Poser hosed up the vertex order when you export, so you have to either work on individual body parts (which means dealing with seams) or skip poser and Zbrush the original obj file (so that poser doesn't corrupt it). richardson has posted some threads on the subject. Since ZBrush doesn't handle the part and material groups that poser needs, you need to use UVMapper or something similar to put all the missing stuff back in before importing to Poser.

Life would be much simpler if Poser would export an uncorrupted obj file, but it doesn't.

I want to be able to do the same thing, but unless Poser7 does things differently from P5 and P6 there is no way to do it directly. The issue is that Poser slices and dices the original mesh when you load the figure (it makes each body part a seperate mesh). The Poser export function either exports the seperate pieces or welds the seams as an option. Either way, the vertex count and order are different from the original mesh. I can weld identical vertices in LightWave and get the count right, but they are still in the wrong order. UV mapper pro claimed to be able to fix the order, but in this case I could never get it to work. If there was an app that would reorder the vertices, we could do it! So if anyone knows of somthing, please let me know!

The only work around I can suggest is to morph the character, zero the pose, export to an obj. Then import the morphed obj into the background, the original obj into the foreground, and move the foreground vertices around to match those in the background (I hope ZB lets you do this; most apps do).

Marque, the reason poser objects come into Maya so tiny is that Maya reads obj files in units of cm (Lightwave uses meters and 3ds max uses inches). I'm not sure what native unit Poser is based on...

She is looking very nice! It is a shame that no one seems to care over in the LW forum...

Other programs have a much easier time with joint bends (and corrections). Poser uses a really screwed up system for rigging. Let's hope Poser 7 catches up with with most other rigging implementations. If they do, it should get a lot easier to deal with...

There is one installer from Daz for V3, another for the face morphs,and a third for the body morphs. If those are all installed in the same runtime, you should not have an issue with Poser finding them. To Inject the morphs, you find them under poses in Poser and click on the ones you want. Alternatively, for a third party character INJ pose, you just click it and it will take care of adding only those morphs that are needed for the character. If things don't work this way, you probably want to reinstall V3 and the morphs.

One of the real PITA things about P6 is that it won't render a single V3 at max default render settings. The best place to start when it gives you the evil message is to try a render at minimum default settings. If that works, you can try increasing settings until it barfs. If it win't reach acceptable quality settings, then you can start playing other games. About the only alternative is to start using another app to render (the route I finally took in disgust).

A couple of things, one is that fixing Miki's mesh problems won't have any bearing on whether clothes fit or not. The issue would be morphs would not transfer. On the other hand, fixing the mesh and making it a single mesh makes it possible to make joint correction morphs to fix the poser rigging problems. Part of Miki's rigging problems are due to less than optimal rigging, but much is due to the way Poser does rigging.

I can't even do a large V3 render in P6 at max (default) render settings, and that's on top of P6 limiting texture sizes to a fraction of the commercial standard (4000x5333) V3 body texture. Maybe P7 will support 64bit addressing...

Thanks, I was mainly curious as to whether there were any new alternatives. It was/is very easy to use.

"I don't quite understand the basic end result...what exactly does this accomplish?" The main thing it accomplishes is a 'simple' way to make a new morph that crosses body part seams. For example, if I want to rework the upper arm and collar, I can export both parts as objs and work on the morph. The issue is the seam between the two parts opening up, which happens with most any smoothing operation. Much easier to work on the full (seamless) mesh. Unfortunately, Poser won't export a single mesh with the same vertex count and order (if there is a way, somebody please tell me how!!!) The obvious alternative is to work on the original obj. The biggest drawback of this approach is that you can't use an existing Daz morph as a starting point. "you're aware, of course, that the modified geometry means that old morphs don't work anymore." Since the vertex count and order are unchanged, the old morphs will work just fine! (They will be additive to what was done to the mesh in ZB of course, but they are additive anyway).

Lightwave 8.5 (soon to be 9.0) and the Worley Labs plugins (G2 for skin shading, Fprime for speckle free ray-traced soft shadows, Sasquatch for dynamic hair) are a great combination for doing people renders. Lightwave 8.5 by itself doesn't do SSS (not sure whether LW9 will or not), so I highly recommend G2 to go with it. Greenbriarstudios has Poser import plugins for Maya, C4D, and Lightwave, although I haven't tried them yet. Also, LW64 will let you load up multiple characters in complex scenes (Neither Maya nor 3DS MAx 8 support 64bit computing yet!) Whatever way you go, make sure it's 64bit!

One issue with Vue you should be aware of is that it doesn't do polygon smoothing like Poser does, one of the reasons I dropped it in favor of LightWave.

Poser is incredibly inefficient in memory usage at render time. I just tried to render a V3 with hair (no clothes for a test render) at the max default setting and Poser refused (on a 4GB system). In Lightwave or Vue I can render her with larger textures than Poser will take with the mesh subpatched up to around half a million polygons with no problem. Firefly is useless for large renders at high settings. About the only thing you can do is reboot your system and then start out at very low quality and texture size settings and slowly increase them until firefly chokes. I gave up on it for anything but quick test renders.

3DNeo, Let me suggest another angle for you, use Poser as the starting point (using all the things it does well) and then go over into a modeling package to make everything right. Then take everything into the package that will support the quality of render you want. (Richardson uses ZBrush and is doing amazing stuff.) The biggest limitation on V3 is the lack of available joint correction morphs (and she really needs them). Options there are to follow the richardson route or to port her and her morphs over to your highend app, rig her, and add in corrections as required. I am still debating which way to go, but do all my serious renders in LightWave because Firefly flat out refuses to try. BTW, V3 gives me about 1.5M polys to tweak at a level 3 subpatch in LW, so the issue is not enough to work with! Instead it is the rigging, sculpting, and shading. Before you know it, you'll be looking for 8000x10000 uncompressed Tif texture maps too...