Attached Link: http://www.planit3d.com/source/poser/lyne1.htm

Good morning, Paul! Because the demo version is even more limited than I thought, I have to rewrite this, and it is out of order, and you won't be able to do what I hoped to lead you through... but perhaps can still tempt you. :inveigling grin: Poser normally comes with a whole bunch of figures, including animals. The basic dog is quite morphable into a bunch of other breeds. For hound dog morphs: Go here, join site. look at left for downloads > poser > morphs... choose a doggie on page 2. http://www.planit3d.com/source/poser/lyne1.htm I chose a basset hound, because of Ghost in the Shell, but your hound may be a different breed, and not as high-maintenance. Lyne, who made the dog and horse morphs here, has a store over at VIP with the best animals around. You might want to go over and drool. http://www.vistainternetproducts.com/ You might never want to see a muskox again, but you could find Debra's free MuskOx model here: :) http://home.wmis.net/~dross/models/models.htm (and yes, I *am* that evil) Since you don't have the dog in the demo, you won't be able to morph it... but you can still drool over the possiblities. There are a couple of ways to apply morph targets, and when you get a full version, we'll lead you through them.

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/

After morphing the dog, you'll need to glassify him (info below), but the important need is for good light sets. It is what makes glass look like glass, and is key to making any decent render. Without light, we have no art (and no vision). for the neat lights you'll need: Go here, join site. Look at left under free stuff to find free lights. Lots of them. Oodles of them, in fact. To make glass look like glass, you won't want the fake HDRI or daylight sets, but something wilder with spotlights and colors to coordinate with your background. http://www.runtimedna.com/ This is a nice site and the forums are full of good information. I have *ahem* shopped here, too. You've already found Dr Geep's tutorials at the archive site. Read the one on lighting carefully. That you can play with in the demo. Learn how spot lights and infinite lights vary in how they reveal a surface. You'll notice with the doggie above that some of the lights make him look muscular and some make him look hollow. The thing with light sets is that you can pull them apart and see how and why they work. Anton make a great underwater light set and SnowSultan made a globall and Blackhearted's pro lumina was one of the first. Each expert approaches this differently. You could sing "Hot diggity dog diggity, oooh, what you do to me!" while making little hell hounds or hot dogs. You could also lament about your "ol' dog blue". Whatever. I don't know what sort of glasshound you've envisioned. At this point, I was going to suggest getting a NASA picture for a backdrop and having your doggie paddle through the Lagoon Nebula, but you might not be able to import pictures in that demo. I usually load them as a texture on a 1-sided square, so that I can move the image around... let me know if you have that prop in the Props library. No matter what sort of limitations, we should be able to work around them!

This you can do: Load the "casual man" which comes with the demo. Up in the menu find Render > Materials. A large dialogue box will pop open. There are 4 color boxes for each material zone in the figure. Make them white, white, black, white. Absolute numbers (0,0,100) (0,0,0) for now... you can play with translucence later. Go to the transparency sliders and make the max 100%. Go to texture and say "no texture" (drop down sub-menu). If you do just the skin, he will look like this:

Actually, he might have a bit of color. My preferred lights are set to white, and my cameras are set to 100mm focal length. You can set your opening "state" and use the memory dots as a backup once you get comfortable with the program. I think you've done enough photography to avoid the fisheye effect on someone's face, but you need to know that you can indeed change this in the camera parameter dials! Back to glassifying... you have to do that for all material parts. Ockham may have written a python script for it, if he hasn't, I'll ask him, because it is drudgery with the later figures and complicated clothing... after doing a figure, I save it to my library so that I don't have to do it again! (Under the Library, there are check boxes, plus and minus... the plus adds an item to the palette.) Eyeballs are sometimes separate objects. You can glassify them OR go up to the menu, Window > Hierarchy. There is a list of everything in the scene. This is where you choose to make the ground visible (oooh, shadows!) if you want. You can also make things vanish. Just click on the eye next to the names, and the eyeballs will vanish. So, after removing the eyes and making everything else clear, we have an Invisible Man.

