I'm considering converting a lightwave character into poser.. what would be considered a good high end polycount? (He's pretty detailed now)

You pays your money and you take your choice. Here are some comparisons:-

• Poser 2 figures:- 2500 faces
• Poser 4 figures:- 16,000 - 19,000 faces
• Vicki 1/2:- 29,000 faces
• Vicki 3:- 74,500 faces

A high polygon count will not necessarily mean a better figure it will naturally depend on how the faces are arranged.

Yep, but since this character is already modeled.. I might get by with fewer If I change the division amount...

Poser really likes to smooth polygons, you may be able to go down a notch on the subdivision value. You have to try the model in Poser to see how it looks, and also how it bends and moves at that subdivision level in order to decide.

I already set it at 1, and think I got some good results. I've never added a skeleton and such from lightwave into poser.. is there a good tutorial out there somewhere? I remember reading that you could import a figure with a similar skeleton, and adapt it for a new character's use...

Setting it 1 will only round the edges, so if you get a good result with that you probably have a lot of polygons to start with in your mesh before you nurb it. If I were to do it, I would import the obj mesh (remember to cut up the body parts first in LW by simply cutting and pasting the various groups) then send it to the setup room, I would then assign the skeleton of the closest character to yours and then save the new figure, from there you would have to adjust the pivot points of the joints and all the blend zones.

I'll probably follow your advice, since this is my first crack at it. I'll need the skeleton from a man like creature with a tail, and wings. any ideas? I think he has 3 fingers and a thumb... have to check that.

I would apply a humanoid skeleton (strip the cr2 of any morph information), save the figure and then add a series of bones from the hip down for the tail, and another set of bones for the wings from the chest bone. For the tail's setup I would look up EasyPose in the forums (I believe it's Ajax's technique, he has an easy pose tube in freestuff for you to analyse. As far as the wing setup there are quite a few wing sets out there, or even the different dragons wings could give you insight as to how to go about it.