Some more ruminations.... One way to step aside from the possibility of being targetted by copyright infringers is to do something unusual or difficult... in such a way that whomever is trying to steal from you will have to work at least as hard! This may be faulty, but I assume that a thief is either lazy or short of time, and neither condition is conducive to craftsmanship. There are a lot of regular textures for V2, goth textures for V2, tattoos all over V2, celtic designs on V2.... Except for the tattoos (many of which come from the sheets given out by parlors or downloaded from the tat sites) all of the textures I've seen have been symmetrical. This not only yields a certain beauty (the human mind loving order and symmetry), but means that the maker only has to do half the work. And, except for a rare artists such as Ecstasy, almost all of the textures are predictable and rather ordinary. Even the goth ones are predictable: white skin, black lips, red eyes... what is so revolutionary about that? A generic texture is easily copied. When I entered the make-over contest at 3dcommune, I wanted to do something different and difficult. The entries have been put into a package whose sales help the site, so I wanted my offering to be something someone didn't already have. Something distinctive. Getting an assymmetrical design to balance takes a lot more work and planning than simply flipping a design. I redrew this one many, many times until I was happy with it. One of the earlier versions had a dark outline, which I had to leave off the final (darned mask left too wide an anti-alias to have a 1-pixel outline), but it finally resembled what I saw in my head. I was pouring over Snowsultan's seam guide, however I still had to test the mask through various poses because of the stretching done by skin... even after I got it to wrap properly around the curves of the face. Plagiarists aren't going to spend testing time. Only a couple of people commented to me about this one... so I suspect that there isn't a market or desire for assymmetry. I've got plans to do the rest of the sequence anyway... because it is different and the only way I'm going to get that look is by doing it myself. Lyrra graciously sent me her lips for Cindy to work with, and there are a couple of other improvements I can make now. The sole way the market will grow is by people trying something different, but it is possible that difference has to come in tiny steps: witness car designs. The futuristic ones are just too different for the consumer to accept, no matter how much they demand newness and variety. But if you do what has already been done, often, how is anybody to tell that it is yours and yours alone? Meanwhile, I'm not too worried that somebody will take this make-up texture and steal bits from it and pass it off as theirs. It'd be too obvious... and plagiarists don't like to actually sweat over making something work. I want to apply it to Natalia, but won't be able to simply move bits around. I'll have to recreate it layer by layer and effect by effect. Then it will require testing through various expressions so that flames don't get lost in the dimples or shoot up into the hair if a brow is raised. A plagiarist would have to work even harder. Making something distinctive in the details as well as the whole may not offer a total safeguard, but it will offer identification... and with as sharp of eyes as this community has, that may be the best protection of all. This will protect your customers, too. Instead of yet another temple built out of primitives or another set of tribal tattoos or another pair of thigh boots with buckles all the way up... why not make something different. And about that symmetry? When I see a pair of jeans with the same wrinkles and folds on both sides, I just roll my eyes and keep going. Real people cross their legs and wear their wallet on one side and favor one knee if they kneel down to pick something up... and the wrinkles in their clothing reveal their habits. When I see a face with the same iris in both eyes, I keep going. Only stuffed animals have identical eyes. Assymmetry is more work, but details count... and in the future market looking real is going to be even more of a premium than looking perfect. Carolly