Maybe this has been said yet, but... Did you notice that some of the most beautiful pics in the poser gallery are essentially Photoshop work ?

Yeah, that's been one of the "hot topics" for some time. Postwork or purist? I think one of the difficulties with the "purist" position is that while Poser is an excellent human modeler, and a great scene creator (with effort), it has an extremely poor renderer. I would never use the native renderer for anything other thatn test runs. The alternatives? One, render in Poser, and enhance the image in Photoshop or similar. Two, use an alternative renderer. Unfortuntely, the available alternatives are often more expensive then Poser itself- Bryce, or Vue, for instance. And if you do use one of these for scenes and rendering, the respective "purists" here complain that you are cluttering their space with Poser output. A third alternative is to buy a more capable renderer, such as Mental Ray, but that's kind of like buying a gold box for copper jewelry. I couldn't afford it. I'm working on a fourth alternative now. (Not to be secretive, but as soon as I get a few more ducks in a row, I'll share. I'm in the just-an-idea stge right now.) As for the original question- I don't think the tools matter so much as the artist in this one. Beautiful work is beautiful work, no matter how it's done. We should encourage each other to do our best in any and every way, not waste time deriding others because our tools are better than theirs. The tool doesn't make the artist. (That was a general comment, btw. I'm sure you have been nothing but courteous with fellow artists, and are simply trying to help with a well-known point of contention.)

I agree with you, we have great artists in the galleries, no doubt. I'm admirative when I see what Voodoo or others are able to produce with Photoshop and Painter.

If you need a better renderer, POVRay is free, and works in nearly every OS out there. /P

I've made some tests with povray... free, yes, but not easy to learn and to use. Maybe I'll post some povray renders someday, but it's damn too slow to create something with it !

That's where I'm going, actually- I want to work out the easiest and best way to import poser figures into Moray (likely Poseray), then to write a good basic tutorial on using Moray with POV for building scene elements, lighting, texturing and rendering.

Yes, maybe poseray is the solution, but it's not perfect. On the other hand, povray is a powerful tool. Superb procedural textures, atmospheric effects, radiosity, caustics...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=133031&Start=1&Artist=Micheleh&ByArtist=Yes

Right. I've found it better to export a poser model as .obj and import it into Moray with the mesh import plugin. The only obstacle I'm having right now is that I need a way to increase the polycount of the .obj models. They export from poser too low count, and end up looking faceted. (I didn't see an option in Poser for high-poly exporting, either.) If you look at my "peg" pic, hte horse is a poser export. I hid the poly-osity with a bump map. *sigh* There has to be a way to fix that. (The rest of the scene was built in Moray. It took a day- just a fun little exercise.)

I don't know how it works with moray, but when you use Poseray, it converts to .pov files using smooth triangles that make the model look soft. Poseray can create Moray's .udo files, you should try this.

I just downloaded it, so I'll be trying it today. :]

Maybe I'm ignorant, lazy or both. I don't want to try placing Poser stuff into another program for renders if it is too complicated. In my book, you should be able to save a Poser project, then open it "directly" into the other program. I mean the entire project without the need to fiddle with objects, grouping, whatever. There should be a way to do this. Ron

Can you save an "entire" scene as a single .pz3 file? It should be possible, then. Let me look into it.