You're very welcome, and yes, Rendo is just that kind of place :)
Any time that you spend getting familiar with the Shaders is time well spent, if you don't model then Shaders, together with lights, are your painting tools.

Good luck and don't hesitate to post here if you need more help

 Poser products will generally work in Studio. Studio has a very high degree of compatibility. The CR2 files will be handled correctly. Whatever works with 2.3 will work with 3.x 
In the past the general issue with Poser/Studio compatibility was the lack of shader support in Studio for some of the most "exotic" functions of the Poser Material Room (fancy name for the shader setup).
Studio 3 has corrected that and now it has more sophisticated shaders than Poser. This doesn't mean that you will have automatic conversion of the materials from Poser to Studio, a few issues will still be there but, you have very sophisticated shading control in Studio and you can use that to fix whatever is not converted automatically. 
Reagarding Bryce I would not spend much time there as it seems to have reached End Of Life status. For Carrara things are in much better shape but you will need both Studio advanced and Carrara Pro, in order to use the DAZ Collada import/export feature.

As you did spend the money for Poser, I would suggest to not think about buying it for the future. I own it but I spent all my time in Studio. It has a maturity, ease of use and streamlined UI that Poser can't claim. Don't mean to start a holy war between Studio/Poser fans, it's just my opinion.

To this day the only Poser products that you cannot use in Studio are the ones that use either Dynamic Clothes or Dynamic Hair. Everything else should be just a matter of adjusting the Shaders.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=378658

Quote - Been told you can do the same thing using UVMapper in place of Compose 

Yes, but that's exactly the point of the update.  Export the mesh from Blender, load it in UVMapper, apply tthe groups, export it again. It's hardly a good workflow. It works but it's a kludge. Not to denigrate UVMapper or Compose, they served us well in the past but there is no reason to not have this all integrated in one tool. Blender can now be your one-stop-shop for modeling, morphing, UVMapping, and texturing. When using Blender to make new cloths of morphs of clothes, having to jump through so many apps every time you need to test the update adds substantial time.
Now you simply export to OBJ, launch Studio, run Morph Loader and you're done!

Quote - It was always possible but if you make it easier, that's great. Will be looking forward to using it.

The update addresses a problem that prevented the use of Blender-generated OBJs for FBMs: Blender did not retain or export the group names defined in the original OBJ file. So, techincally, yes, you could make modified meshes from the original Poser figures but those meshes would not be  recognized by Poser or DAZ Studio because of the lack of groups. 
The updates in v.2.49 fix this issue.

Quote - Basically you select the body part then in the properties bit of the parameters tab, click "load morph target" and away you go

AFAIK that doesn't work for FBMs

Quote - How do you load the morphs in Poser?

Sorry, don't know about that, I don't user Poser anymore since DAZ Studio 2.3 
Maybe other people here in the forum can suggest a workflow for that? If you can create a PZ2 file that refers to the FBM geometry file then you can use the PZ2 in Poser and apply the morph. 
Seriously suggest to look at Studio, it makes a lot of things much simpler to do.

 If you haven't used Blender before it can be quite the "impact", the UI is great but is very different from anything else. A good source of introductory tutorials is totallyblended.com
Also the book "Introducing Charactech Animation with Blender" has a very nice description of the Blender UI.

 Look under the File menu in Blender, Import, toward the end of the list there is "Wavefront obj"
You can watch a tutorial about the whole process at http://paolociccone.com/tutorials/blender_poser_fbm.html

Thank you. Have fun and don't hesitate posting here if you need more help
 

Hey Mannixman, thank, I'm glad it was helpful.

 Interesting. That was the original behavior of the plugins when I submitted them. My rationale for that was that since groups are defined they should be included anyway, I mean there is not damage in importing them. Campbell Barton argued about a UI option and I added it. At the end of the day it was more important for me to have the updates in the new code release than trying to argue philosophical points. 
Anyway, let us know how it goes.

Strange. I didn't try the PPC version, it might be that that one is different. The Intel version has it. 

 @Pol Good suggestion, I'll see what I can do.

 @sirenia Th eversion number has not being changed yet, you can see the same number in the tutorial. Just run the OBJ import and if it has the "Poly Groups" then you have the right version.

Hi. As I mentioned a few days ago, I worked on a video that shows the new workflow, starting from the stock V4 obj file.

The video tutorial, 17 mins, is now available, you can watch it at

http://paolociccone.com/tutorials/blender_poser_fbm.html

Enjoy!