I started fiddling with meshes and tried various Freeware 3D Modellers but for no good - some won't run with my XP, some lose material or bodpart information, some mess up the geometry and so on... I'm by no means a 3D-veteran, and tried the simple approach: export from Poser as .obj - fire up 3D modeller - import there - modify - export as .obj - import in Poser again ... with the rather frustrating results mentioned above... I tried the same using other formats like .3ds or .lwo but things got even worse... So my last hope: can anybody please point me to freeware or shareware modeller that "understands" Poser meshes? Thanks ahead...

Well, I'm new to Poser. If its a poser mesh, I don't have any outside program to alter it. Only outside proggy I use is Bryce to render after posing and exporting. I do like to dabble in making models and use ElectricImge Universe for that. Great modeler,real cheap if you buy through EI web site. Comes with Amorphium for free and that's a must have for modeling and converting the EIU models to obj. Sometimes I've filtered the mesh through 3dexploration which fixes a lot. out of curiosity, why export and then import again? What are you trying to do? Do you have PP or P5 to bone again?

what I'm trying to is the following: I save P5 Don (the male char) as a new character, lets call him Hugo, he is "in" hugo.cr2. Hugo is a Cyberpunk and supposed to have some body parts seriously modified, props wont do the trick. So I copied P5NudeMan.obj to Hugo.obj in the same directory as hugo.cr2 and altered the .cr2 to read its geometry from hugo.obj. Works perfectly. Then Hugo went for surgery (I tried to edit his mesh Hugo.obj with various progies), but sadly he didnt survive (the geometry, materials or body parts were broken)... I ended up loading P5NudeMan.obj into Poser and exporting it to Hugo.obj (and other formats) to make sure its not a problem of the original .obj...

If you installed your software with a compatible change it should work good in XP, before installing your software, click the properties of the set up file, click compatible tab, click windows 2000 and then okay, then install, should put it in with all components working. Sharen

well if Poser5 is the same as Poser 4 - DON"T USE AN EXPORTED OBJ. The figure is in a different place, and Poser is sensitive. Use the OBJ from the geometries folder and DON'T MOVE IT. That should fix at least some of the exploding mesh problems The tutorials section should have some basic walk throughs for various programs.

I've not tried a Poser5 .OBJ yet but I don't expect it to be significantly different to Poser4 in this respect... I use Cinema4D 5 SE from a magazine CD (actually PC Format issue 133), OBJ Scaler, and a "replacement" .OBJ filter for Cinema4D to fix "exploding" issues with the built-in filter. It's a bit of a hassle to do, but I scale up the .OBJ I want to modify (often an exported morph but there's no reason an original .OBJ from geometries folder shouldn't work), expand it with OBJ Scaler (been a while but say 100 times or perhaps 1000 times) and rename to a *.pbj (which the filter uses because it can't over-rule the built-in *.obj filter) and work on it. Often saving as a native Cinema4D file until I'm ready to export the resulting .OBJ, use OBJ Scaler to scale down (by 100x or 1000x) and then it's back into Poser. Like I said, a bit of a pain, but cheap.

you can also try running your object file through UV mapper and saving it there before importing it into your modeling program. that does seem to fix some of the export import problems.

I use 3DSMax with the free HABware Lightwave OBJect exporter. I just load in the geometry, ungroup it, clone all of it as an instance, and hide the original and scale it up to a hundred thousand percent (3DSM hates tiny poser files). Then I edit the clones either one part at a time or with an Edit Mesh modifier. When I'm done, I delete it, unhide all, select all geometry (in case I left splines sitting around or something) and export the lot as a new OBJect. Works for MTs and for editing geometry. I use a similar approach to making all-new geometry for conformers, etc. I import the geometry I want to model around or match joints on, scale it up, usually collapse it ansd apply a heavy optimise so Mike or Vicki don't suck down my resources with the diddly zillion vertices, do my modeling, then delete the frozen scaled 'tailor's dummy'. Re-import the geometry, and shrink the big one I just made down to match it. It's the chopping before exporting that gets to be hard, especially when making a conformer for a Millenium figure -- cutting out those 'collar' pieces isn't easy I've found that I usually get pretty decent results if I trace a spline around the dividing line, scale it up a bit so it surrounds the conformer, then extrude it, collapse that to a mesh, and possibly scale up the other end to make sure all the geometry is covered. Then I use that for a boolean in cut->slice mode. Each time I slice off a part (starting outside and working my way in), I save, then collapse to an editable mesh, go to 'element' mode (where what I just sliced out is already selected because it's new), and detach that as the appropriate part. But those 'collars' are still hard to make work. Sometimes I have more work box-modelling my extruded cutting tools than I do making the mesh. I've tried a few other techniques -- likecloging the original's part twice, inverting the normals on the first, face extruding the second, then attaching them and welding vertices -- but it doesn't always work (though when it does it matches the cut-line perfectly).

