Hi Stormy! - Step 1: Take a DEEP breath. :-D Poser is easy to learn and use, but it WILL take some time. Patience is a virtue. Before you go off and download lots of add-on stuff, you should probably give yourself some time (a week?) to just play around with what's built in to the program and learn your way around. There are lots of helpful people and tons of helpful information here, but you just CAN'T digest it all at once. It'll take you a while to learn enough of the lingo to even understand what people are telling you! So here are FOUR REALLY BASIC TERMS to get you started. #1 RUNTIME - Inside the folder on your hard drive where the poser program "lives" there is a folder called RUNTIME. And this folder is the skeleton and circulatory system of Poser. All the figures, props, texture, poses, hair, faces, etc. etc. live somewhere in the sub-folders of the RUNTIME folder. You will become VERY intimate with the structure of these sub-folders. Part of the RUNTIME folder is what Poser shows you in the Library on the right side of the window under Figures / Props / Poses, etc. So when you DO install things correctly into the RUNTIME folder, you don't have to import them or anything. They just "show up" somewhere in your Library, and you can go in there and bring them into your scenes. While every RUNTIME becomes unique, some details of the structure are the same for all installations of Poser. That is why many ZIP files you download can just be unzipped into the RUNTIME folder and everything will go where it's supposed to be. If you see a 2nd RUNTIME folder INSIDE your RUNTIME folder, it means you unzipped a file that should have been unzipped one level up, in the program folder. (C:Program FilesPoser 6 or whatever.) #2 GEOMETRY - It is important to realize that, because of the way Poser works, many of the items you use that seem like a single thing are actually stored in multiple pieces. The actual data that makes up a figure's shape (called the "mesh" in some 3-D programs) is called the geometry. It has an .OBJ file extension, and goes into the GEOMETRIES sub-folder of RUNTIME. But the geometry itself is not enough for Poser to use a figure (or prop or hair or...). Poser uses other files that tell it how to work with the geometry, and these are what you see in the Library window as Figures, Props, Hair, etc. As a newbie, this is only important to you for 2 reasons: Reason 1 is that without the geometry a character will not work. Victoria by DAZ is one of the most popular figures for Poser. When you buy or download Victoria, you get both the Victoria geometry file and the Victoria figure files that show up in your Library. (On your disk, these figure or "character" files have a .CR2 extension.) You will see many other "Characters" for Victoria available for download. These are alternative figure files that change the way Victoria looks, but they do this by working with the geometry that came with the base figure. If you don't have the base figure, you don't have the geometry, and none of the characters will work. Some popular base figures are Victoria, Michael, David, Stephanie Petite, Aiko - all from DAZ, and non-DAZ characters Apollo Maximus, Laroo, H.E.R. and MayaDoll. You'll also see references to Posette and Dork - the base figures that came with Poser prior to P6 - and Jessi and James, the new base figures that come with P6. Each of these figures includes a base geometry that dozens or hundreds of other characters (many of them free) will be based on. Reason 2 is that geometries must always go in a specific place in your RUNTIME and that place is determined by the character's creator. The other files can be moved around as you see fit. For example, if your Figures Library has a "SuperCats" folder that was created when you installed a cat figure, and you want to put the cat from that folder in the "Animals" folder for the sake of organization, you can do that. But if the GEOMETRIES folder contains a "SuperCats" folder, you can't delete or rename that folder, or move its contents. If you do, you will break any figures that rely on the meshes inside the folder. #3 CONFORMING & PARENTING - Quick Poser history lesson: In the old days, Poser distinguished between Figures, which had parts that could be posed, and Props, which were just static objects. (On your hard disk, prop files have a .PP2 extension, while figures have .CR2) If you had a Prop that needed to move along with a Poser figure, it could be "parented" to one of the body parts of the figure. So for example a coffee mug could be parented to a hand, so when the hand moved, the mug would move along with it. Or a hat prop might be parented to a figure's head. When clothing was added to Poser, they needed a way to make sure that the clothing moved along with the body that was "wearing" it. So they introduced the idea of "conforming." Conforming is limited to figures (rather than props) since it basically means a figure makes all the same moves that another figure is making. This decision is still with us. It mandated, for example, that all conforming clothing items be treated as "Figures" rather than "Props", which explains why clothing often appears in the Figures library and there is no "Clothing" or "Costumes" library. It also led to a split in the world of hair. Early hairpieces in Poser were simply props that got parented to the head, and they appeared in the Hair library. (These files have an .HR2 extension.) But as more advanced hair pieces with posable parts came along, they were considered Figures, and added to the Figures library (since their files had the .CR2 extension could not live in the "props only" Hair library.) Adding to the confusion (as noted) is that Poser 6 removes some of the arbitrary limits on what kind of thing can go in which Library folder. Maybe this will all be resolved happily in the near future, but I'm not holding my breath. The moral of the story is that if you now find yourself hunting through the Library trying to find things, congratulations! You're already using the program in the same way as some of the most advanced Poser experts! :-) #4 MORPHS - Since there is such a small number of base figures, Poser renders would all look the same if the only way to make images was to pose the base figures. However, you can do more than just pose (bend) the mesh of a Poser figure. You can also distort it. By distorting the mesh of the base figure in creative ways, you can do things like create facial expressions, change face and body features, alter the shape and size of body parts, etc. These distortions of the base figure are called Morphs. Poser figures all come with built-in morphs, and additional morphs can also be purchased and added later. If you put together a bunch of morphs that work together, you can make it available as a Character, and that's how most of the characters you see available for download are created. Morphs are controlled by dials in the Poser interface, just like the bending and twisting of limbs. Some morphs show up automatically, and some have to be added manually. A full discussion of the different types of morphs and how to use them is deeper than I want to go in this posting. Learning all about morphs is one of the longer roads you will travel in your Poser journey. Note that while some characters use unique morphs created by the vendor, some are made by using built-in morphs, or even popular add-on morphs. This means that the character you are downloading is really just a packaged-up bunch of morph dial settings. If such a character is based on add-on morphs, and you don't have those already, the character will not do anything. It essentially tries to set dials that don't exist, because the morphs the dials are attached to have not been added. This is most common with Victoria and other DAZ characters - many of these use the Victoria (Michael, Aiko, etc.) Head & Body morphs, which are an add-on packs available (for $$$) from DAZ. That is why it is important to check what is required when downloading stuff, especially characters. If it just says "Requires Victoria" you can use it with the base figure and don't need anything else. If it says "Requires Victoria and Head & Body Morphs" you will need both the base figure and the add-on morph pack to make use of the character.

• Jimdoria  ~@>@