simply in a class on its own. I'm a Musescore user: which is a freeware competitor to music notation software costing hundreds of dollars like Sibelius and Finale and even Dorico... their development of Musescore 4 is incredible, but even it doesn't hold a candle to where Blender has gone.

So, I'm pretty happy with posing figures in Poser. Rendering? not so much. And the cloth-room, er, yeah, not crasy about that either. But POSING is so easy... so I pose my figures in Poser, export to OBJ and then use this awesome (new-to-me-at-least) feature in the Oject Data Properties area... again, it's that little dropdown under the add/delete + and - thing. Workflow is as follows:

* Pose your figure in Poser

* Export as OBJ (your posed figure and the one in Blender must be identical in terms of vertex count or this will not work)

* Import OBJ into Blender (scale up x10, the Object -> Apply -> Scale - which I always do with imported figures from Poser)

* Select the figure that is to receive the pose - customarily in a T-pose at this point

* In the Oject Data Properties area (with the little green flux-capacitor icon), in the Shape Key section select the [ + ] ... it will give you a new shape key entry called "basis"

* Import your posed obj, doing the whole scale x10, Object -> Apply -> Scale thing. Not sure it is strictly necessary, but always good to have like with like

* Select the posed figure FIRST

* Hold down the shift key and select the T-posed figure that is to receive the pose NEXT

* Back in the Oject Data Properties area, click the down arrow and select "Join as Shapes" - the name of the second figure will appear as a shape key

* Delete the posed figure - it has served its purpose

* Select the Shape Key (under "basis") and set the Value to 1

Done!

⭐⭐👍

Hi Robyn 

It is great to see you back and hope to see you more often you have been an inspiration to many of in the past especially those who use Poser with Blender so your fresh look at some features that some of us actually were not aware of thank you in advance for sharing your discoveries. I wanted to point out one thing and this might more towards those who use non-built in add-ons and paid add-ons there seems to have been some python changes or additions to the python libraries in Blender 3.1 that were not in 3.0 so make sure if you have updated to Blender 3.1 from 3.0 and have not downloaded or updated add-ons you may have purchase do so I have come across several that break and give error messages that don't always point to the add-on needing updating.  Just a little FYI and again Robyn great to see you again 

Good to know, Lobo. I just picked up a couple of very cheap addons on Blender Marketplace, but yeah, they're for 2.93, so they might be broken. In Linux, I'm running 3.1: don't think I've upgraded the Mac yet. I had to pick up a bluetooth numeric keypad for my MB Pro because doing the emulation thing was just too painful: too accustomed to keyboard shortcuts. I'm glad so many of them still work.

Here's that shadehouse (still in design mode) I'm working on: you might recognise Alyson:

That was scaling Alyson to who was actually going to be using this shadehouse - we need shade more than glass (greenhouse) as it's semi-tropical here and tends to get quite hot and dry, even in our winter. We're going to be converting most of our growbeds (we have 10) to wicking beds, as there's just too much sinking of the soil as the biomass (green yard waste) from our trees breaks down. Blender has been a useful tool in terms of getting a rough idea of how things work together.

Looks good Robyn if you got the add-ons from Blender market the creators there usually update their products in a very timely fashion I know the ones like HardOps and BoxCutter need to be completely removed and shut blender down restart blender and install the newer versions don't have to do that with all add-on usually you can just install new versions over the old one 

Thank you, Lobo.

A bit of background: in terms of which computer I do most stuff on, it's my old (2012) Macbook Pro, where I do mostly writing musical sketches and pretty much everything except Blender. I have Poser and Blender loaded on the thing, but it's abyssmally slow and laggy. For Poser I've got an older desktop with Windows 10: that's all I run on Win10. For Blender, I prefer Linux Mint (dual-boot with Win 10). About the only reason I've kept Poser is: posing figures... it does it so well.

I've struggled to rig figures in Blender. Even with Rigify, the steps were just complex enough to where the rig never 'took'. Watching a video today by Pixxo3D on YouTube changed all that: I've actually managed to rig a Poser figure (using Basic Human Metarig) - after around a dozen or so tries - and discovered some interesting things about rigging and parenting Poser figures in Blender.

* 'Doubles' - that is, vertices that occupy the same space as other vertices - will prevent your rig from 'taking' to the figure

* Hair needs to be parented to a bone - not impossible, but that took several tries as well

Quick-n-dirty render:

Posing - such as it is, all done in Blender. I'll have to have a go with the full Rigify rig next so I can pose hands, eyes and expressions.

Not sure if anyone's particularly interested in this, but I've put together ... well, it's a bit strong to call it a "Rigging In Blender Tutorial", but anyway, generally speaking, it seems to work pretty consistently for me. Please let me know what you think:

Rigging Figures in Blender

Thank you Robyn.  I haven't upgraded past 2.93, but it's always good to know of a helpful tutorial for when I do.