Quote - for whoever said this:

bring in the characters as well via Body Studio <<<<
and anyone else who thinks that's what Body Studio (before or after being bought by EF) does.

IT IS ONLY HOSTING. Once you get your scene into Max, Maya or Cinema you will not be able to move anything. No morphing or adjusting. NOTHING NADA.

Good point on the PSA Opera, but I wasn't concerned at this point about being able to bring fully-rigged characters into LW. I'll just be happy with hosting--it will give me access to LW's renderer for animations.

I'll want to have fully rigged characters imported into LW at a later date. For now, hosting is sufficient for a project I have in mind.
On a side topic. whether or not Poser will create an effective character importer into LW or any other 3D app is likely to be a point of contention. Poser's content library has Poser or Poser Pro as a gateway. Write a means of importing Poser content into LW, and what do you need Poser for?

Ok. Good to see that they're at least getting some more information out via a developers' blog.

I'm not thrilled about LW support being released at a later date, but with LW going to built-in collada support in the coming year, this should still be usable for me. I'm not too upset overall.

I'll buy PPro on its release and wait for LW support. It's still cheaper than switching to C4D, Max, or Maya.

Thanks for posting the blog link ratscloset!

For me, I don't use Poser for rendering at all. Even the vaunted Firefly renderer is too much work and too much of a resource hog to for me to get good-quality images.

What attracts me to Poser is the content libraries. Daz, Renderosity, CP, and others out there have generated thousands of low-cost, good-quality meshes. While vehicles and sets are no problem to import into LW or any other app, the characters are the proverbial "holy grail" for me. I could spend upwards of $2K to buy C4D and the add-ons necessary to get the same functionality as I have in LW right now and then I could bring in the characters as well via Body Studio or Interposer.

Or I could spend $500 on PPro to get the similar functionality with my copy of LW via scene hosting or collada. That's what makes this attractive to me.

The common-user that dogor refers to is not a fixed base. People transition into and out of that base constantly. I suppose that I would have been a common-user at one point but at the time I was getting into 3D in a serious way, Poser was at version 1. It wasn't until Poser 6 that I started looking at Poser as a viable app to add into my workflow. And even then, I find myself pushing the limits of what Poser can do.
All I want is for Poser and LW to talk to each other without too much work involved. Make it work, and make it easy enough to use.

PPro does have the potential to start opening up new markets for Poser and Poser content. Even though I have run into a LOT of vitriol in visiting other forums and hearing what they say about Poser from the self-styled pros, I know that the real pros will use whatever tool will get the job done and not care about the pedigree.

After reading many of the Poser forums, I expect that I may be one of the few people in the Poser community excited about PPro.

To me, network rendering is crucial. I run a 7-machine home renderfarm for animated projects and I would not be anywhere near as productive without it. When you're dealing with 20+minute render times per frame, being able to get animation done quickly by throwing more processors at the project pays off big.

Collada in/out is invaluable for transitioning content from PPro to LW or other apps. LW hosting is apparently still in the works for PPro, and that would be very useful for me in my planned projects.  If it does nothing else, it will still be worth the price tag for the full version.