First off, THANKS A MILLION again guys! You are trully amazing. All this info is superb.

One thing I failed to do from the beginning was to be more specific as to the kind of final product this images will be used for, what kind of audiences are expected, and more about the final file/media format. I think is time I did that.
You see, this is not for a feature film, neither a short film, nor an intro animation for a game.
These images will be only part of an educational type of software. It's like a series of exams/tests, once you reach the last 3rd part of the software you are presented with these 3d environments (indoors in most cases), and you are expected to interact with them.
So as you can see the priority here is content, rather than quality of visuals.

It is not intended to CG people audiences, nor even artists in general.
In most cases the audiences will be executive and office type of people.
This should be yet another reason why not to be too demanding with the visuals.

As for the format, it is Flash. So far we have been creating the 3d elements separately, mostly in order to make them interactive. But it also saves us time and work, eg: if there was a problem only with one element (as opossed to the whole scene) then we just fix that element.

As for rendering to image files, well, that's what we have been doing so far. Not over the reasons you kindly offered, but simply because we need the alpha channel for transparency in Flash, and Poser6 cannot render alpha chs. in movie format (only in PNGs).
The programmers say it would be more efficient (from their stand point anyway) to work with movie files instead, as they could instruct the software just to look for frame num x in the movie file, and then jump to frame num xx, and so forth.

Although I was aware of the "multipasses rendering technique" I never got around to learn it in depth (much less apply it), many things you guys mentioned I didn't know, others I only knew partially.
One thing is clear now to me: Got to render to image files and multipasses - Not for this one (unless you give me good reason to do it), but for my next visually demanding project that is. - ; )

OperaGuy - "note: in items 1-3 you speak of "Creating" figures and "creating" morphs. What does that mean to you, specifically? Obviously you know there is no modeling in Poser."
By "creating figures" in Poser I meant: Not modeling for sure, just either use the default one (James or whatever his name is), or replace it for another one. I am sorry about the confusion, clearly I didn't express myself very well.
By "creating morphs" I meant: In Max, with the Morpher modifier. Using the "morph targets" (max term) previously created in Poser, import'em as OBJ files. I admit this is just a theory so far. That's why I was asking for anyone to confirm it.

CobaltDream,
Thank you for the interesting links, they may come in handy for sure :)

Ok, I hope I didn't forget anything.

Back to you again guys : )

JDL

Message edited on: 02/26/2006 12:45