You can't go wrong with Blender. Total freeware.

BTW: There's a way to get a copy of 3DSM or other expensive stuff without having to pay for it and without doing anything illegal -- if you're handy with the vertices or a good enough salesman. Simply get some big or well-funded company to hire you to do some modelling, and require a copy of the program as a requisite for the job. You get mega-expensive software free, you get paid to use it, and the company can write it off their taxes as a business expense. If you're in the US, you also get a nice feeling that you actually got something back from your tax dollars (because when the company writes it off, the IRS or equivalent ministry effectively pays for it, and you know where their extortion money comes from) besides nuclear missiles, dangerous schools, mediocre public transportation, pointless blue laws and harrassive police who demand ID because you had the audacity to walk outside after dark even if you['re obviously thirty. Ahem. Excuse me. Sorry. Ranted there. 'Pardon me, waiter? I'd like to return this government... it's not what I asked for.'

Got Blender but it won't read .OBJ ... 3DSMax with OBJ2MAX and MAX2OBJ loses groups and materials ... To me its more and more unbelieveable that there's no easy, bodypart/group-and-material-save way to edit poser meshes...

I've never had Max2OBJ or OBJ2Max lose groups -- and I've only lost meterials when I forgot to export them. Weird. You can use UVMapper to assign faces to groups and materials, too.

Got Blender but it won't read .OBJ ...

Python scripts:
OBJ file import
OBJ file export #1
OBJ file export #2

@dodger: do I have to do anything special with 3DSMax? simple minded me imported hugo.obj (a scaled and UVMapped one), in the Popup-Dialog specifying hugo.mtl for materials, Multi and Group (whatever that does). Ok. lottsa lines in 3DSMax. scared me not touching anything. only do Export... ugh, another popup-dialog, me picking "textures" and "polygons" (whatever that does again)... Reading the exported .obj with UVMapper only finds 1 group... BTW. its 3DSMax 3.1. the Plugins 3.1b1 by Johnny Ow.. Please don't hit me for the simplicity of my approach, but before I throw myself into the depth of 3DSMax I tried to verify the procedure as a whole... Thanks for ya patience =)

make sure 'use materials' is checked on export. Also make sure that 'use materials' is checked on import.Don't bother making a .MTL file on export, poser doesn't need it.

UVMapper: bevore 3DS: 77 groups, 17 materials UVMapper: after 3DS: 1 group, 17 materials so it seems to boil down to all the bodyparts/groups beeing lost... sighs

Hang on I'm starting up 3DSMax to get you screenshots of the settings I use...

Oh yeah and don't select 'default' on import (just click it to deselect it as above)

(Psst, before anyone gives me any shite, I know my WIndows colour scheme is boringly grey -- and that means it doesn't throw off my colour perception when I am working on an image!)

Oh, yeah -- on the import plugin -- that blank field above the groups to select -- that's where you can add a string to prepend to the names of objects after import. For instance, when I'm making Mike clothing, I generally add MM_ in there, so that when I import Mike, his left upper arm is MM_lShldr instead of just lShldr. If you're making a mesh out of (instead of over, in the case of clothing) an existing geometry, don't put anything there or your group names will be all off. As a last ditch solution, you can always open the OBJ file in gvim (www.gvim.org) and lunp to each fo the section headers and add in the group command by hand! (Yes, I'm an insane programmer)

Were closing in! I obvisiously have an older importer for my 3DSMax 3.1! It only shows 2 groups, "default" and "Figure 1" when importing an .obj UVMapper reads perfectly. Sadly I don't have 3DSMax on my machine here at work, but I'll give it another shot by not exporting the "Figure Names in Polygon Groups" from Poser later at home... Thanks for your efforts so far =)

Are you poening these from the actual geometry files or from an OBJ exported from Poser? If the latter, you will need to select 'include body part names in groups' or whatever it says. Do not use exact internal names because if you do it will add the :1 or whatever to the end of 'Figure1' parts.

Just as a note: by 'Figure names' it means things like 'Figure1' and 'Mikes Biker Jacket' by 'Body Part Names' it means things like 'lShldr' (the real name, not the getStringRes result -- thus 'lHand' not 'Left Hand' I do not believe I have ever seen 'existing groups' actually do anything differently. Normally, I would assume that 'Existing Groups' would export all the existing groups, which means body parts, but it doesn't seem to work that way. For an export of a scene with multiple figures and/or props, you'll want to export figure names. To export a poser-scaled object to place in a prop or figure file, you do not want to export figure names. Especially for a posable -- the 'rCollar' will become, for instance, 'Figure1:rCollar' thus making poser see refer to 'Figure1:Figure1:rCollar' which isn't a part in the CR2. You might be able to force it but I do not know the escaping string for poser files.