Let me first say I am amazed at the quality of the imagery produced and shown at renderosity.com. It's inspirational and awesome!

However I don't yet own Poser or any of the other software.
What software should I consider purchasing, should I wish to produce something like the types of scenes shown here.

I've been told by someone that some of the effects used in the sceneries can be produced by freeware.

As someone totally new to all this, what and where would be the sorts of resources I would need.

TRhanks in eager anticipation.

I would say poser is the place to start for a 3d beginner. Poser is fairly simple and straight forward to use. And the great thing is that you've already found the #1 resourse and support site. Also you can get a copy of Poser 3 (older version) for free or at least for the cost of a magazine as it has been given out with more than one 3D magazine. This way you can get your feet wet, but I believe that Poser 4 has more advanced features. As for other programs there are several that are used along side of poser and yes some are freeware. But I'm not going to go into that because I'm not familar with them enough to recommend any of them.

Poser is a good start, it is not that expensive, it is easy to learn and is capable of amazing stuff. Not to mention that it is strongly addictive and therefore solves a lot of problems like "what to do with free time" etc ;-) Furthermore, the Poser community here at Renderosity is excellent in providing support and helpful tips, and you have tons of free stuff to download as well as fantastic Poser related products in the Store. I would suggest that you start by downloading the free trial version of Poser at www.curiouslabs.com and play around with it for a while. I have recently added Vue d'Esprit to my repertoire. Even though I still need some time to get to get the hang of it, I see that it is a sofware with an amazing potential. There is a free trial version at www.e-onsoftware.com. As a matter of fact, most products used by the Renderosity community can be downloaded as free trial versions, it is a great way of testing the product before making the decision to buy it. The Poser trial version is very limited compared to the full version, but it gives you a hint of what it's like anyway. A cool free software to check out is Terragen, a landscape modelling and rendering software. Check out the fantastic pics in the Terragen gallery here, be amazed, and download the program at: www.planetterragen.btinternet.co.uk. It is easy to use and you will get wondeful results that will get you hooked on 3D graphics! It happened to me ;-)

I recommend buying your software one piece at a time. After you get Poser 4.0, play with it to see what it does do and what it doesn't do for you. Then you know what else you need to buy.

Michael 2.0 and Victoria 2.0, from DAZ3D, are extremely popular figures, and those are probably the only two other Poser 4 products that you could almost certainly buy right away and be certain you're not buying something you don't need.

You will also find that you will need paint or photo software to touch up your renders. I use Adobe Photoshop, and I think the other popular one is Paint Shop Pro. Those two have lots of tutorials written for them, so they are good choices. I can also add from experience, that Corel Draw is completely inadequate to touch-up renders.

Get everything else you want on a buy-as-you-need basis. If you have a fast connection, almost every piece of additional software you want can be bought for immediate download.

And, of course, only buy it if you can't find it for free first. There's just lots of good, quality free stuff available. Always search free stuff sections first.

They say Poser is the place to start. I agree IF you want to produce pictures with people (or people-like imps and animals). If you want scenery, or exploding spaceships, Poser is perhaps NOT the best choice. What DO you want to do?

I can't see any point in rendering poser figures if they cant be seen in a landscape of some kind. I presume Poser4 is just for figures? Does it have any scenery draughting tools?

There are plenty of backgrounds and scenes available for purchase or free for Poser. But, aside from placing props, Poser itself doesn't allow the creation of backgrounds.

I have done well enough with my projects, using scenes and backgrounds created for Poser. So I wouldn't recommend to anyone to buy one of those programs just because that person is buying Poser. I would say wait and see if that's a void in whatever projects you want to do.

Oranda,
Speaking as a relative newcomer to Poser - I've been fiddling with it for about 8 months - I can give advice from recent experiance.

Definately download the trial version of poser and play with it a bit. IMPORTANT TIP: pose your character with the dials; don't try to do it by the mouse. You get much better results with the dials.

Some type of software to do postwork is a must if you want to get the kinds of results you see in the gallery. Figures need touchups, special effects are added mostly through postwork, etc. Poser's rendering engine is only so-so at best so postwork is a must for best effect. Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are the most common postwork tools, and neither are cheap. I was lucky to already own photoshop before I bought Poser.

I'm going to politely disagree with bjbrown and suggest you hold off on buying Micheal and Victoria. The two of them together cost almost as much as poser does! They are very nice figures, but play around with the standard figures first. I finally did pick up Victoria but frankly don't work with her much. Also, DAZ periodically puts them on sale so you can get them cheaper than full retail.

There ARE some extra softwares in our Marketplace that allow for generation of sceenery and terrain. Litluver makes absolutely to die for trees at a good price - and this is a botanist praising his stuff, and I'm VERY picky about plants. George Deep has a terrain set and there's another called "Core Worlds".

There are also tons of freebies out there. Besides our own Free Stuff section visit some of the members of the Webring. Kozeburo's Digital Babes (3rd site down on the frontpage web ring listing) has the most incredible and realistic free hair in a variety of styles. The default poser hairs are hopeless.

Also visit Traveler's MorphWorld. Traveler has a huge variety of 'morphs', some of which correct some of the Poser default figure's most glaring errors, others which enhance modeling of the face and body of "Posette" (the default p4 female) and the "Dork" (the default P4 male, so named for his dorky eye configuration). Some of his stuff is free, and he has a CD collection for sale of hundreds of morphs that is worth every penny of the cost.

Most importantly you've found one of the largest and most active 3D communities there are. People here are always ready to help, and we have some incredibly talented modellers here that are always ready to give advice; also some of the people from curious labs and DAZ hang around here and often will help with technical questions.

Best of luck and HAVE FUN!

Orando drop me a mail with your address and i'll post you poser 3 (mag version fully legal) i've had the thing for ages and no one wants it LOL.....oh and get www.anim8or.com its free and cool :o).........Steve

Wow! What responses, such feedback! THANKS - I've never had such speedy, friendly and clear feedback before, upon any other subject on the net. Thanks to all who have replied. and ... I'll be back :-)

It is true that Poser does not have any landscape creation capabilities. However, if you do indoor scenes, you can do nicely with the rather primitive modelling capabilities in Poser. Create some walls with the primitives, apply a nice texture to them (available as free stuff) and add some furniture props (also possible to find as free stuff). There are also very nice full interiors made for Poser, mostly as commercial items, that will give you plenty of possibilities. If you find a free copy of Poser 3, please be aware of the fact that the leap to Poser 4 was huge!