Quote - Ain't no sin to do it... best tools for the job under the conditions you're limited to...

Lol - well considering how some of your die hard linux folks get I'm still not planning on submitting any screenshots to some of the linux forums I hang out it on occasion :)

Quote - Nice... I've been using VMWare, Xen, and VirtualPC (on a Mac) for eons now. May have to give it a whirl... what license does Sun put that under?

I believe it's under GPL - VMware works pretty good, we use it at work, but I don't have a copy at home and it's still a bit to pricey for my tastes.  Virtual PC, well, it works alright but it has some serious limitations, like 16 bit color, that can make setting up most linux distro's a royal PIA.   Virtualbox has all the goodies of Vmware with tools installed (like the shared folders and such) and detects the color mode of the guest OS.  I had ubuntu desktop up and running inside Windows XP x64 in less that 15 minutes, that's including the time it took me to install and setup VitualBox - pretty much falling off a log easy really.  Ubuntu never knew the difference, and once

I installed the virtualbox tools inside Ubuntu, now it acts like any other applicaiton window under XP.  Like I said, I'm fairly impressed :)  That's actually another first for me, Ubuntu - I'm more of a debian man myself, but under the circumstances I thought Ubuntu would make a better choice, it has a lot of the newer packages for development available without any hoops to jump through, just select and install (love the deb package system). 

Granted, I absolutely despise the default color scheme.. that baby poop brown is just awful, but I'll get that changed hopefully soon enough :)

Quote - Actually, this very forum (via the search features) would be a very good place to do some research on the matter. Also google-up Rob Wisenant's home page concerning ERC and other bits and bobs that will likely help you a lot about getting some insight into the Poser file formats. Some other folks to grep for would be Nerd3D, Dodger (and his site at xfx3d.net, I think), and a few others that will come to me once my brain gets out of first gear this morning. I don't think DAZ would have too many objections to helping you grok some of it as well.

I'll have them all bookmarked by days end :)

Quote - Is OGRE that good for non-game rendering? Heh - I'll have to get off my butt and go take a peek at it. :)

Haven't done any testing with it yet, but from the API it looks like it includes a good 80% of what I need right off the bat.  I figure worst case scenario if I have to I can always look at another library or code some add ons for OGRE if need be, but the initial run through looks very promising.

There are a few other libraries out there that I might make use of too, at least in part, still getting a game plan down now while working on the Poser file API - figure things will go a lot smoother later on down the road that way :)

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...