Hi, just started using poser and I am slowly trying to teach myself what I can about the program. In looking at the final rendering of this picture, there are some things I need to figure out and was hoping someone could help or at least point me in the right direction.
With the skirt of the female, is there a way to make it split for her left leg instead of just having her leg fading into the skirt..
Also I have noticed that so many of the gallery postings the hair looks like real hair,,is there a secret to rendering the hair??

Poser is rubbish at doing skirts (to put it bluntly), and a lot of the more recent ones have special features to get around Poser's shortcomings. There should be some instructions in the readme file that came with the clothing - what piece is it you're using here? Transmapped hair is the usual way of doing it, although some artists paint it on afterwards, and there's also Poser 5's dynamic hair which can work well or be awful. Some have more success with it than others. Have a look at the credits in the gallery postings you admire, and see where the hair came from: if it doesn't say, ask the artist. They'll nearly always be happy to pass on that information.

Attached Link: Kozaburo's site

Hi there, You have nice composition and posing on this pic, well done. Bob said more about skirts than I could, so I'll leave that part of it. You can get some great free hair at Koz's site (link attached). Some artists paint hair on in postwork (that is, in a graphics program, after the final render in Poser.) There are a couple of good tutorials here at Renderosity on painting hair, in the Tutorials section, if that interests you. One tip that will immediately improve the quality of your renders is to turn on shadows. The default render settings is with shadows off. It takes longer to render with them on, but adds some much needed depth. I don't think you have any shadows at all on this picture. Another great way to improve renders is to take away the horrid default poser lighting and use something else. There are many free lightsets for download at RuntimeDNA (www.runtimedna.com) as well as here in the freestuff at Renderosity. Again this adds to the render time, but is well worth it, to help you learn about making your own light sets. Well done, and welcome to your new Poser addiction ;-)

The Clothing is from Daz3d it is called the Princess of China, for the morphing fantasy dress.

this is an excellent first pic. the combined pose looks great and the overall scene has a nice look. here are a few things you can do to improve it. 1. The lighting is a little dull and greenish. There are plenty of excellent global lighting sets in free stuff or better yet learn how to create a global lighting effect. The textures look much better when lit right, especially the photorealistic look you want in your hair. 2. The camera needs a better look. Zoom out a little and increase the focal length to at least 50, you'll get a more pleasant image. 3. Bob is quite right about skirts and poser, they are tough. Poser 5 has dynamic cloth which may solve the problem. You can also use a magnet deformer to pull the skirt out of her calf. The thigh is in a fairly extreme pose and Im not sure you could pull it out far enough with a magnet without getting some funky results. which leads me to... 4. The joys of postwork. Personally I would pull the upper area of the skirt out with a magnet as far as possible and then postwork the rest in Photoshop. You can use a technique called snowcloning, render once with the thigh visible and once with it invisible. Comp the two renders in photoshop and make the skirt visible over the area of the thigh that it would cover. This may sound like a bit much, but here you have a good start to getting the results you want. If you have any questions about what I've described here feel free to ask. :)

Thanks to all of you for your help..now to get back to poser and try these helpful hints

I just got the morphing fantasy dress, but haven't used it yet, so I don't know how the skirt poses. Some of the recent DAZ releases have been nothing special in that area. Let us know how you get on - it's a lot to take in all at once. ;-)