Hi All

I am trying to get an opening image for a short story I wrote and I need to get an image of hands working a Cat's Cradle (with string). I could do it photographically but having to find a model with nice enough hands and then setting up a shoot seems like such a daunting chore!  :(
 So, hoping to find an easier or at least more obtainable solution I thought to try it in either pen and ink or 3D. If 3D I am going to need a string prop in the shape of a Cat's Cradle in several stage of the process forming. Is there anyone here that might know of one already made that I could get for this?
I suppose I could do the string portions in PSD but then I would need a reference image of the several stages which brings me back to the photo! :(

I would use Girl's hands (they look GREAT!), start a cat's cradle yourself, have someone there take a pic in th epose you want, emulate that in poser, and then photoshop in the string.

If yer planning on animating it, I'd just shoot myself.. LOL!

Good idea dude.
But there are a few problems. Though I have the Girl can't use her on my older system..yet.
Posing the shot for someone else to shoot is something that has never worked for me. I don't know how proficient a photographer you are but no one can really control a shot well enough to give you exactly what you need except you even something as simple and seemingly insignificant as this project will go unusable.
Setting up the shot would mean lighting, background and model. Not something I can do or even want to do in my current situation.

I guess the alternative is Pen and ink....if I still remember how to draw!  (

Nah.. yer overthinking it. better yet, have someone else do the cat's cradle, and use bright colored yarn that will stand out for reference.

Don't worry about lighting, background, details or whatever. Just worry about camera angle, and the pose you want. You will be duplicating it anyway, so the rest would be tossed out anyway.

Take a buttload of pics from slightly different angles.. since yer using a digital camera, there's no excuse to not take 20 shots or more even!

Toss all the bad shots, and just keep the ones that have what you need in them.

Then use that for a reference.

Sometimes we tend to overthink things we want to do, when we can get by with a simple solution.

I mentioned Girl, because she has GREAT hand design, but any poser figure would do. if you can't even load girl though, I can't think of another figure with fewer polys that would look as nice. maybe V3 would do, or even V2?

You are right. I do tend to complicate sheit in the attempt to simplify. :(
I have the old Zygote female hands but there is no darn texture for them. I have tried creating my own but just can't figure out how to UV map them and being on a Mac UV Mapper is not a very good help for me there. But I will try the photo solution just need to figure out whose hands to shoot!
Thanks.

BTW, how old IS your system that you can't even run Girl on it? She's from what, 2004? Your system would have to be a few years older then that to not be able to use her.. so we're talking what? 2000? 2002?

Sounds like it's time to save pennies for an upgrade.. LOL!

What is a "Cat's Cradle"?

A tangled string kinda thing you do with your hands when you are bored...

http://www.ifyoulovetoread.com/book/chten_cats1105.htm

Oh, those things! I used to play with string and make all kinds of shapes when I was a kid. Never knew there was a name for it.

Quote - BTW, how old IS your system that you can't even run Girl on it? She's from what, 2004? Your system would have to be a few years older then that to not be able to use her.. so we're talking what? 2000? 2002?

Sounds like it's time to save pennies for an upgrade.. LOL!

EEEEEEEEEK...I must love to suffer and kvetch too!!!!

:) Yeah man.
It is an old PowerMac 8600 300Mhz with a 604 processor and a gig of ram.
The problem is  the hard drive I am running Poser on is an old 18Gb with only about 400megs available and though I have other drives in the box, I also have a bad motherboard that for some reason refuses to Reboot. I could install GIRL and some other stuff but that would reduce the size of the drive space interfering the way Poser renders. The bad motherboard  not only make updating drives difficult it also disallows me to burn CDs. I have two really good CD burners that when I did my final upgrade to OS 8.6 (that would run on this darn thing) just stopped working which has made it difficult transferring stuff off the system for archiving. All attempts to find out the reason why have failed. I just quit trying, detached the burners and moved on. Though I have been transferring renders to one of the other drives in the box, if the processor or Motherboard die I will have no way of getting all my important stuff off the drives because they are all SCSI interface!

I am going through the motions of upgrading a G4 iMac but the work of upgrading the OS to Tiger means making a huge amount of changes in other things and I am not too good with change so it takes me forever to implement it.

Asuming he not reffering to book titles or Harry Chapin songs , its a string creation . See this site :

http://www.ifyoulovetoread.com/book/chten_cats1105.htm

Deja Vu! ;)

Man Shante, it's time to upgrade! heck a 580 GIG external hd is about $125 shipped!

(Ya know, you could always get a windows system for less then $500 that would be a ton faster then what you have now... )

I KNOW.. Mac.. Windows.. ICK.. but money is money...

