I was ready to buy upgrade to P_12, had a heap of store-points towards it, when a plumbing disaster in kitchen distracted me.

( Vermin damage to drain pipe within wall !! Ick. Documented over at DA...)

By the time the dust settled, the sealant foam hardened and the soused kitchen units were repaired, I'd had time to look at what P_12 offered.
Or, rather, did not...

I do not use Python macros, so the version change was not so bad. Losing the 'basic' material room would be a problem, as I seem unable to grok 'Cycles' beyond rudiments.
'Eye of Newt & Leg of Toad' !!
As I quipped above, is there a platform-independent 'Cycles for Dummies' in the house ??

"Um, let's see what the updates bring ?"

Six months along, I've now even more store-points waiting, enough for the thumb-drive, too. And I'm checking eg Amazon Books for a non-Blender 'Cycles' text....

For the record: Without re-rigging, I can usually coax free Noesis into porting rigged figures from eg SFM 'Ragdolls' (MDL+VTF) and XNA/Lara ( .MESH.ASCII directly, re-exported if XPS or .MESH, plus any textures) and get an FBX that usually 'plays nice-ish' with Poser.

Upside, usually only one (1) or a few (<10) sub-rigs. First in list usually allows wary posing.

Downside, scaling may be wildly huge or tiny, YMMV. IIRC, P_12 has 'auto-scaling'. Plus, texture allocation may be wonky, due Poser 'diffuse' vs  specular / albedo etc... 

And, import may go horribly wrong, spawning ~20, ~30, even ~70 sub-rigs. IIRC, I once got ~130+: I sorta wept and, rather than wrangle via hierarchy,  just closed Poser.

As yet, even respecting TDA porting prohibition, I've found no simple way to get rigged figures out of MMD's PMX format. Yes, Blender can do it via a complete re-rig, but that's beyond my skills...

This guy with vaguely familiar face began as an SFM Clone Trooper by stefano96 on DA, went via Noesis to FBX. 300% import scale, 7 sub-rigs...

"Where am I ? What happened ??"

Bit like the hydra-headed water damage to my kitchen: Each repair seemed to reveal two more problems requiring non-trivial fixes costing time, money and/or ingenuity...

I won, but the hardest part was doing it right, getting it 'future resistant'...

Long ago, far away, I crafted lab & utility programs in 6502 Assembler and a bunch of BASIC dialects. Coding was easy, but clean coding was an order of magnitude harder. Worse if you were stuck with a snarl of badly maintained legacy stuff. Happens I'd the patience to comb out 'spaghetti', the wit to build in lots of flexibility...

I'm still on P_11. There's a lot of stuff I'd like to see in P_12 that probably won't arrive until P_14~~15. FWIW, there are bugs in my P_11's UI that I remember from P_4 !!

IMHO, Bondware / Rendo have a battle on their hands. There's so much catch-up & clean-up from the Smith Micro era, so many changes needed to support the new versions of Cycles & Python, all while sorta keeping up with several well-known 'game engines'.

Top of my wish-list are gas-gauge / trash collection, better handling of complex models, much more robust rigged FBX import and, perhaps, easy import of other rigged formats such as XPS and PMX. Comprehensible 'Cycles' would be nice: Is there a cross-platform 'For Dummies' in the house ?? My understanding is that the further future of Poser is critically dependent on getting unimesh working right. Right, mind. Which, in turn, requires lovingly marrying two very, very different rigging systems such that they 'play well' together. And, with that, importing other formats becomes so much easier...

YMMV.

Thank you for your thoughts.

My understanding is that improving Poser's generic FBX-import must await 'resolution' of unimesh rigging and its complex cascade of consequence.

So, until then, FBX files must be offered to Poser with 'Due Care'...

What version is the FBX file ? The older, the better, IMHO.

FWIW, I've been surprised by some FBX imports including animation. My yell as that 'Orc' charged across the screen seriously startled the duty-cat...

Glad resolved: Other possibility was your Poser reaching 'max out' stage and about to throw errors about texturing etc before quietly losing chunks of scene...

Hair may be sufficiently hi-poly to tip render engine into 'gibbering'...

Conversely, given our low-flying poltercats, is there an easy way to disable all Poser's hot-keys ??

Major advantage of using external libraries for all but the most 'core', frequently used items is so they do not clutter Poser's in-house run-time folder tree, may be easily culled...

My 'as required' external libraries are spread across three big drives, 1TB E:+ F:, 4TB G:, would be utterly unprintably unmanageable were I to stuff contents into Poser's Runtime on C: Besides, they simply would not fit...

As I understand it, P11 makes an occasional 'call home', usually when it pops up message that updates are available: How else would it know ??

Which offers I hastily beat off with virtual '4x2'...

I've ample store points to upgrade to P_12 plus the 'goodies' thumb-drive but, so far, I've seen no compelling advantages. In fact, if P_12's material room will dump me straight into 'Cycles' snake-pit, d'uh, so not going there...

Well, not until I've perused, digested, grokked a platform-independent 'Cycles for Dummies' ...

Whichever mapper you use, it's not so bad if the materials are left in 'default' positions. It's when everything gets 'optimised', shuffled around, shoe-horned into corners...

Yes, I get reduced to incoherent despair when trying to mask glass, glows etc etc from a mega-map that looks like a 'Mondrian'...

And I still get flashbacks to the patient hours spent hunting a 'My Little Pony' eyes...

My usual tactic, before reverting to a sorta-binary-chop to localise said parts, is to try each style of mapping by turn, see if anything looks familiar...

Also, agree with Blender's UI issues. That, like DS and GIMP, gives me a prompt migraine...

If not too much trouble, please keep it alive.There's the big names, also a lot of smaller ones.

"NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID"

Yeah, that's my Norton's take, too...

Unless RenderCache folder happens to be in... C:\Users\CAD-Tower\AppData\Roaming\Poser Pro\11

Free Irfan View can open these .EXR files, but free XNView can display them as thumbnails...

FWIW, render presets, which may have acquired less-than-meaningful names, are in adjacent RenderPresets folder. Although suffixed .PRP, they are in plain-text...

This is where the revenant renders lurk ? Those that re-appear at next start, though deleted from within Poser ??

(  I hate it when I've done a bunch of quickie iterative P_11 trial-renders to get scene lighting or facial textures right, delete them as I go along, but they *all* pop up next time...)

It is Windows. Shut down, swear at length to allow lingering electrons to ebb, re-start. Ensure 'Cold' start with mobo BIOS splash-screen, mind, not 'nap'...

Make sure you have 'updates' turned on / force updates.

And, if you have a network-render 'Box' for remote queue work, do same for that so both have same song-sheet...