u know - a way to make alpha planes always face camera + stay upright etc
love esther

You mean like parent a high square to the camera?

ah but it wouldn't always be upright, nm sorry.

 apparenty parenting to cameras and props isn't the whole answer so I was hoping poser 8 would have it built in.
Love esther

You can  use "point at " to have a billboard point to the camera , but it takes some adjustment of the center and endpoint or it will tip over . It will tilt anyway unless the camera is exactly level with it .
I had no success in trying to use limits to prevent tipping :(

There may be a script of Ockhams that would do it , but that would be for animations .

I don't really have a clue about creating figures, but have noticed that with them and morphs you could set a minimum and maximum value.
I was thinking that if you created a "figure" using a square (which could have texture, alpha etc on it) which is "boned" to a "base" body part, then you could set rotation limits. eg: y 360 degrees, x 0, z 0.
Then if you select the square part of the "body" and point at camera, would it not just rotate on it's y axis?

Don't know if it could work.
If it did, I wouldn't mind a copy!

Unfortunately, in Poser, the Point At function bypasses rotation limits.

 >>> apparenty parenting to cameras and props isn't the whole answer so I was hoping poser 8 would have it built in.
Love esther >>>

Though I haven't tried it, I'm wondering if it might be something that the Dependent parameters feature might be able to handle.   Like MAYBE, somehow, you can tie the rotation of the billboard plane to the position/rotation of the camera?

Netherworks has an FX set over at DAZ that has a good work around. The plane has two small 'guide' cubes that allow you to quickly line them up by hand.

www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/0/hero-fx-xtreme

 Interesting.