:)
Well in a perfect world you are right Money is Money and buying a Windoze Machine From Hell would be what some might consider a viable solution. But I am not "someone"....I am a Mac User!  and I have been in hell for the past year or so and don't want to make my existence more difficult  or worse than necessary by getting another Windoze machine (already got s cheap laptop used and though I have had it for two years still can not get it to connect to my internal network...sucks!) . LOLOLOL
No, but honestly I have worked on both and prefer the Mac. If I could afford to spend $500 on a crumby Windows machine I can invest roughly the same amount and get the MacMini and use the peripherals I already have instead. If I was working I would have gotten the new one and left the G4 iMac alone to keep on working with what it has until it died. But I have been outa work since last February 10 and still no hope in sight. Two years ago my apartment got flooded and it took until just this last August to get it fixed. I was still on unemployment then but it finally got done...thank God,  by the dictatorial condo management firm and their insurance(a story I really don't need to get worked up about again!).

I have a double ruptured disk and a torn ligament or something in my left shoulder ( I am told, needs surgery) which  in combination with my bad back make finding alternative work even in (Perish the thought) retail, almost impossible.

All i want to do aside from finding a decent job is do my artwork...as best I can to keep the pain of reality at bay. Thank God for Poser and the internet!
Now all I need to do is find someone with decent hands and some string. Any partied]s interested PM me!  LOL

BTW thanks Markschum and Gareee for the links. Now I have my visual references!

Glad to help! I also was in a flood situation about 12 years ago.. NOT fun at all.

Just the other day, I was thinking about some oversized art books I had, and lost in the flood.

Oh man...I have huge library of underground comics and valuable collectible books worth change not to mention all my artwork, negatives and slides and photos and photo and sound equipment. and my biggest nightmare always seems to entail flood or fire. Luckily the flooding was isolated to the front of the apartment my parents bedroom, kitchen, bathroom dining room and front hall. When we finally got it fixed as they were putting finishing touches to the laundry room off the front hall someone found mold in the closet that came from the neighbors flooding earlier that spring. I had to have my closet and laundry walls removed, professionally dried and creosote treated, re-drywalled and painted (at the neighbor's expense thankfully).  What a bad year.
So I HATE FLOODING!  :)

Heck,, I had a foot of water in my living room on and off for the better part of 3 months!

I can remember many days, of all th eneighbors getting together to fill sandbags and placing them hoping to reduce the flooding.

I can remember parking my car, and being afraid to get out, for fear water would flood into the car.

And even better, I remember seeing water moccasins 10 feet from my back door, and seeing alligators 15 fet away, since I was living in florida.

Color me glad as HELL to be out of there! I'm living on the side of a mountain now, with no posibility of flooding at all! *Unless water rises above 3000 feet above sea level.. hehee!

Dude I can appreciate your joy of being at a higher elevation but as you must also be quite aware of mountains shift and land slides and when that happens rocks and dirt and mud and trees fall. How close to the edge of that mountain are you man!
I live in Virginia and nothing happens here...except unemployment and that was suppose to not be possible in this supposed Recession Proof area!  BULL!

PS sorry if I burst your bubble!  LOLOL

Oh, I'm not duymb enough to be living on a mountain top.. 3000 feet is actually a bit of a valley here.. LOL!
There is plenty of woodland up above me to stave off rockslides, and we have one of the city water towers nearby, so any issues with power or water are immediatly addressed. ;) We're the first people on the list to get things like that sorted.

When the hurricanes came through a few years ago, we were totally shielded in our little cove, and while we had a lot of rain, winds were cut by the mountain, and it was much tamer then we anticipated.

Worst thing we've seen here was old partially rotted poplar falling over.. and tht just means more free firewood!

"still cannot connect it to my internal network.."
Well, if your internal network runs AppleTalk, I'm not surprised. Only Macs (and with a bit of arm twisting, Windows) can use AppleTalk. Swtich to something standard like TCP/IP, and your problems are over. Requires some setup on both the Mac and the laptop, but not too much.
Oh, if htat laptop is running Windows 98 or Windows Millenium, all bets are off. Those are just about the poorest excuses for an OS that ever existed.

Win 98 wasn't that bad...BUt you are now talking a os designed for hardware almost 10 years old. In computer lifetimes, that's like 3 generations, and I wouldn;t be surprised if there were issues with it.

Win95, Win98 and Windows Millenium were horrible when it came to networking. Windows Millenium was horrible in every other aspect too, while Win95 and Win98 (second edition) were usable.

I wouldn't say horrible, but you have to consider the tech at the time. Compared with today? Hell everything 5 years old or more was terrible.. LOL!

