I finally decided to purchase Bodystudio and have had a couple days to mess with it. Since I've seen others making inquiries I thought I'd offer my observations as well as asking a couple of questions that hopefully others may be able to answer.

1. I found the plug-in to be extremely easy to use and well designed. It allows you to bring in multiple poser scenes into a Max environment complete with textures and animation. Basically, the plug-in "hosts" the Poser files so that changes made in Poser will be updated in the Max file when reloaded or upon reopening the scene.

2. Bodystudio does a good job of handling Poser textures to the extent that it can. Image maps and transparencies are accomodated beautifully. You have some options to better emulate shaders using the Max materials system. Given the differences in the materials systems, Bodystudio operates exceptionally well.

3. Each Poser scene has its own null so that scaling and positional/rotational animating can be applied on top of whatever animation is inherent in the poser scene. This makes it a snap to tweak mocap and other motions to match precisely within the Max environment.

4. Being able to work with Max scenes and use renderers superior to FireFly are huge advantages. As a test I dropped a variety of Poser models (from low-res P2 to V3 in the foreground) into a Max classroom scene and rendered it with Vray (see below) to see how the stock settings would render. I was quite pleased with the result.

5. I was clued in to the fact that Bodystudio is not 64-bit compatible and that's the only real negative I have at this point. Hopefully, this will be rectified in an upcoming release so that users can take advantage of 64-bit Max systems.

Now for my questions:

1. Does anyone know a way to extract the mesh/texture data from the files hosted by Bodystudio? It would seem to me that this shouldn't be tough to do (with the obvious understanding that you'd lose the animation capabilities) but I haven't figured out a way.

2. Until we have a 64-bit version the memory limits of XP are a problem (I would point out to those of you not aware, that there is a software switch for the pro version of XP-32 that allows you to up memory recognition to 4 gigs. I'm running a home version so I haven't been able to try this myself. You can find the details by googling it or searching "XP memory switch" on the cgtalk forums.

3. I haven't figured out if it is possible to instance the Poser files brought in to be able to get multiple instances without taking a hit on the texture/geometry file sizes. If anyone knows an answer to this, please let me know.

TheDoctor