When I import a poser character into Bryce and render the complete scene, the Poser character's skin and clothes look like lined wooden, instead of smooth textures. Is there a reason for this? I'm a newbie with both programs, so I really don't know what I'm doing wrong.

What format are you exporting from Poser? If you export your figures from Poser as OBJ files they should import smooth and with all their textures applied. If your figures look like they are rough carved from wood you need to edit them smooth. Do this by clicking on the model to highlight it, then clicking on the little "E" next to the model. Select the Smoothing option by clicking on the smooth sphere, you can also adjust the level of smoothing by raising the scale on the left. After it has edited the model, close the window and render. The wooden look will be gone.

First off... don't rely on Poser to give you any kind of quality rendering. Export your Poser model with all the textures attached as a ".obj" file (wavefront, I think). Just remember which directory they reside. Import your objects into Bryce and read either Brycethech's or Peter Sharpe's tutorials on importing textures. Bryce does a much better job at rendering tex's when you use its interface. The attached was rendered in Bryce alone...

If you have Poser 3, it will give you trouble in importing the texture with the model. P4 fixes this.

Nukeboy wrote: "First off... don't rely on Poser to give you any kind of quality rendering." Huh?!?. I beg to differ my friend. Both Poser and Bryce have their strengths and weaknesses. Here's a side by side comparison of the same Vicki 2 model rendered in Poser4 and Bryce5 with one spotlight as the only light source, same textures same pose and aproximately the same lighting, camera angle and focal length. The hair is Casseopia hair by Vairesh (available at daz3d.com). I think Poser handles it's own models and native textures a little better than Bryce does, but it's pretty close. I still prefer to use Poser figures in Bryce because Poser tends to crash if you make scenes too big (no matter how much RAM you give it).

Yikes, Poser looks worlds above Bryce here. Of course, if you fooled with the material lab settings, you could probably out-render Poser and get a much more realistic picture in Bryce (ambience settings and what not). It actually looks like there is NO TEXTURE on the hair in that Bryce render. Don't mean to pick a fight, =) just adding my two cents. For the record, I think Poser does a great job with rendering (especially motion blur in Pro Pack) and the engine is far too often "written-off" as a non-professional toy. You could say, Poser produces excellent quality relative to the work/time you put into it.

No offence here, but that isn't a good example of the bryce render engine compared to posers. There is no hair texture other than trans on that example (bryce version) and as has been pointed out, with a little tweaking with materials like bump, specularity et al, the results can be much higher!. Posers only real advantage IMO is it's pseudo soft shadowing.