Thanks for all the encouragement. I didn't really take much stock in the negative comment. The person, who posted it, isn't a typical troll because the person has done some modeling and has a gallery--unlike the typical troll who has no accomplishments to show. The fact that this person looked at the image, based on the thumbnail, is an indication that the image was worth looking at. I know I only have time to look at a fraction of the images in the gallery and, if the thumbnail doesn't grab me, I don't bother opening it. The weird thing is that, after opening it and seeing all the credits for what I used, it suddenly turned this person completely against the image. I do not understand people like that. Something, that was once good, becomes completely horrible when it violates their internal rules. My mother is sometimes like that. She once complimented me on how good my car looked after it got washed. I told her that I never washed my car. Her immediate response was that I better get it washed. It was a 180 degree reaction. One minute, the car was spotless. The next, it was filthy. It's one of those strange perceptual things where reality is totally governed by perceptions. Had my car been washed a minute before my mother saw it, she would still have seen the car as filthy if I had said that it hadn't been washed. These perceptual things are constantly at odds with much of the art world. I remember seeing a photography site that expressly would not allow digitally altered images on their site. There are many art sites that are the same way--but the photography snobbery bothered me more. The best photographer in the world only has marginal technical skills to learn. A two year-old can figure out how to push the button on a camera. It takes a little more knowledge to understand lighting and focus, but it's a smaller learning curve than something like Poser. What truly distinguishes a great photographer is having a good eye for an interesting image. It astonishes me that an artist or photographer can dismiss digital art as not being creative. As with anything, there is good and bad digital art. We've all seen it. I'm sure that we've all seen highly acclaimed artwork and shook our heads in dismay at what the critics are trying to tell us is magnificent art. I've seen Poser art that is awful. Poses and expression aren't realistic. Composition is bad. They're still using the lousy default Poser camera focal lengths, etc., etc. Most of us would never consider knocking those efforts because the person, that put up the images, thought that they were good enough to show the world. Considering that it takes time to learn Poser well, they've still accomplished something. With the right helpful comments, they can improve what they're doing. They'll probably never achieve what the top Poser users can do, but the most obvious problems can be fixed when they are technical errors. Artistic errors are harder to correct and harder to offer advice on. The average camera shooter will never achieve what Ansel Adams did in his career as a photographer. No amount of technical skill in Poser or Photoshop is ever going to turn somebody, without innate artistic sensibilities, into a great artist. I started looking at some of the galleries, of posters here, and there's some really incredible stuff. I've been putzing around with Poser for years, but only recently started trying to do full images. I've always enjoyed drawing and have some decent skills with a pencil, but always lose something when I try to finish the drawing in ink or paint. Computer art has always appealed to me because of the ability to redo things that aren't working without starting from scratch (though that ain't always the case with Poser). Getting good results in Poser (or any art program for that matter) is not as easy as it looks. I've only recently started getting comfortable with my results in posing figures. Poser can be terribly frustrating to use because there is nothing natural about posing a 3D figure in a 2D interface. I could spend hours getting a figure into a natural position that I could draw in minutes. It's taken me a long time to do a full image in Poser because of the difficulty in getting results that were worth the effort to complete. The lights in Poser are more arcane than I'd like. It's annoying to have to wait 30 minutes for a render to see what Poser is doing with the lighting and find that it's nothing like in the pre-rendered image. In my image, there's a yellow spotlight directly under the wood spoon and there's nothing to indicate that it's there in the render. I was hoping to get yellow highlights on the bottom of the hands and on the spoon. I'm still learning. I'm finally starting to appreciate what can be done with Poser. It is still a lot of work to do something. It's pushing me to upgrade my 800 MHz system. I'm getting tired of trying to nudge a rotation, in a busy scene, by a couple degrees and have it swing 270 degrees. Thanks again for the nice words.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon