I have to say I'm really amazed at the Posing vs Modeling saga. I started in the 3D world only a few months ago, and before then I never even imagined there was such a thing as posing. I found out about Poser and started with that as it seemed like an easy way to get into 3D but it always bothered me to use other people's models in my scenes. It felt like cheating. To me it seems people use models they just downloaded, and then just put the lighting on and made a render then get compliments on the whole scene.

I make it a point now to have only things I made in my pictures. The only things I start from an existing base mesh are characters since I'm still starting out and if I try to start from a box they end up looking like crap, but I always take care to sculpt them up to create unique, identifiable characters. The end result will probably not be as good as someone using downloaded props, when the final images are seen side by side, but the other person is being congratulated for doing 1% of the work in that image. That's like a recent demo reel I watched which I found really good, that had 2 video scenes of people following CG fishes, then I realized it was a modeler, and the only thing he actually did were the fishes, he had someone else do the videos and the extensive compositing work. If they were shown alone on a white background it would have made the video extremely boring.

So how far can someone actually go and still call it "his" work? Do you need to have every object start as a box initially? Or somewhere in between? Or nothing at all. Certainly a lot of people seem to think so (the whole Poser community). How do you critique someone about a model if he didn't even make it and wouldn't know how to fix it? I know a lot of modelers look down at Poser people, but what I find even more weird is a lot of Poser people look down at modelers, for some reason. Uhm I guess I derailed a little bit here.