Nah. What the problem is when I first got the laptop a friend installed the software and set it up to work but I think it was Windows 98.  My Bro-In-Law connected to the network and worked ok.
Then stupid needie me decided the tiny bit of ram needed upgrading and the tiny hard drive also needed a revamp so I bought and reinstalled both and my friend decided that instead of reinstalling Windows 98 which was already proven to work (yep TCP/IP) it would be "BETTER" to install instead Windows 2000 Pro.
Since then I have not been able to reconnect via wireless modem. I can connect to the internet with a I believe twisted pair (or equivalent) ethernet cable) but can't find the Mac network like I used to be able to and can't seem to use the wireless.
Of course DELL has customer Service in East Bum $%&@ India or wherever, so trying to get their help and understanding them has proven useless (a desperate need made me a glutton for punishment, I tried 3 times w/o success before finally throwing in the towel!).

No thanks for my money Macs are the simplest and easiest to work with. Period.

Windows 2000 is a good solid OS, BUT - laptop support is limited. It was never meant to be installed on laptops, it was designed for business desktop PCs. There's a lot of typical laptop hardware that doesn't have drivers for Windows 2000.
Windows XP has good laptop support, and networking is easy and solid. But if Windows 98 worked, why don't you just reinstall Win98?

Don't have it. The laptop didn't have any software disk. The guy that sold it to me for $200 (stupid me thought it was a sweet deal!) claimed he lost it. There was just what was on the drive. So when I put the bigger drive in there was no OS. Friend 2 said "No Problem", and installed 2000pro. Big problem.
No laptop working the way I need it to work now. Useless paperweight!
Phew!

Now wait a minute.. you buy an out of date laptop, install hardware the company doesn't support, install an OS that's 8 years old, and was never designed for that laptop, and the issue is windows? Tell ya what.. find a $200 mac, toss an 8 year old out of date OS on it, and then tell me how much you love it.

They have cheap laptops on sale all the time.. Wamart even had some budget ones for under $400 which at least had up to date hardware, and came installed with windows xp (or vista, I forget which).

You can't buy someone else's old second hand hardware, and then then compare it with new systems. And you can;t blame Microsoft for poor purchasing decisions, or for installing an OS that's ancient in computer terms.

We all make poor purchasing mistakes from time to time, but that's our own mistake, not the manufactuer's.

Right. Whatever.
The topic of this thread was pretty clearly spelled out. It is turning into another stupid Windows this as opposed to Mac that. I really don't need it. I have worked professionally on both systems in real tough high volume design and prepress environments and the bottom line is as it has always been that Windows machines irregardless of the version, both OS and hardware, just don't last as long or work as trouble free as Macs. Period.

I bought a Mac IIci 16 years ago and it lasted 13 years. It had its limits ans systems go but it was worked hard for all that time. Even when it no longer had the juice I needed to do digital imagery, I used it for word processiong, print serving, faxing and internet browsing. I bought a more powerful less expensive Windows Box and it lasted half as long.

The 8600 I have now is maybe 10 years old. It is old and has issues but it still works where the New Windows machine I bought to replace that first one has been dead for several years. That one was never replaced. If I was working I would buy even the cheapest Mac, the Mini, and feel quite confident I had a system that would last me and work right for a long time. In fact not only would it do its job with the OS but I could also stress myself out (if I so chose) by launching side-by-side Windows and convert files and textures until I turn cathode ray green!

As I said my current computer is dying and giving me problems because It is old and slow and I am frustrated having to work on it. It has issues as mentioned but it still works but, it won't let me install a version of an OS that it was not designed to work with.The Dell laptop did. If what you say is true why does the OS actually work on it? If  Windows 2000 Pro wasn't designed to work on that old a system it should not be working at all. Stupid OS? Stupid system.?  Or maybe there is more going on here.
I don't know and neither did any of the other "professors" of Windows".
So much for the intelligence of Windows. My laptop still doesn't work that is all I know. Period.

Windoze? No thanks. I have enough stress in my life I do not want to add more by forcing myself out of some misguided "need" to have a more updated system, and buying a Windows box. In fact though I have been out of work for over a year now, if I see a position is open I am qualified for but I would have to commute 1.5 to 2 hours to be stuck working my ass off on a Windows system...I just don't apply. That is how strongly I feel about Windows. And the more I hear Windows users Kvetch about all the problems they have with their systems and the more I recall the last 15+ years having had the same problems, and the more times I trip over that nice case with my fairly useless DELL Laptop in it, the less I want to comply and buy.

Buy the Best and funk the rest. Macs Rule....if you can afford one!  :)

With that I will bid you good night!