Ryamka, I tend to disagree. While it is true that the poser users consist mainly of hobbist that does not mean that there are not a lot of developers among them. I'm an engineer and I'm drawn to poser precisely because my artistic talents are limited and I could never create a good looking character in 3ds from scratch (...and because I was always fascinated by virtual porn ;-) Actually I would bet that more so than with posers users that seriously use lightwave, max or maya are probably more likely to be hardcore artists with no programming skills whatsoever.

Marque: DAZ always maintained that the basic version of D|S will be free indefinetly so they never planned to make money from it. They want to use this as a tool to sell their content and their advanced plugins which they could still do if they make D|S Open Source (and choose the right license) In fact from the DAZ quote above it appears to me that they are going for a "half open" source concept as they are inviting developers to join their team which probably does not mean they want to hire them but rather provide them with an NDA, the souce code and let them work on subprojects.

As far as I know there are already quite a few general purpose scene graph engines out there so I would propose to really focus very narrowly on the Poser realm. I have not really thought too much about it in detail but I would propose cross plattform Qt for the GUI (with windows still being the main target platform), Python for internal scripting, OpenGL for real time preview and an interface to PovRay for rendering (with support for other render modules to follow). Plugin support could be implemented via a COM like layer (which is actually not windows specific). I think before anything else the program should be able to read and correctly display any poser 4 content. This is the one thing that I find severly lacking in DAZ Studio which has all kinds of fancy features but actually can't even read one of my custom characters without problems.

With "Open Source" I talk about the core of the product which is totally different from publishing the SDK so that others can write plugins. My point is that it would be great to have an application whos development is driven by the community and not one company with its own agenda.

The chain shadow simply does not look right. In fact the whole chain does not look right somehow. Also the picture seems unbalanced with the character standing so much to the left. Also the head looks weird. What kind of mask is that?

Hi, thanks for those answers. Selecting from the drop down list/hierachy window is always possible but just adds a couple of clicks to the process which I wanted to avoid. Making clothes invisible is also problematic especially if the underlying body parts are partially invisible too. Is there a way to do this more easily in Poser5? Thanks, Eric

Lets not too crazy here. The freestuff section at DAZ solely exists to draw visitors to it's site in the hope that they buy from them. Also a lot of the freestuff items are either complimentary to a purchasable product or are incomplete and require additional purchases to make them really useful (the gorilla is a prime example). I like daz, I bought a lot of stuff from them but I think they should be much more thankful to me (and there other customers) than the other way round. Especially as there are some individual contributors here at renderosity that have probably made more things available as freestuff then they have. Some additional criticism: Some of their products are clearly overpriced compared to high quality items here at the marketplace. Releasing clothing packs without the morphs to make them fit anything else than default michael is a joke. Don't even get me started on the clothing controversy. Too much "reusage" of the michael/victoria mesh. That especially did not work well with the millenium kids. Shaky server infrastructure. I made about 6 purchases from them in the last 2 months and in two cases the download link was not working correctly or I could not access the site at all.

I don't know I might not be blinded enough by the "poser look" yet but what I see is the picture of a real man (admittedly in a ridiculous outfit) compared to something that looks as real as a a barby doll.

Hi, this stalling happens usually on systems with not enough memory running win98 (ME, etc) if there are numerous high resolution textures in the scene. Reducing the texture resolution (can be done in any paint program) usually helps without sacrifycing quality too much (especially if you render to 600x450)

Thanks for the comment.

) Make your leading light more white, or very slightly >blue. There is a lot of blue light in that room, despite >the color of the chairs in the foreground.
Getting the lighting right is definitely the hardest part. By the way, does anyone know a program that tries to do that automatically (adjusting the brightness/color setup from one picture/layer to another). I use psp and it does not seem to have a function for that

1. You have great movement in the character, but despite >that, the loincloth just doesn't look right. Perhaps you >could lower it closer to his butt. On the other hand, you >do need to add some postwork to the hair to give it motion.
   I agree with the loincloth. Clothes in general are very hard to get to look realistic. I have experimented with adding those in postprocessing but it's time consuming. The hair looks fine to me though.
2. And last thing that might help, get a photorealistic >texture for Mike. The low res version available at DAZ is >excellent. And it works great up to the proverbial 3' away.
   I actually use a pretty highres texture from the marketplace (can't recall the name right now) and I have bought numerous other ones which all have there pros and cons (I don't want to have body hair for this character) Why don't you like this one?

This is excellent for a 10 minute set up. Move the >loincloth down and spend a little time in texturing and >post work, and it'll look pretty darn real! Good luck.
Thanks. My goal is to cut down the postwork time as much as possible as I intend to do a lot of pics of that nature. Of course one can spend hours tweaking every detail but setting up the pose and doing all the test renders takes long enough. Any more time and it would be more efficient to hire a real world model ;-)

Well, I agree the background pix could be cool if it was not so pixelated. I do not want to sound rude here but with Poser it's so incredibly easy to get a girl and a dress and a smile together that it just takes a little more to call something a "GREAT JOB" even for a beginner. With such obvious mistakes I would actually call this a pretty bad job. (sorry, got to be honest sometimes)

Agreed, I noticed that the shadows don't match pretty early on. However, I liked how the troll rendered with the current lighting setup so I left it at that. Also at least to me it does not look obviously wrong as there might well be more than one lightsource in the scene.

First, the background pic is too pixelated. That is easy to get right so it's worth fixing. Obviously the lighting on her looks very "plastique". This is also relatively easy to fix. She also has no good texture on her (as visibile on the face, especially the eyes). Her left arm is poking into her body, also easy to fix. It's damn hard to make poser renders look real but you should avoid the obvious mistakes ;-)

Hi, on the shadows: they make or break a picture in my opinion. You can definitely get them right in poser or if you do postwork it's easy to fake them if you have psp or Photoshop. You are right about the fingers...