Hi,

       as friend wants me to make a 3d model of her entire body to put into an animation I'm working on.. I'm fairly competent at animating, but never tried this before.

        so, I load up V4 and a bunch of morphs and play with the dials till I get the face / body proportions right, zoom out, render, looks nothing like her..

         I've read a few tutorials about skinning a face with real pictures, so I've told her to take a few pictures at different angles, are there any tutorials out there about skinning an entire body?  or any other tutorials that might help me (or even other programs).

thanks.

Post some pics of your progress along with your friend so we can see exactly what isn't working or where you are going wrong. Mainly the face if possible.

First thing, do some research and pick a pre-existing texture pack that closely resembles this girl's makeup, eyebrows, skin shade/type and load that up as your baseline.

Now go ahead and morph.  I have had better results working from the bottom of the list up, rather than the other way. 

Use Magnets.

Spawn a full body morph, reimport it, set everything back to zero.  Wait a day or two, and repeat the process.  Create 20 frames and at one end, set the first morph to one, on the other end set opposite morph to one.  Now go over the anmiation and look for the perfect blend of your different takes.

Now do this 5000 times over six years.  Realize it's never going to be perfect.  Here's mine:

There are a number of tutorials floating around the web on the procedure, but it is not as easy as it would seem.  Just taking a few photos does not exactly give you the right lighting and textures you really desire.  One major problem with such textures, is specular highlighting, which will not interact correctly with Poser's basic lighting. Photographic imaging should be handled by a professional photographer where careful lighting can be controlled and manipulated.  Profile photos work best for providing morphing detail which you can accomplish by just spinning parameter dials. 

 If you have a front face shot and a profile shot from the same distance with the same lighting you can try Poser's Face Room.  I haven't had much success with it myself,  but it's there.  It will give you a decent face texture.  You do need to use it with a Poser figure, such as P8 Alyson or P7 Sydney...

Pay attention to camera's FOV, too.. Portraits zoomed from 30 feet away look nothing like the wide-angle "hold the camera at arms lenght" type of photo people post to their forum profiles / facebooks / etc.  It's the same in poser. Try a picture with the pose cam and then the face cam to see what I mean.