My workflow might seem a bit strange, but most of it is because I try to avoid things doing from scratch. I am just a beginner in this whole character rigging and animation thing and for now I am making use of presets as much as possible. Another factor is that I am just making an internship in a foreign country and I don't have the time to deal with everything in depth if I want to stay in schedule.
This includes also the boning of Poser. I just deleted a few bones and exported the skeleton as BVH into Maya. In there I readjusted the skeleton to a perfect T-Stance which fitted the T Pose I previously set up for Ioli inside Poser.
Then I imported the character mesh from Poser with BodyStudio 2.6. I was actually hoping that BodyStudio would include the skeleton and skin weight information, but I had to find out it was only the mesh being played back inside Maya. Skeleton and weights information are there, too, but not accessible for the user.
So I had to find another way to get the skin weights into Maya. And the most obvious step was to use Daz Studio with its FBX plugin. I'm still optimistic that I will finally get the Ioli character exported as FBX including all morphs, but I need to do more testing. I read some success stories over at the DAZ board of Maya users getting a good FBX export. However the number of unsuccessful attempts exceeds the successful by far.

You said you would love to see a Daz figure with weighting? Well actually I had one in Motionbuilder, but it was the V3 character with the base skeleton as it is in Poser. The weighting looked quite good. All limb rotations went smooth without strange deformations. But I don't like the generic skeleton, especially because both spine bones are too close to each other. That makes retargeting of our motion capture data less accurate.

I will keep you updated :-)

Btw, do you have experience with MarkDC's Poser FBX Exporter?

Bye

The Poser export options are indeed poor. It should be self-evident for a 3D application to support the FBX format.

Anyway, what do you mean with the first who succeed at this? At transferring skin weights from a base character to another character set?
It actually worked without an error message. Only warning messages that some bones could not be found on the target character. That was because I made my own rig where I deleted the Buttocks bones and made some other changes. But as I said the skin weights produced a total mess. When I rotated for instance the right shoulder half the face was moving with it :-D

Btw, do you or anybody else here also have difficulties in painting manual smooth skin weights onto the V3 character in Maya? I get strange shading discontinuities in a lot of places although I smooth them out like crazy. I might do something wrong, because I am new to weights painting with the artisan interface in maya, but right now I can't recall that I made any major mistakes. I followed all the steps as outlined by A. Alvarez from Gnomon Workshop.
Or maybe the shader translation done by BodyStudio (which I used) made these discontinuities too obvious.
But I read very often about the poor topology of many Daz characters. Maybe this caused the prob...I dunno.
Any advise?

Ok please ignore the previous post. All of a sudden it worked although I didn't change anything. Strange. However, it looks a MESS! Unusable skin weights.

Actually I have another question, but I better open a new thread...

Sorry I had to rush to lunch with my colleagues.
Just wanted to continue writing that I found a similar program like T4M, available at:
http://www.greenbriarstudio.com/3D/index.htm

Do you know this one? It even works for Maya 8.0.

Btw, can someone give ma download link for T4M? Since I can't access the forum I get no download permission on the website.

Thanx!

Ok. I found out the main issue is the high resolution of the texture maps. These are 4000x3000 pixel and they exceed my memory capacity. Still this is a litte strange, because I have 2GB 667MHz RAM which should easily be sufficient for these textures, shouldn't it? Also I created a 2GB swap file on one of my drives.
When I reduced the texture resoluation by 50% with irfanview they seemed to load just fine. Only the eyebrows remained shaded  like in the above image. I got rid of this problem by deleting the shading group for the eyebrows in the Maya Hypeshade. This deleted the superfluous polygons at the eyebrows and revelaed the underlying texture.
Still reducing the texture resoluation is not what I want. I need the detail of the skin texture so I am searching for a way to keep it and work around the memory issue. Any ideas?

Unfortunately I can't register in the T4M forum, because the graphical confimation code is not loaded. Right now I am experimenting with a little program called Grouper 1.4 and see how it can help me. Also I found this website which seems more uptodate with adding comptaibilty between Poser and Maya than T4M.

(The list of invalid objects continues until 54 or so...)

BTW, I run Maya 7.0!