I have to admit that when I discovered this marvellous little world that is Poser, I was quite stunned that so many people seemed content to buy props, clothes, textures, light packs, poses etc and 'just' put them together. I used to build plastic scale models as a kid, mostly from kits but often "scratchbuilt" using plastic card, wire, balsa etc from photos and drawings. And this 'pre-made' poser thing seemed like the equivalent of buying an expensive kit ready-painted and almost finished. It seemed like a dumb hobby. It's not that I felt it had less merit from a creative point of view, I just really couldn't see the point of it. I thought that if one is doing this for fun, then why pay out (more) money so you can skip over a big part of the fun of doing all the base stuff yourself too. So, not wanting to miss out on any fun, I learned how to do just about every aspect from scratch, pouring an utterly absurd amount of time into it, and I wised up a lot in the process. I certainly came to apreciate the work in the products in the marketplace! I learned that it isn't worth trying to master everything, there just isn't time in life. Have a go by all means, get the basic idea, but then focus on the aspects that you enjoy most and put your time into those. My thing is modelling, poser is a vehicle for that, and finished renders are a spin-off of that. I've produced very, very few finished "art" renders, the pictures I make seem to be nice test pics of my models, but I'm happy. But if my primary aim was to produce lots of finished pictures, learning modelling and mapping would be a pretty daft and circuitous way to go about it. Ob