i've been thinking about buying poser for limited use in bryce (haven't been able to make photos of figures as pict objects look completely integrated in a scene so far). how well does bryce handle texture mapping of the figure (facial details, etc.) or is there a way to import a figure with all the textures somehow intact? that seems unlikely, but then, i know nothing about poser. thanx.

The only thing you have to do is to click on the appropriate texture in Poser/Runtime/textures directory and its subdirectories. the way to do make it easier is MeTaL Fixer: http://www.fignations.com/jelisa/mtl/mtl_fixer.html As to the "intact", you have to tweak specularity, ambience-ambient and bump values, regardless whether you use MeTaL fixer or not. There are several tutorials on importing Poser figures, one of the best is on http://www.curiography.com/

Attached Link: http://www.castironflamingo.com/tutorial/grouper/

You can import with textures in tact. You MUST export your model out of poser as a .obj this way the mapping of the textures stays in tact. Other formats lose the mapping. When you import into Bryce you will still have to play with the transparency maps but it is pretty straight forward and as mentioned above there are a number of good tut's around on how to do that bit. The other recommendation I would make though is getting a copy of the freeware version of "grouper". I have had a couple models fail to import into Bryce because of geometry issues, grouper fixes those. *(see link above)*

Yep, Grouper is wonderful. Aided me a whole lot. S.

thanks for the help. i've never worked with obj. files before. didn't realize they could carry all the texture information. that certainly does make trying poser out a lot more appealing.

Once you get the hang of things, the two programs work very well together.

Thing with obj files is that they have to have a mtl file beside them for Bryce to ask for the textures. You also could, beside using metal fixer, just copy all the needed textures to the directory where the obj and mtl files are.