I am seriously thinking about the beard that was recently added to the DAZ store (morphing beard). I have seen some renders in the gallery, and they look really good. Does anyone have any woes they might warn a potential buyer, or is it easy to use? My biggest concern is that it might kill my machine. It is already a running little sluggish with M2 and + clothes in a populated scene. Is it a memory hog? Also, will it work with M2p4 without a lot of effort? I think I will be using that figure most often, since you can have several of those buggers and still actually use the machine. i normally wouldn't ask, but since there is the potential for beards with the default mike2, and it is $30 (I could spend that on other stuff). I just want to make sure it is really a good purchase.

I can't comment on it killing your machine.. I've had no problem with it. I love it though.. it really is an incredible piece of work and can allow you to do a lot... I have a lot of pictures posted when it came back a week or two ago if you'd like to look we were all talking about it. I consider it one of my best purchases ever. Anzan

I just bought the beard yesterday, but haven't installed and tried it yet. Give me a few hours to play around with it, and I'll let you know. If it works on my anemic machine (P3-800, 128MB, Win98), it should work on almost anyone's. By the way, the hair included in the beard package can use textures created for Anton's Full-and-Feathered hairstyle. Doug Sturk has released a Full-and-Feathered texture pack at DAZ, and it has MAT poses for Anton's beard.

Thanks for the info, guys. My machine is 750mhz, which can handle the mil people, but they are just under the point at which it starts getting overwhelmed. If I add too many other polys, It really starts adding up (two mil figures requires careful attention to the texture sizes and consideration for the number of surrounding props) From what you say, I'll probably spend the $. My biggest interest is in RPG type images, so it fits really well (as does those great evil wings....my poor wallet is going to hate me;) Little_Dragon, I actually bought the Full-and-Feathered hairstyle. They should offer the beard as an upgrade ;) The Full-Feathered is actually one of the two items from daz that I regret buying. It does what it says it does, but the style lends an 80's metal look. With the beard, though, it really looks quite appropriate. As for systems, we are pretty close in capabilities. I have a similar set-up with ME (now that is something I really regretted buying....will probably be the cause for me to wait as long as possible before handing them any more cash for XP..I don't care how stable it is. ME should NEVER have been released as a product. I will probably go back to 98 if I wind up reinstalling windows) and 256M. I'll wait and see how it fairs for you. Thanks, Eric

Attached Link: http://www.cooltuna.com

Eric, check out the freebie texture for F&F hairstyle at CoolTuna-- there are two of them, black and brunette. They vastly improve the look of the hairstyle. Finish off the edges as it were and give depth to the rest. Look under Free Poser Downloads. I passed up the hair until I saw these. It still could use some interesting morphs to give it variety, but the beardset sorta does that.

Okay... with my old AMD K6-II 266mhz, 150 mb RAM, and 98 first edition, I can load a mil fig, the P4 Horse, P4 Dork, and my Dracos Titanicus (hefty textures and polys)... slow, but fully functional... Surely, Eric, with nearly twice the proccessor, you can handle a few milfigs?

Err, make that K6II 366, not 266

Much better than the beard morphs that come with Michael, especially when it comes to long, flowing hair. Relatively easy to morph and pose, also, although I wish that the Head morph dials were in the same order as Michael's.

1. The beard, "out of the box" with default settings. I still don't care much for the full-and-feathered hairstyle, but as EricTorstenson points out, combined with the beard it looks appropriate.

2. Shorter beard with Dwarven Red texture. If the full-and-feathered hair isn't what you have in mind, you can make it invisible with the material transparency settings and substitute another hairstyle, like Lourdes' Mike Hair. In the course of playing with the beard and face morphs, I messed up the moustache a bit. Probably my fault, rather than the product's, but I feel that the moustache morphs could use a few additions.

3. With the exception of shadownet's beard prop here in Free Stuff, nothing comes close to matching this, and Anton's beard is more versatile and realistic. The full-and-feathered hair looks much better when lengthened.

4. Smile for the camera! The level of detail holds up well in close-ups. The beard has mouth and lip morphs to match Michael's, which makes facial expressions and animation much less painful.

Should you buy it? That's up to you, but I think that my money was well-spent.

On my Pentium 3-800MHz rig with 128MB of memory, I could use Michael 2 and Anton's beard without difficulty. Adding more props and figures would be problematic due to my lack of RAM, but the beard itself doesn't seem to be a resource hog. Render time for each of the images above (with default lighting at 400x300) was less than 45 seconds with shadows, bump maps, textures, and antialiasing enabled. The close-up image took the longest, of course.

Thank you for the examples Little Dragon. I haven't bought it yet because I don't care for the full and feathered hair look, but it does look better in your renders.

OK Valandar, technically it isn't really impossible, but with Vicky2 + textures, Mike2 + textures, a room + props, poser is almost guaranteed to crash after a while. If I am careful what I use, I can work almost carefree (at least for crashes). I suspect there is probably something dreadfully wrong with my ME installation, but I'm too lazy to try and reinstall. Well, Little_Dragon, I will probably grab them tomorrow. At least I'll have access to the best darn Kenny Rogers look alike ;) Thanks for sharing your results. Eric