Poser Pro to Clip Studio – how?

I tried a quick test on sending a 3D character from Poser Pro to my newly-purchased Clip Studio (Manga Studio). There’s still no bridge or utility to do this, it seems it’s a question of exporting the figure in .FBX or .OBJ format and hoping for the best.

1. First, V4 is clothed and dressed and posed in Poser. Here she looks rather good in Poser’s real-time Comic Book mode. No 30 minutes of hand-inking in Clip Studio required.

Still, let’s see how good she can look in Clip Studio.

2. The FBX export from Poser was done to the required 2014 target, and with other settings correct…

… but on import to Clip Studio it turned into a disaster. The figure was imported as a straightforward t-pose, and the pose was lost. The outfit was not conformed. Thus .FBX does not seem to be a viable route from Poser except for static props.

3. So I tried .OBJ format. In Clip Studio, I created a new Document. Import…

Nothing, zitch, complete absence of a standard 18Mb .OBJ model, despite seeming to load for a second or two. Is it too big in scale and thus out of sight? Nope, it’s just not in Clip Studio at all. No 3D layer produced (as should happen), no 3D model showing in the scene list, no control panel for an imported model.

I tried again with different export settings, different models, getting progressively simpler in my choice of model until even a simple 10k book also had the same result. So it can’t be the model size that’s causing the problem.

I then tried the old Manga Studio trick where you .ZIP the .OBJ with its materials and .MTL file. Nope, nothing worked with that either.

I then tried a non Poser .OBJ I exported from Blender years ago and… it loaded fine. Ok, so at least I then knew that .OBJ import isn’t cripped in the standard version of Clip Studio.

Thus the problem would seem to lie back with Poser 11.2. Is it unable to export an .OBJ of a type that can be read by Clip Studio?

And yet, the .OBJ loads fine in Keyshot and can be saved out as a new .OBJ file. That also fails to load in Clip Studio.

So I’m baffled. It can’t be Poser, as Clip Studio also ignores the KeyShot-written .OBJ file.

Closing and re-loading Clip Studio had no effect on the problem.

I then loaded the KeyShot .OBJ in MeshLab 2020. Looking good, nothing wrong there…

… and saved it out as another new .OBJ. Surely this one would load to Clip Studio? Nope. Same failure. Nothing happens, no 3D layer is created and no 3D model is imported. This time there were no textures to potentially mess things up, either.

Could it be something inside the Poser .OBJ metadata, being read by Clip Studio and causing it to reject any Poser export? But surely that would be cleaned out by not one but two re-saves of the model in wholly different software?

So I have to give up. I had wanted to demo Clip Studio with Poser, but… total failure. The only remaining option is to export a ‘posed FBX’, but forum comments suggest this is impossible from Poser.

Update: Poser to Clip Studio – the solution.