Wasn't it Tom A. who wrote:
>Question - Blobman is pretty slow parsing.  Are Poser meshes any better? 
>  And has anyone animated a poser figure?

Poser meshes parse quickly, and (like all meshes) they render extremely
quickly. The slowest part is converting the mesh from OBJ format to POV
Mesh format.

I'd never considered doing a Poser animation in POV before, thinking
that I'd have to export each frame individually and convert each OBJ
file to mesh format individually. However, it turns out that when you
export an animated Poser figure you can specify multiple frame output
and it creates a sequence of numbered OBJ files, and ObjUVPov can be
told to convert the whole lot at once. Then you just have to write POV
code to read a different mesh for each frame, like:

#include "strings.inc"

#declare Command = concat(
   "#include \"Fred_", str(frame_number-1 ,0 ,0), ".inc\" ")

#declare Figure = object { Parse_String(Command) }

Here's some *per-frame* statistics for a typical Poser person to POV and
rendering a very basic scene at 1024*768 AA 0.3, with very simple
lighting and texturing, on a 850 MHz Coppermine II.

Exporting Poser model to OBJ      3 secs
OBJ file size                   2.9 Mb
Converting to POV mesh           74 secs
Mesh file size                  3.7 Mb
Parsing                           5 secs
Tracing                           9 secs

So it would be possible to create a 60 frame animation in about an hour
and a half using 396 Mb of obj and mesh file space.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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