Hi, I was reading that Vue is capable of importing .pz3 files directly. Tried this with Poser 3, but Vue complains about the file format. Any other export format from Poser 3 will bring the geometry, but only a default material. I know I can retexture them in Vue, but I was wondering whether there is any way to bring the figures from P3 into Vue with at least part of their textures?

Nobody answered. Ts ts. But it is indeed a little long ago that this issue was under discussion. I simply did one thing. Thought about who could know something like that and then asked her - Guitta. She says a warm hello to all and that she is missing this forum very much. Of course she has no access right now to Poser 3 and Vue so she can't check her thoughts personally but gave two options. #1 Save all elements from Poser 3 into pz2's separately. Character one file, hair another etc. And then import those to Vue separately. Guitta said, it should work that way. #2 Export as obj file from Poser and import that into Vue. One trick. Copy all the bitmaps (textures) into one folder first, apply them from there to your characters and then export your figure to that folder. Poser then will write a mtl-file to the obj file that contains the texture information. Inport the obj-file to Vue and see what happens. Guitta said as well that she thinks you have to do the different parts (character, hair etc) separately but i am not too sure about that. Try it out and let us know. What can happen is, that Vue still does not find the texture directly (i had that case before) but has a material "prepared" where i simply had to reconnect the texture again. Not a big thing. If you are not sure what texture, you can open the mtl-file in a word processor (or notepad or whatever), it is readable. And see what is written in there. Let us know what your experiences are. Walther

Hi wabe, thanks for taking the time to getting an answer to this and also big thanks to Guitta for sharing her thoughts. Many people here miss her very much, too! As there was no answer at first, I had a deeper look into the Poser folders (as I was using a standard character). I'm completely new to the program and thus not very used to where and what things are. For a first run, I found a .tif for that figure and applying that as a bitmap in Vue, I could color the figure. Didn't manage with the hair yet and made a Vue texture for that. However, I suppose it is the better idea to make the parts seperate to be able to apply different relief or shininess to different parts (like cloths and skin). One of the bitmaps did not seem to really match the appearance of the character within Poser anyway. I'll give you suggestions a try during the weekend (once I figure out, how to do it...) and keep you posted on the outcome. I probably will get Poser 4 within the next months but need some figures for a short term project and thought this might be a good way to get my feet wet.

I'm sorry firebolt, I know nothing about Poser 3 in Vue. I am, however, thrilled that Guitta has responded to this thread through wabe!! That's so wonderful!!! I'm sure she's delighted to use her knowledge to answer questions about Vue. Brilliant idea, Walther!

Ditto...Guitta is one of the true authorities on the use of Vue, that's for sure! Glad she was able to help, thanks for asking her, Walther.

Ok, I spent some time experimenting with Poser 3 this weekend and did not come much further... I could not find a way to save anything as .pz2 - it saves a pose I put in the library correctly as .pz2, but that's it. Having, for example, hair for a character, it will be removed with it when I delete the character. However, adding hair without a character in the studio will not work. Whatever I did, I could not convince P3 to generate a .MTL file with its exported .obj :-( And, maybe I'm just too dumb, but I did not find a way to put different colormaps on different body parts - no matter which part I select in the Render->Surface (or whatever that's called in the englisch version) it will take the map I select for one part for every other part as well. However, when I get the .obj to Vue and map the standard colormap (that .tif with all the parts painted on) onto it, it looks somewhat acceptable - pale colors as of the standard and all the same kind of surface unless I would do complex bump and shininess mapping. As I exported with groupings, I could also texture each part myself, but I don't think I'll find the time to do that for this project. But I anyway learnt some Poser basics :-)

Well, the difficulty is that we all are on Poser 4 or 5. Not many till nobody on Poser 3 anymore. So i/we can't test things really there. Are you using a german version of Poser 3? Just a guess from your name :-)). BTW, have you tried the other export formats as well? Maybe 3DS will work? Or another one. I always try to export to all possible formats to find out what the best solution is. Regarding the Vue material questions, maybe you add some screenshots of the material settings here. So that we can see where the problem might be. Sounds to me that you mix the texture with a colour (white) and therefore gets the pale look. But almost impossible to tell without more information. Would it help to explain all that in German (if you are native German) in a IM? If so, send one to me and i can try to help you that way.

Hi Walther, thanks for the offer. You are right, I'm German and using the german Poser version. I think I will be changing to P4 in some time, too, so this is not really extremely important, but nevertheless I'd be thankful for a german explanation on how to convince Poser 3 to put different textures on different body parts and to produce an .mtl file. As for the textures, I included a little test render. I only applied a simple color to the hair, nothing fancy here. The woman on the left is as the .obj comes in (3DS will look similar, only a different shade of grey, DXF as well). The one in the middle is using the standard .tif from the Poser3 textures. That is the pale effect I mean. For the one on the right, I increased the color saturation in that .tif (maybe overdid it a little, but should be okay for the demonstration). There is no color mixing or other special effects in the Vue materials - just reduced the shininess of the default material and adjusted the image size. Looks like I can add bump maps to the different parts manually while keeping the overall .tif for the color production. That way, I can live with it in any case, but would still be curious whether I miss some of the possibilities of Poser.