This problem troubles even more in regards to using a camera. I have a master's degree in painting and photography but it is so hard for me now to use the camera. I stick to 300K toy cameras mainly. What is mine in a photo... the building, the tree, the nude? I tend to make light effects or photograph patterns I find more and more. Likewise, as a painter what is mine? So much came from the model. I never signed my paintings. For a while despite feeling it was a bit precious I insisted that gallery shows label the work as collaboration listing both me and the model as artist.

Lately I have been feeling bad about how I too have been suduced by "PoserRealism" and high quality Poser content. For years, until I upgraded to Poser 6, I made do with Poser 4, a couple reduced Resolution base figures, lo-res freebies and a hell of a lot of post-work. I think I was more productive then somehow and although Poser 4 work had a distinctive almost primitive look, the stuff by different people was often distinctive and narrative based rather than slick shader based low-end simulation of high end MAX or Maya CGI. I see a lot of joy now in really high quality content, shaders and lighting but maybe less in terms of raw personal vision. I don't know.

Poser and any other "art" production should be about having fun and certainly it is real damn hard to pose and light a figure in Poser but I feel like the best art is done to see what it will look like, to suprise the person making it... maybe this new slick look in Poser takes away from that discovery. Sometimes I wish I could be doing this same work in a platform more like Second Life or Spore so that I was forced to focus more on my /content/ instead of Poser content. I very seriously wish in a way I could go back to Poser 4 but when I try the hassle of single runtime w/out sub-directories is frustrating. I don't know.

Certainly posing and lighting is an accomplishment and some people do it in a way that is utterly breath taking. Whether it is art... whether anything really is "art" I don't know. Maybe doing some work with the base content would be an empowering act of discipline. I used to make my painting students work sometimes with the limited "Goya palette" of colors (black, white, yellow and red ochre) as an act of discipline and so as not to be seduced by high key modern colors. I have been doing exercises in Poser using only the Andy and Andrea manikins to focus on gesture and composition. Maybe some exercises with a restricted selection of content would make you feel better about your work... make a runtime with just a single scene and figure or two and work only with that for a while and see what it forces you to do "artistically".