Hi,

Hmm...  one thing I like doing is watching the supplemental DVDs that come with some movies, usually there is a lot of interesting stuff having to do with CG, interviews with CG artists and examples that show screen shots of some of the apps and works in progress that are going on in the artists workshops.  Pretty cool stuff.  One that I saw recently showed some 3D models that were under development at the time, and one thing I noticed was that they didn't really look much different than a lot of the content I have seen created for poser, which made me smile a bit while watching the video.  The television can't do justice to what is on the monitor, of course, but the models looked primitive and amateurish with no texturing and animations that were not near a finished product yet. 

The guys and gals on the videos are some of the top artists in the 3D art world, modelers, animators, texture artists, etc.  They also show the finished models near the end of the video and they look pretty amazing with texturing, finished animations, etc.  But I remember thinking that it is possible to create some great 3D without being the top in the field if you have the time, the patience, a love of 3D art and a good computer, lol.  That's one of my biggest roadblocks;  my machine is old and has a lot of mileage on it, so I am pretty limited in what I can do without bringing the darned thing to its knees.  I also have a physical condition that is much like rheumatoid arthritis;  a systemic disease that effects the connective tissue making my joints ache like they are full of broken glass a lot of the time, especially after I have been on the computer for several hours at a stretch working on a model or poser render...   lol

But I guess that's the moral to the story, at least in a way, we all have to work with what we have at the time, machine-wise, content-wise, experience-wise, imagination-wise, ect. 

I'd love to get my hands on one of the workstations they are using in those videos, at first I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to use it, of course, but that's how I felt about poser and 3Dsmax about 9 months ago, although I still have a long, long way to go...   lol  

I really admire a lot of the modelers and artists here, it's all interesting and just a heck of a lot of fun, at least for me anyway....   ;-)

M