Attached Link: Konan's Place

To everyone who is excited about the "Poser to 3d Studio" animation plugin, here's some news. The plug-in will be ready in a few weeks. The process has been prototyped, and it works just fine. It is a commercial venture, but it will be very reasonably priced (I have to pay my rent and put food on the table ). The texture mapping of the standard Poser figures is not 3d Studio compatable. I will put together a tutorial on how to remap the figures such that they are. For all of you who have tried exporting poser figures to 3ds files, you may have noticed the distortion of the texture map around the edges. There is an easy fix for this which the tutorial will demonstrate. Anyone interested can drop me an email me at konan@spacemoose.com and I will keep you posted on the progress.

Is this only for your dragon, or is this for any Poser figure? Either way, this is very interesting and I wish you the very best of luck with this. And I would definately be interested in any updates :) Paul

Any poser figure baby! Like the above letter says, to the default poser figures need to be modified if you want the texture mapping to work properly. I will provide a tutorial on how to do this. Once you have modified the figures, they will be 3d Studio compliant forever. Send me a letter and I will put you on my contact list.

What about when you replace a body part with a prop in Poser, then create an animation you want to export to 3d Studio, would it work? Would I have to remap the object? Are we using .3ds files here, or are we exporting to .obj to do this. (Preferrable, as this is the best format for mapping.) Does this plugin interpolate morph targets from each frame exported from Poser? Does this mean that I have to create geometry for each frame of animation I want to transfer. IE, for example, I have a 10 frame animation to export to 3D Studio: When I export from Poser do I export each frame of animation as a seperate .3ds/.obj file, then import these as morph targets in MAX? Little bit more background on how this utility works, would definitely sway my decision to buy the plugin. Will there be a functional demo? co(V)(V)union

By the way, the UVW mapping of .obj files does get properly preserved from Poser, if you import the .obj with the Habware plugin. Just an FYI. co(V)(V)union

The plugin will import the frames that you export with Poser. It will put them in a compact form, rather than leaving them as full meshes (except the first frame). The user will be able to select which keyframes are signifigant and which ones can be discarded. There will be a viewer such that you can preview the animation before exporting it. It will then be exported into a 3ds file where the first frame will be a full mesh, and subsequent frames will be stripped down, such that only the information required to morph will be available. The morph linkning will be taken care of by a MAX script, so nothing is done manually. Full contrl over timing will also be available. This process can be done by hand for a few frames, but it would be rater tedios for a few hunderd. With the plug-in, you can optimize the # of morphs and view the animation until it is perfect. Then you export a 3ds and Max script file. Load the 3ds file and run the script. This will work for ANY figure or geometry that Poser exports, as long as Poser exports it properly to begin with (Poser 4 seems to work just fine). The plugin will also weld all of the seams such that they are smooth and continous, while it does not alter the morphable geometry. See my latest post for an animated gif that was generated from 7 key frames spread over 28 total frames. The seams are not welded in this case.

Well, there are alot of people who not only like the user friendliness of Poser, they enjoy the thousands of figures, props and stuff that are available. When the plug-in is komplete, it will be very simple to export animated figures to 3ds MAX for superior rendering. Konan

Konan, you should contact Animatek about your plugin. WB2, Animatek's powerful landscape software has a full interface to MAX, enabling WB2 to render complete MAX scenes and animations in their landscapes. I wonder if your plugin would make possible to animate Poser models in WB landscapes trough MAX. http://www.animatek.com/index_frame.htm

I am designing the program to be as portable and independant of anything as possible. Any render that can import a 3DS file and link objects as morph targets will be able to use the output from "Maximum Pose" (The unoficial name of the program). For some rason that I have yet to figure out, MAX will not recognize the morph target assignments in a 3DS file. For this reason (unless I get a fix), the program will also generate a script, that you can run in MAX to automate the linking process.