In general survives to corrupt meshes without crashing and tries to repair it whenever is possible.

You can load Poser meshes with internal geometry (pp2, cr2, hr2) and dynamic hair and can load 3ds, obj, dxf, ply, off and stl formats.

Can export as obj, pp2 and LuxRender (lxo+lxm+lxs)

You can perform several operations with the mesh: Reverse normals, Mirror,X,Y,Z; Weld, Convert to quads, Convert to triangles, Split, Smooth (taubin), Subdivision (Middle-point), Fix normals, Remove duplicated faces, Remove non two-manifold faces

Just finished something like drape or convert to a regular mesh (don't know can call it)

Not all these features are present in the uploaded version.

Working in other subdivision schemes, decimation and Poisson reconstruct (turn point cloud into a mesh)

Try with PropViever 3 (ShareCG) to convert 3ds to obj format and then import obj into Poser.

PropViever supports 3ds keyframes and so, it puts all the elements of the model in the correct place. Most of the times it works, but sometimes it fails and leaves the parts glued or in wrong place. Until now I don't know why, some 3ds mystery secrets ???

In either case each part of the 3ds mesh has a group name in the exported obj format.

Use two lenses. Changing the distance between them you change how much is the magnifying effect or its reverse. Maybe you get an inverted image. Add more lenses and you can have a non inverted image.

How physically correct is Poser I don't know, just experiment and see what happens.

The problem is that with morphs or even dynamic clothes is that the distance between vertices is changed while the texture coodinates remain always the same.

The only way to avoid the stretching or compression of the texture is to morph the u,v coordinates too and not only x,y,z

Is not the question of polygons number, is a question of science, knowledge and how you use this knowledge. Is a question of amateur vs technician and technician vs engineer. Apollo landed in the Moon using computers that were very primitive compared to what you have in your cell phone, but this stone age computers were enough to put man on the Moon. On the other side, you are not able to land on the Moon or even build a wooden bridge using your cell phone.

Rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics, springs, masses, fluid dynamics is a many centuries old question, it began with Newton. These problems were studied and solved and so, people built bridges, steam machines, planes, ships, factories, industrial machines without having computers or even a toy calculator, all was done by hand and it worked and continue to work today.

Now if you take your mavelous toys that have an amazing computational power and speed, and add a two centuries old problems, theories and solutions a miracle will happen and even more amazing miracles will do happen.

Quote - would this work for mapping an egg shape?

You can map an ellipsoid, you only need to do the same with the y coordinate.

An egg is not an ellipsoid, but is similar so the mapping will work fine even not exactly.

I don't know how Wings works, maybe it maps correctly an elliptical cylinder, but Rhino 4 does not !

The inverse problem.

The second problem was that I wanted to build a mesh of an ellipse with uniform lenght of the faces. Any edge of a face along the perimeter of the ellipse has the same length.

The mathematical solution is the inverse of the incomplete elliptic integral of the second kind, nice name again, but this time I was unable to find a software package, library or related maths. What do exist is the inverse of the elliptical integral of the first kind (Jacobian functions), but nothing about the second kind. Until now I was unable to find the exact solution.

What I did was also another approximation with an error less of one percent. I have not implemented it in any software yet

Well, now I have the math base needed, but how I do it? I can use some software package to solve this integral and I found some after some day of web search. But there is also another big problem. The calculation is time consuming, for today computers it means nothing, but if we want to map meshes with tens or hundreds thousands polygons it will take some time to do it, well rendering an image takes much more, but I wanted to find another and faster way to do it.

My idea was to approximate the solution, I don't need an exact solution, I am not going to land in Mars with this. An error of one percent would be something beautiful and nobody will see any difference in the texturing. I wanted to approximate this integral with something basic mathematical operations and basic mathematical functions.

After two or three weeks of work I found something very simple with an error of less than 1.5% and it took me half of an hour to code and include into a software app.

How I did it?

Well, the solution of the problem is nothing easy. I shall try to explain in a way as simple as I can.

To have an uniform distribution of the texture map applied to a curved surface, the UV coordinates must be proportional to the perimeter or arch lenght of the curve.

The simplest case is a plane, as the curve is nothing more than a line, the texture coordinate becomes the plane coordinate  u = x , v = y  scaled by a factor to fit into the uv range, generaly 0.0 to 1.0

Next cames a cylinder. It is a little more complicated, but still continues to be very simple. One UV coordinate is a simple line (the height of the cylinder) so v = y and the other coordinate u is the perimeter of a circle.

The perimeter of a circunferrence is something very simple and it is proportional to the arch angle, so we have u = angle. To find the angle of a point along the perimeter of the circle, we only need basic school trigonometric functions, sinus, cosinus, etc. This functions any calculator does, any software routine has and even are implemented in the CPU of a computer.

Here ends the easy story. If we have an ellipse instead of a circle, things go ugly. No school knowledge can solve this. Now we need University grade and advanced calculus. The solution for the arch length of an ellipse is the incomplete elliptical integral of the second kind. Nice name, but the problem doesn't end here. This integral has no exact solution. To solve the integral it must be expanded into series. It was done and results were tabulated one or two centuries ago, but still contine to be something nothing common in our lives. This integral is part of what we know as "speciall functions". Common scientific calculator don't have them, we need a calculator with speciall functions. There are also software routines and libraies that can calculate this integral.