Q. What if I want more than one character in a scene?
A. It works fine.  Create your animation in Poser using as many characters as you like, but import and place them in Cinema 4D one at a time using the instructions above.

Q. What if I decide I don't like the animation and want to change it?
A. In Cinema 4D, delete the Null containing all the Morph targets.  Then delete the master object.  Fix what you want to in Poser, then re-import as per the normal instructions.

Q.  All those morph targets make Cinema 4D really slow!  Can I do anything about that?
A. In a word, no.  Each morph target is effectively a complete copy of your main model.  The Poser businessman with hair has about 16,000 points and they all take up memory.  The 300 frames of animation which makes up the demo shown here therefore contains 300x16000=4.8 million points, all of which Cinema 4D is trying to keep in memory.

Q. Couldn't I just export BVH motion from Poser and then just attach that skeleton to a single Poser model in Cinema 4D?
A. Well, yes, but not all parts of the Poser characters are boned - in particular, the face.  Therefore any facial animation you've done will be lost.

Q. OK then, so why not just export the animated head and use BVH for the rest of the body?
A. You can, but the problem with BVH output from Poser is that it records the bending and flexing of the skeleton but not how it moves in world space.  Put another way, your character will not move from the spot he's standing on.  (Unless I'm doing something wrong in Poser, of course ;-)

Q. I don't need to see the entire character as he'll be sitting behind a desk.  Could I just import the torso?
A. Yes.  Just select the bits of the character you want in the Heirarchy Selection screen in Poser (see above).  In the talking heads demo movie all I actually exported from Poser was the heads, eyes and hair.  note: as per the first question, each character was exported seperately!

Q. Does this work with Lipsinc Mimic?
A. Yes.  The talking heads demo movie was lipsynced using that very product.

Q. Does this work with custom Poser models (eg, the Poserworld CD stuff)?
A. Yes.  Anything you can build and animate in Poser will work with this system.

Q. What if I want parts of the set to move during my animation - an elevator, for example?
A. That's no problem, it just means a little more work.  I would export the moving parts of the set seperately so that they can be independently moved in Poser.  However, when you later import the Poser animation into Cinema 4D, you'll have to animate the moving parts again.  It's not ideal, I know, but who ever said animation was going to be easy?

Q. When can I have a Macintosh version of OBJCrusher?
A. This is underway right now.  In the meantime, OBJCrusher does work perfectly in VirtualPC if you happen to have that.

  Q. What does OBJCrusher actually do internally?
A. Ahah!  A fellow geek ;-)  Firstly, read the Wavefront filespec.  You should see pretty quickly that if you just joined two OBJ files together with a copy & paste, the second object wouldn't work because the 'f' lines would refer to vertices from the first vertex set (I know, I tried it).  You should also see that we don't need any of the data types except 'v' and 'f'.  So, for each OBJ file, OBJCrusher removes all data types except 'v' and 'f', inserts a single 'g' datatype with the target name, removes the 'vt' and 'vn' data from each 'f' line, and finally renumbers the 'f' lines to address the right vertex.  OBJ files are plain text, so you could always try looking at 'before' and 'after' to see for yourself!

Q. Is the OBJCrusher source code available?
A. Yes and No.  It's not available for download here at the moment.  My plan (well, my hope) is to translate both OBJCrusher and WriteMorphKeys into true C.O.F.F.E.E. plugins so they work for both Mac and PC, but that will depend on me finding the resources and the help, which I'm confident I'll be able to do.  Once that is done and working, I will release the full source code.