Well, I've tried the .pz3 import, and was only once asked to locate Poser.exe, which is cool because I thought I'd have to do it every time. I've noticed that the models seem to be smoothed the same way in Vue 4 as they are in Poser, which is very cool. BUT, the object/body parts are grouped differently! I had a figure that was wearing glasses, and in Poser tha glasses were made up of the frame and the lenses. Obviously the lenses need to be transparent. But in Vue 4, that only showed up as one object, "glasses", making it impossible for me to make the lenses transparent in Vue 4. The lenses were transparent in Poser. No amount of UV mapping or texturing will handle that problem. Obviously, I can still import .obj and retain all the groups and materials, but then the smoothing on the model is the same old way. Also, an even worse problem is Vicki's eyeball material. A Vicki model imported as .obj has four materials per eye: eyeball (the damn "coating" material---whoever came up with that idea out to be...),eyewhite, iris and pupil, each of which can be textured separately. If you can't make the "eyeball" material transparent, it's just a completely opaque sphere around the eye which thoroughly hides all the important parts, making her look like some kind of a zombie. Some people like to make that material mostly transparent, with a little reflection, but I usually simply delete it, except for close-ups. However, when the .pz3 is imported of a Vicki character, all you get is "left eye" and "right eye" in Vue, all 4 parts merged. There is no way to make the "eyeball" material transparent, much less delete it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Overall I think the characters that are imported as .pz3 look better when rendered, but if you have any transparencies, forget it, unless it's one entire object. I know I can actually remove the eyeball material from the blmilwom.obj itself (with UV Mapper), where that wouldn't be a problem, but then I can't use some of the iris morphs I've made.

Hi Mike, Have you tried double clicking on the group (i.e. "right eye"), and then clicking the split mesh tab so that it seperates into seperate material parts. I'm not sure if it would work with Vicky, as I have not bought her...I'm more of an animal person ;) Cheers

hmm... I wasn't even aware of that yet. I'll give it a try, thanks.

why dont you import the glasses as 3ds mike and fit em to the face then you can add glass

Right OK, I just tested it on the Zygote Rhino imported as a PZ3, and the mesh will split...but, I've found another bug :( I doubled clicked on the "Head" group and split it into 5 groups. What Vue did was make a copy of the head but split into the five parts...excellent. I then had to delete the original unsplit head that had become untextured to see the "new" head in the render. Problem is it ruins the mapping for the head...ohhh well! Cheers

Oh yeah, I know all about that sort of thing, but I was hoping to find a way around having to do that, since they're already fitted, ya know. ;) THe "split" thing didn't work, either, though it might have something to do with "double sided" or not. I managed to see the pupils, but no irises. weird. Anyhow, I have to leave for the day, and won't have any time to experiment until this evening....

That's weird Martin... I'll have to check that out too. BTW, I was replying to dolly....

I'm a little confused, Mike. If the glasses lenses had a different material on them...which they should have, if they had a different material in Poser...then you shouldn't have to split the mesh. You should be able to go to the material summary and pick out the material assigned to the glasses lenses and tweak it however you want, just like you do to change the leaves of a Solid Growth tree. What am I missing here? -SMT

Good thinking Stephen...I had also forgotten about the material summary ;) Cheers

In fact, unless a mesh is "articulated" (going to have moving parts in an animation), I would prefer that it be JUST a single mesh, (no sub-objects) with multiple materials. It's simpler to handle that way, and It will actually render faster. -SMT

Attached Link: http://www.sturkwurk.com

I'm new to vue, but I'm testing 4 right now also... I brought in a Pz3 (which you can see rendered in Poser format in the digital comic gallery here at Renderosity called Klatu) Everthing came into vue fine... except the head had no texture all all... and the eyes were floating in space... I've also done another test with the Daz3d BMW imported again from the Pz3... and it almost worked perfectly... except Vue wouldnt recongnize the bump maps (they may have been a psd file... vue doesnt recognize psd?) BMW is shown. let me know if some one comes up with any major import breakthroughs!

There is a recognized problem with BUM file import with the current version of Vue4. E-On is working on it along with a number of other annoyances, and I'm sure they will release a maintenance upgrade very soon. -SMT BTW: Very nice render, indeed! :)

Like Sturkwurk, I had a model import with no face, the eyeballs casting shadows to the inside of the hair. It's very weird looking! I think somehow the figure's head got its normals inverted. I haven't had a chance to get back to it to investigate further yet.

I've had some interesting experiences with the poser import. Materials and groups : The best way to fix this is to go through the material summary. Especially if you want to control the body skin and the head skin with only one material, it is easy to assign the same material to multiple body parts that way. Bumps: Vue seems to overreact with poser bump values. Just reduce the bump gain in the vue material way way down and it looks normal again (I found this was easier to do than remove the bump map in poser and add it later in vue) Crashes: I had multiple crashes importing poser models in vue. Most of the time, I found out they were related to either props (especially 3ds props) or very twisted clothes. In one picture, I had to strip a poser character from all her props (she had a crown, earrings and a necklace) and save them as individual obj files for later import in vue. I hope this will help...

"...had to strip a poser character from all her props..." Just try "unparenting" the props before saving the scene and see if that helps... -SMT

Ahhh..... the Material Summary... I forgot all about checking in there. Guess I was just too excited about Vue 4. :) Actually, I was running a bunch of quick experiments, trying to get the feel of it, and didn't spend much time on any one thing except my latest pic in the gallery, which has no Poser in it.

About the 'locate poser.exe' problem. The only time I ran into it, I had poser already running and I was trying to open vue at the same time. The problem dissapears if I run close poser before opening vue.

They say on the E-on site to rename "poser.exe" as "poser.exe". And that is the same thing-- same name--not a typo. Strange, huh?

May be i have chance because all my poser imports works fine until now,if i set no bump in Poser.Here one with Vic2p4 using victoria textures and total hair.Without retouching( but need on clothing but was the same in Poser)