One last question, when I get poser...I've never used it before but I'm a very good artist with portraits and cg. How long will it take me to learn this? Oh and if I wanted to make a 3d character of my girlfriend how would I make a model to look like her? Is there a way to scan a picture in and convert it to 3d?

The learning curve for Poser is pretty smooth, and not too steep. If you run into any major problems you can't deal with, we're here to help. To modify a character to look like a specific person is quite a task, and is usually done using morph targets (OBJ files that modify the underlying mesh). Visit Traveler's M.orph W.orld 2.0 for more morphs than you can shake a very big stick at. (Link is on the right-hand side of this page) Unfortunately, you can't convert a scanned picture into a 3d mesh just yet. What you can do, however, is build a texture map based on the scanned images and apply it to your morphed and modified figure. Paul

With regard to building models from photos, see my reply in the thread "Creating Faces from 2D Pictures" below. Found some freeware that sounds like it may do this but I've not tried it yet. I'm hoping someone will give it a try and report back to us if it's useful.