Good info there, Replicand. I divide my time between L.A. and San Jose but confess that I enjoy the film projects I work on more than the forensic stuff. But, hey, you gotta pay the bills.

I completely agree with you about rolling your own character meshes. I've been using Modo lately for modeling and took Steven Stahlberg's "modeling cybergirls" course last year, which helped my technique a whole bunch. More recently I picked up the "Essence: The Face" book, which was very enlightening on several counts. I particularly appreciated its suggested workflow using FaceGen as a starting point for building human heads. Since you're a Maya guy you won't get any use from the cool Max plug-in for skin shading that's included but I highly recommend it to Max users.

In all honesty, I also have to say that you'll be a better animator and have better results if you follow your approach and I much prefer building and rigging my own characters when time and budgets permit. However, I often get clients with just a few thousand bucks who need a settlement or mediation presentation with some character motion on an insanely short deadline. They almost always have a photos available (often pretty brutal crime or accident scene pix or even morg photos) and in forensic presentations anything you can do that comes closer to matching the person depicted is a plus. Usually the character motion is not complex so, for us, using Poser for the setup makes a lot of sense. BodyStudio lets us render the result pretty painlessly within the crime or accident scene we built in Max. 

Since we rarely deal with facial expressions or speech, we've started creating 3D head models with FaceGen when we are given decent photos of the person's face. Thus, we can create a really nice textured likeness that we export as an OBJ file and then substitute it for the Poser character's head. We're not going for film quality, so using conforming clothes works just fine and we have a presentable customized character without having to do any rigging.

Having said all of that, I'll acknowledge that the high density of the Mil3 characters is a bitch as is the texture load. That's why I'm really hoping ReissStudio releases a 64-bit version soon. 

In the end, I guess the peculiarities of forensic animation make this a particularly apt solution since production values are not required to be as high as commercial or film work and the emphasis is on speed and shortcuts to get customized stuff done on time.

Like everybody else out here, I'm an aspiring film guy too, by the way. Figuring out how to do decent effects on a shoestring is one of my favorite pasttimes. You might enjoy seeing some of the stuff I did on a short here: www.lodohappyhour.com Click the VFX notebook to see a breakdown of the FX I did. We used FrameForge3D and Poser for a bunch of Previz, by the way.

Take care and maybe someday we'll cross paths.

Mark Johnson
www.forensicarts.com