Because Avatar Lab doesnt suit my needs I want to use Poser to create some Avatars. See also my question about differences between Poser 3 and Poser 4 ! Does anybody know some other programms to create an Avatar ? Should be cheap and easy to handle. Thank you

It's interesting that Avatar Lab doesn't suit your needs. What are they? PhilC has done a tutorial for importing avatars from Poser to Av Lab and of course all the animations are interchangeable between the two programs (that makes it useful for checking out animations incidentally). If I remember rightly, Truespace now handles Avatars for Adobe's program, but I'd be intrigued to know what you want to do....

By avatar lab, do you mean the Curious Labs one? That's the one that comes to mind about avatars cuz Adobe recommends it on their Atmosphere beta page. Sorry, I don't have any other suggestions off hand.

Hans...what platform are you making avatars for? For Adobe Atmosphere, I know only of the Avatar Lab and Truespace solutions. There are a few other solutions for VRML: Avatar Studio (Blaxxun and Canal+ versions), and NAYA Avatar Creator (Gomid). If those might help, let me know and I'll look up the URLs for you. Lynn Grant Castle Development Group

There's word that the Atmosphere may be going bye bye, that it may not be what they thought it would be. I think it was in this month's 3D World. Marque

Any idea what the next "atmosphere" may be? I would have thought that with adobe behind it, it would have succeded...

Rumors of Adobe abandoning Atmosphere are unfounded. Atmosphere has been offered as a free "beta" product since it's pulic introduction well over a year ago. The strategy behind this is similar to Adobe's PDF tools. Proliferation. Ubiquity. Adobe believes in the future of web based 3D and has put forward a sincere effort to support a system that enables easy creation of immersive worlds, the hosting of interactive 3D objects and as well as has built strong relationships with important partners that can create complementary tools and and technologies. Adobe Atmosphere may not be the ultimate 3D web system for ewveryone, but it sure has taken hold for a large number of users. The Atmosphere online forum/community at Adobe is the most active forum of any product that they offer. Hopefully, before too long, there will be a new forum here to address the Atmosphere/Avatar Lab community of users. I don't want to position AvLab as the ultimate way to create Avatars. There are other solutions, even with Poser and ProPack, but it has made its mark as an easy, inexpensive Avatar publishing tool. Always glad to squash an unfortunate rumor... Steve Cooper Curious Labs

Maybe I read the article wrong, it starts on page 22 of issue 25 of 3D World. You should read it yourself and make up your own mind. I own the CL Avatar Lab so I'm not slamming anyone's product, as I also own just about everything Adobe has put out as well. Was just making a comment about something I read. It appears that the reason it is still in beta is "we need to come out with Macintosh support" "The other thing is the rendering. Atmosphere worlds are pretty easy to download, and on a fast machine you get a pretty good result. But we'd like to support hardware rendering better." I may have to install it and check it out. Marque

Actually Avatar Lab seems to be the best choice since it is specifically for creating avatars. I just wish we could do the mapping of the faces this fast in poser 4, but I hear possibly poser 5 will have that ability. Fingers Crossed, Marque

A search of the free stuff here in my name will reveal some fun animations designed for Avatar Lab. I made them shortly after the program came out....

Does Avatar Lab exports to VRML ?

Not on it's own, no, but Poser does and since the two work in harmony.....

Hi, back again. I want to use an avatar on a website. He should introduce himself, make a nice greeting, should speak about the news and so on. So the program should be able to export gif and/or jpeg, integrate real world things like a chair, a table should be able to do facial expression and also motion animation. I would like to type in the text and you can "see" the avatar speaking. Also to combine phrases with motion so for example if the avatar says "As I suppose ..." he points to himself. I would like to import scripts for motion from different packages. So as I asked bevor for a poser sports pack I would like to import motions like swimming, playing golf and so on. This scripts should be universal for every human avatar regardless of its measures. This scripts should only depend on the sex and the age of the avatar. So for a golf website you can define a golf playing avatar and so on. I would like to have a male and a female avatar in different ages. So, maybe at the age of 18, 30, 40, 50. I would like to be able to define the length of the whole body, the length of the arms and legs, and other sizes that you see in catalogues for clothing. There is no good software on this planet

Everything you want to do is already possible but, you need to integrate all the disparate technologies together. Mostly what you need is a good database and a way of linking that to a web-site. I can't see your problem....

Attached Link: http://www.egisys.de/demo/Avatare/ThreeDee/

you are describing a highly scripted self updating database driven web site.
there are plenty of avatar programs for creating your little characters
but thats only half of your task
to perform the functions you describe will require high level web programming skills with a program such as Macromedia Director Shockwave internet studio 8.5 Dreamweaver ultra dev or MX, apple web objects , or "Macromedia Cold Fusion" good luck.

Brilliant Steve! If I ask her a stupid question she raises one arm slightly and makes a spitting sound, if I ask her a rude question she waggles her head coyly and simple questions make her disappear completely! I think it's wonderful, armed with the babel fish translater I could play for hours, but I wouldn't let Petunia get wind of this though.....