Hello I've been battling an issue with 3DS Max whereby after importing a Poser Scene via PoserFusion and applying a Mesh Optimizer (to reduce polygon count) I'm losing the animation on the model.

I've tried using ProOptimizer and MultiRes and after applying both optimizations the mesh no longer animates.

The only one that preserved the animation was the basic Optimize modifier, but I found it too simple an optimization and tweaking it only led to ugly deformations of the mesh.

Can anyone help me find a way to optimize the mesh in 3DS Max while retaining the animation generated from Poser?

Thanks.

You can manually optimize any mesh by adding a edit poly, switch to edges, and enable edge loop mode from the Graphite Ribbon (if you don't have it mapped to a hotkey).  Loop Mode allows you to quickly select full edge loops by simply clicking on any edge, then CTRL+BACKSPACE to remove them.  Even on dense topology, this would be the cleanest way to optimize; assuming the mesh in question consists entirely of quads.  This should, in theory, preserve any animation baked into the character as well.  I am not familiar with Poser or PoserFusion, so this is merely speculation.

There's also a plugin called Polygon Cruncher, which does a very good job preserving all kinds of things in a reduced mesh, like UV's.  Can't guarantee it will work for you in this case, but it's another option.

http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/polygoncruncher/3dsmax.htm

Alternatively, there are some Maxscripts which promise to retain the mesh type, and all kinds of modifiers.  This is one of them:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/lod-creator

Here's another one for Maxscript:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/auto-prooptimizer

If Scriptspot is currently "offline" right now for maintenance, they should return in a few hours.

Thanks very much for the reply, I'll try out some of those scripts. 

After some discussion on other threads the PoserFusion route may not be the way to go as it doesn't generate any bones or rigging for animation, only animated vertices.

The COLLADA export exports the rigging, meshes and textures... but the conforming clothing is now detached from the figure.

So basically in the COLLADA export:

1. The Victoria4 Figure itself animates correctly

2. Any props specifically parented to body parts animate correctly

3. Any conforming clothing DOES NOT animate at all

4. Any conforming clothing that is parented to the Victoria Figure is re-oriented at the base of the Victoria figure

Any ideas on how to get the conforming clothing animation exported in the COLLADA file in a way that 3DS Max interprets it properly? 

Just quick question: for what purpose are you looking to reduce the polycount of the model in your animation? If the answer is to speed up viewport performance, or rendering, then you might wanna look at the Point Cache modifier.  It will save out the imported vertex animation to a file, which can then be loaded to a static model, to speed up playback and performance.  It provides a faster viewport response than models which are rigged with bones and skinned.  As long as you're not doing the animation in 3dsmax, then you really don't need all the rigging and skinning information in the scene.  It's only going to slow performance.

The purpose for the polygon reduction is to make it more manageable for use in Unity3D as a game object.

I know there are tons of posts on this topic, and I've been reading through a lot of them, but haven't found a clear answer.

The COLLADA export is close it just does funny things with the conforming clothes. Perhaps I have to re-parent the meshes to the bones after importing into 3DS Max.

Cheers.

Alright finally, after a year and a half of trolling the forums and fiddling with export/import settings, I've solved this issue of how to get Poser animated scenes into Unity (single characters only).

Assuming we're talking about a single Victoria 4 character and conforming clothing:

1. Animate the Victoria 4 model with whatever motion you need in Poser

2. Save the pose as an Animated Pose back to the Poser Library; sometimes the pose will not save hand and foot parts properly and cause the clothing mesh to deform weirdly, you have to open up the pz2 file and find the section for lHand or rFoot or whatever part is deforming weirdly and reset all its translation values to 0 (zero)

3. Pick the clothing you want for the V4 model and add to the scene but DO NOT conform or parent to V4 (just add it stand alone); it is important that all objects are direct descendants of the UNIVERSE scene object

4. Apply the pose you just saved to the conforming clothing; this will animate the clothing as if it is attached to V4 even though it is not

5. Export the scene as COLLADA (dae) 

6. Import into 3DS Max; if you've been running Max for a while I find sometimes 3DS Max will warp the clothing mesh, in this case I just restart Max and re-import the DAE file and it shows up fine

7. When adding optimizers like MultiRes and ProOptimizer make sure they appear underneath the Skin modifier or else they wont take effect when you export to FBX

8. Export from 3DS Max to FBX

9. Import into Unity 3D and generate a Prefab from the FBX reference

Hopefully this gives someone else a head start if their character modeler of preference is Poser, this was a particularly painful road for me to travel.