So, what can you do with a glass man? I nabbed a wonderful fractal from Free Stuff here. Look under 2D where you can find fractals, photos, tiles and textures. This is "abstract" by dunstan. I resized my window (up in the menu under Window) ;^) and imported the image. Always be sure that you maintain the same aspect ratio if you do this! If you slap the texture on the 1-sided square, it isn't as vital. Dropped in the glass guy. No visible ground, since I didn't want falling shadows on it. Posed him to fit the image. Poser comes with oodles of fun poses to start with. The first thing I do is remove IK from any and all body parts. If I start with a canned pose, I remove limits, too. This was "scared", tweaked, of course. If you don't have any poses in the demo, start with the hip and cant it slightly, then work out from there, moving and pulling at things until he is interesting. Changed the lights to spots and made 7 colored lights. If you click on the color light button (up next to the icon showing your lights), you get an eye-dropper. Hold the mouse button down and bring it over the image... this way you can pick up the background colors and integrate them into your lighting! Anyway, I spent a couple of hours turning this guy into glass, posing him, and lighting him. The image is about 90% there... but as you know that last 10% is what drains the time. I'd need to spend a day or so tweaking the fingers and moving lights and noodling until I was happy with it... but this is enough to show possibilities with just a standard figure and backdrop. If you get the full program, you'll be able to do a lot more and with a bit more polish, so to speak! ;^) Carolly

Also, if you are thinking of "Dawson's Christian", or some such story, Poser comes with skeletons to fit the standard figures, and you can find all sorts of space ships for sale or free depending upon the model. :) Anyway, have fun, and remember that this community is here to help. Carolly

If you have Poser 5, using refract instead of transparency gives more realistic results because the light bends just like it does in real glass.

Here is an example plugging in the refract mode
and enabling raytracing in the render.

The renders in this thread are INCREDIBLE!! I need to attempt versions of these as a learning experience in P5. Wow!!!

dbowers22, Paul (glasshound) downloaded the demo for ProPack, so I'm trying to think of creative things he can do with only a couple of items and no ability to import. I'd certainly urge him to buy P5. He has mentioned wanting to do bookcover and pin-up type art, so your image may be more tempting than mine! ;^) That is a nice use of refraction... I could see a nice smoky genie coming out of a bottle and somebody forgetting what he was wishing for. Carolly

As far as the Poser 4 /ProPack demo goes, I do have the "drawer handles" on the right and bottom. The animation is currently appearing on the bottom while the libraries were not. In checking the libs, I have access to only the Casual Man and Barney figures. Under Poses I can use only Barney and Demo Poses. I have a few Men hair styles available as well. There are some sample preset lighting, camera etc.

OK... It looks like you can pose your figures, but a box or square primitive would be a lot more useful than Barney. With a box, you could pose the man into a seated position (and learn the importance of the orthographic cameras for accurate placement), and just treat the box like a prop in an art studio. We could also have some fun with z-tooning and bas-reliefs. If your flu is getting better, I'd suggest playing with the lights (upper left corner). The Poser default is for 3-point lighting which gives rounded forms in most renders. The infinite lights are easier to handle than the spot lights. With spot lights, you often need to use the "point at" command (in the menu) to get them facing the right direction. With the infinite lights, you can simply grab them and swing them. If you click on a light, you should see some icons so that you can change color and brightness and such. Just play. :) At the bottom of the library palette in each section, you should see up to 4 little icons. "Plus" and "minus" will add and subtract the selected object to the library. "Check" will place the library item in the scene, and will replace an item. For example, if you have Casual Man loaded, check on Barney will switch the figures... not what you usually want to do! "Double check" will ADD additional figures to the scene. Remember that old animation program I showed you where you made sheep? Lots of sheep? Using "double check" you can do something like a Magritte with lots of the same-suited and posed gentleman floating in your scene. If the hair is in the figures section, it needs to be "conformed", but man's hair is usually a prop and needs to be "parented". These actions glue the hair (or clothes) to the body so that when you move the figure, the hair goes with him. Otherwise, it looks like a toupee 2 paces behind its owner! So, add a hair model to the scene with your CM in default position. The hair ought to load at close to the right place (you can use the trans dials to nudge it). With the hair selected, go up to the menu: object > set parent, choose figure 1 (unless CM loads with another name). You should now be able to have your guy do a handstand and keep his hair. :) Carolly