Quote - If the thumbnails are .rsr, Poser 8 will not recognize them.

Poser 8 is not fully backwards compatible with earlier versions?  That's disappointing.  That means DAZ Studio might be the way to go in the future.

I wonder what other areas on not compatible with older content?

You've made me more interested in giving DS a try, but even more to spend some time in Hexagon. I'm always amazed when a company spends a lot of money to buy a product only to essentially abandon it. Corel still upgrades Painter, but doesn't put much effort into promoting it--they seem to prefer Paintshop Pro. Corel has just about abandoned Kai's Power Tools, but it still has some excellent filters that have yet to be beat by any newer Photoshop Plug-in.

Attached Link: http://xurge3d.com/inc/sdetail/29875

At the moment, both companies have to play well together.  Poser has the largest and longest established user base (meaning most of the money spent on content will go to Poser content). DAZ has the largest content store for Poser.

Occasionally there are interesting bits of cooperation.  About half a year ago, I saw a vendor at DAZ selling a Miki outfit that was not offered with a version that was compatible with a DAZ figure.

Quote -  Isn't that what Google's Sketchup does? I  must admit I have only heard about it, never tried the program myself.

The free version inherently has extremely limited import/export capabilities, though I've recently learned that there are a lot of plug-ins that have filled some gaps, though I don't know to what extent. SketchUp is a modeling program.

Nope.

The closest is Deep Exploration, but that program has been priced outside of the affordability of the average user. Making that program so expensive is a dumb idea because it cuts out the entire Poser community that only wants a conversion program, not all the other bells and whistles they added to it for creating presentations. Even that program doesn't do everything. It cannot convert RayDream, Carrara, 3dsMax, Maya, or Cinema4D models on its own (it says it does C4D, but I never found a model that it could convert). The only way to reliably convert models from those programs is to own the original program.

RayDream is now Carrara. Your cheapest option to convert your old models is buying "Figures, Characters and Avatars: The Official Guide to Using DAZ Studio to Create Beautiful Art" from Amazon for $23. It includes a free full version of Carrara 6 Pro, as well as Hexagon 2. I know you don't want to spend money, but I'm not aware of anything that converts RayDream models. It's been a few years since I did a Google search to try to find a converter, so maybe there's been something since then.

There are some free 3D programs that have import and export capabilities that may help converting a lot of models (but probably not the ones Deep can't convert). You can try Blender, Wings3D, and SketchUp to see what they might be able to handle.

At the moment, there is no great conversion program for 3D models that works with all the major programs and that's a shame.

Does P8 import newer versions of Lightwave?

Can it handle larger 3ds files more reliably and not blow up the import or crash if a file is larger than 1 Mb (earlier versions could sometimes import larger files, but freezing was a fairly frequent occurrence).

Does P8 import any file types that earlier versions don't?

I didn't realize that there was an obj exporter for the free version of SketchUp.

Thanks!

Attached Link: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=2dfd5b5840125d41630a81e41b3b6ffd&prevstart=0

DAZ Studio will import Collada files.  Does anybody know if DS does a good job with importing Collada? DS exports Obj, so that will provide something that Poser can use.  I don't have Poser 8, so I don't know whether or not Poser can now import Collada files.

The next simplest solution is a transparency texture.

I didn't realize that Content Paradise Japan was closed. E-Frontier still sells Poser 7, but not the latest.

I did find a new Shade character, Tully, but it's too stylized for my tastes. Babelfish did a lousy job of translating the site and missed most words. I'd question whether one of the features for this character is "back hair". Google's translation program called them "shoes" which makes more sense. Why am I not surprised that Yahoo messed up Babelfish?
shade.e-frontier.co.jp/unlock/tully/

This is a little closer to what you might be looking for--a tent with laptops and maps.

Even this might be too fancy for mercenaries depending on what kind of unit size you're depicting (not so much the image, but the backstory size).

If you look at the movie Blackhawk Down, the soldiers on the ground didn't have anything more sophisticated than radios and paper maps. That was all special forces units. Mercenaries probably wouldn't be any better equipped than those soldiers. Mercenaries might have laptops in a jeep and satellite phones on them and you should be able to find freebies to serve that purpose. The above image would be the kind of Army command center managing around a hundred soldiers in over a dozen vehicles.

Try Google searches in their images section and this site to try to zero in on what you want.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/
There are going to be a lot of misses before you find something of interest, but that's how I found the images I posted--and it wasn't easy. There are a number of mercenary games out there that might help figure out what they'd carry.

Even the second one is not at the battlefront. The frontlines are even more low-tech looking with laptops and computer screens inside crowded vehicles. Combat isn't glamorous. This image is from a joint US-Afghan military command center, so it's probably a division, or higher, asset. A battalion operations center would be a few small camoflaged tents near command vehicles. War is mobile, so frontline operations centers are built around command vehicles that are quickly stripped down to be moved where needed.

The TV images you see of wartime operations centers are populated by generals and are very far removed from the soldiers actually conducting the battles.

Quote - No WW is licensed to SM, we still own it.

Creating new figure support is more art than science. It takes me about a day to put one together. I added support for Sixus Goblinz this morning.

I wasn't sure if the NDA would prevent you mentioning that.

I'm glad to see the Goblinz getting support. I hadn't picked them up yet, but am going over to take a look right now. I wonder how close the figure compatibility is with the Sixus1Cirque midget figures?