http://store.cgsociety.org/product/000369/

**Conniekat8 & operaguy
The collada route will not give you the results for what operaguy is after,
if i understand well operaguy whants to have a fully "editable" rig ?
Collada gives you not the bones but helpers !! 
The envelope weighting is baked and only useable if your willing to weight by vertex ,
which is a nightmare with poser meshes.
Loading morphs with collada is very "heavy" because the morph is bassicly a deformed mesh and you bring MAX to its knees.
JCM in MAX is bassicly the skinmorph modifier with works much better than JCM's because you can model the morph the way you want it to deform.
The dvd paul made on this subject is a must have in my opinion and saves you hiring a rigger because i think that although it may look intimidating the proces is very straightforward with the right tools.

**

**whkguamusa,
Yes, the drivermesh is splitup in a head & body so loading facialmorphs keeps the file "light"  , hair & displacement or normal maps etc, are only used on the high res rendermesh, cloth is typical skinwrapped to the low res driver mesh. **

whkguamusa,
The script let's you work with a "driver mesh" and a "render mesh"
The rendermesh is skinwrapped over the driver mesh so typical you animate with a low res driver mesh and render the animation with the high res.
Therefore no viewport slowdowns.

Operaguy,
i think youre best option would be to use Paul Hormis Hyperriger.
Not only is paul one of the better riggers in the business, his scripts are one of the best solutions if you rigging for biped.
The hyperrigger script sets up a fully rigged solution with a very nice deformation system.
I use the scripts myself and the deformations you get out off it with V4 are the best you can get.
Trust me , you do not get the same results by weighting her by hand.
BTW weighting in max is done mostly with the skinmodifier instead of Physique.

http://www.hyperent.com/Hyp-Maxscripts.php

Or having the time of your live doing it !!!!
A fig file is basically a biped preset.{structure file, 5 spine links, 3 finger links etc}
Say you have made a custom biped for apollo and rigged him, you can then save your biped as a fig file.
 So when you make an other character like apollo you load your fig file and the biped is created for you.
Another plus of fig files is loading mocap on it, when loading for example a bip,bvh etc you specify your fig file and the mocap is transfered to your bipedstructure.

Conniekat,
Yes as **dvlenk6 **mentioned above you can import every morph you wish.{they don't have to baked, that's just a personal preference}
Don't freak out over the fallof zone's, all you need to do is paint some blendweights so the transsision from one envelope to the next one is smoother.
Since the vertexweight is baked in you don't need to tweak the envelopes.
Don't paint to much vertexweights because you get in trouble fast with that much vertices.
Rigging is almost zero, all you need is a biped with the same figure structure as you import.
If you wanna give it a try i good give you the fig.file and your ready to go.   

Morning Operaguy,

I'll rig in Max. Unless, that is, I find a 'transporter' that moves Poser bones into Max an creates an actual Max-advantaged rig. I highly doubt this is possible.

That's the idea of collada !!

Looks good conniekat,
The only problem now is your stuck with the basic animation out of poser.
I thought operaguy wanted to animate in max  as well.
So he has still to rig and skin the character, that's the reason i pointed him to the collada route.
With collada you export the animation out the same way you do with pomax { only 1 button click ....grins....},import into max and you have the benefit of the same animation only with keyframes intact , a animatable mesh with pretty good skin applied {which you can adjust with vertex weighting/blendweights}.
The biggest plus this way a believe is that you can link the mesh {skininstance with collada} to a biped and animate further your animation with the biped { Mocap or keyframing}.
The second plus with the biped is the use of skinmorph { the other reason to link to a biped because collada exports helpers not bones}.

BTW:I noticed you allready downloaded the exporter,{what do you think of it so far?}

Conniekat, by decimate do you mean the optimize modifier?

Operaguy, Are you trying to skinwrap the hi-res version to the optimized one?
If so, i would split the mesh in 2 skindrivers so you could morphanimate the low-res and render the high-res and not get a huge filesize and you could use pointcache.
Have you thought of a collada route?
Bring in the meshmorphs{baked} and your animation.
The animation is still editable in max and if you want more control link the skininstance to a biped.
You animate the biped and the mesh "follows" with pretty good weightmaps { the best i have seen of all the "plugin's".
 

**Operaguy,**I think it depents on your plan's for v4 in max,
are you gonna rig and skin her ? 
do  you just need her for rendering your animations?

It works the same way for export.
export your model as an obj.file with the guruware plugin,
In the plugin you can choose the poser profile so all the parameters are set for you.
Only remember your scale settings { if you import the file with a scale of 100 ,you export with a scale of 0,01 wich are the default settings of the plugin}

use the guruware importer http://www.guruware.at/main/index.html
I assume you know how to use the unwrap uvw modifier.

**Jules53757,
Thanks for your reply

**adp001,
**The problem you discribe is the reason why i have to create new channels,
I have 3 conflicting morphset's so i tried to download your program to fix the channels.
Does your program needs "aditional files" , i can't seem to open the program { windows xp pro}

Gretings**