This is an article I found at MacCentral Reiss Studio, a company that develops and promotes 3D graphics tools, and Curious Labs Inc., which designs, develops and publishes software tools such as Poser, have teamed up to enable Curious Labs' Poser animation technology in the Maya software package from Alias|Wavefront. Reiss Studio has a new plug-in, BodyStudio, that lets Poser users render and playback animations created in Poser from within Maya. The US$299 plug-in provides a large source of pre-rigged characters and props. It's available now for the Windows operating system with a Mac OS X version promised "soon." Poser is a 3D-character animation and design tool for digital artists and animators. Maya is a3D animation and visual effects software for film, broadcast, video, and game development. There's a community of over 100,000 Poser users, and a large selection of adaptable characters, and props, many of which are available for under $29. The characters can be easily animated in Poser, and the fully textured, animated meshes will play back in Maya. These characters can interact with all aspects of Maya, such as dynamics, modeling, Maya Cloth and more. BodyStudio promotes an advanced level of compatibility between Poser, and a high-end 3D Application. It offers, among other things, a shader translation ability and "Real World Scaling Presets." With BodyStudio, when you host a Poser file, a custom shader network is created in Maya that matches virtually all of the shading features used by Poser, according to the folks at Reiss Studio. All File Textures are automatically set up, and assigned. In addition, there is also support for Poser's file format and transparency maps are automatically inverted to match Maya's transparency functions.