**Wednesday morning

** My upgrade to Poser5 arrived yesterday at 5:45 PM. I went to bed at 3:30 AM this morning. That speaks for itself.

My interaction with Curious Labs was favorable. They performed, including answering my calls and emails.

Here at Renderosity I purchased **
EJ by 3Dream, $12.25
EJ - Extra Pak I by 3Dream, $5.95
EJ - Extra Pak II by 3Dream, $5.95
BAT's Lovely Lingerie by BATLAB, $5.00
Nikki So alive! by Posermatic, $11.90**

My goal is and has been to see if I can get on the level of creating cinematic characters in the tradition of 'Romantic Realism." By this I mean: fictional re-creation and representation of actual people, like you might see on the street. My first candidate is "Holly," who is pretty, smart and interesting, but not a supermodel. You would find her perhaps two years into her career as an attorney. I want 'realism' but not hyper-hyper realism. I want the image to call forth in the viewer's mind not someone from a 'possible' world, but rather someone from objective reality. I also want 'romantic' in the sense of someone who has created a positive, proactively valuable life for herself.

I spent a lot of time trying to get Victoria 3 over the last year to win the audition, without success. After my first evening with Poser5Woman, EternalJudy and Nikki, I think I am finally on the first rung of what could be success. I am grateful to Curious Labs, 3Dream and Posermatic for their efforts. I am in a state of humility and respect for the amount of work that has gone into this technology. The attention to detail and exhaustive tool-making involved here deserves to be recognized. My hat is off to all of you.

I did not choose to open Poser5 yet. That learning curve will come, but I knew if I went down that road I would not get a screen test on the first day! So this test was performed in Poser4 with ProPak. I am on Windows XP Home, Pentium4 2.4GHz with 1Gb RAM.

I first attempted to work with the texture that came with EJ. That has promise, but the colouring was not right. I loaded the Nikki texture, but worked with EJ's dials. There are MANY dials! And I find the approach to morphing here quite different and advantageous compared with Vickie (V3, I still have respect for you, but we are just friends for the moment.) P5Woman/3Dream gives the user-modeller access to every feature of the face, exhaustively. I will write more about that another time. Importantly, you get to manipulate her features with exquisite control. For instance, you can model the eyebrows by moving from left to right along the brow and arch and shape it segment by segment. This not only gives you control over your character's default visage, but you can imagine the possibilities for setting human emotion in her face; she can give you 'a look' with her eyebrows, if you know what I mean.

This level of control extends to the eyes, the forehead, the nose, ears, lips chin, etc. etc. Exquisite control. The last thing I will say is: I am grateful to be able to model a character out of symmetry! Yes, symmetry is why we go ga ga over international beauties and supermodels. But the ones who are REALLY captivating to me are the women with the infinite variety of the gene pool in their face, and symmetry is present, but they also have imbalances. More on this at another time.

Anyway, this is just a first shot, I did not work with lighting, or body morphs (she has on Bat's lingerie although you can't see it in the examples.) I set the animation as well as could be intuited without much trial and just let if fly while I got a few hours sleep, so the motions are not rekeyed. I rendered with texture, anti-alias on, 24 fps at 640x360. I was getting a frame every 20 seconds. Hair by Kozoburo.

Here is Holly:

Download short Quicktime animation here, large format, 11.6 MB [patience, 2 min download on high-speed cable modem)
Download short Quicktime animation here, small format, lo res, 1.1 MB

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