How does this sound: Clothing that is fast and easy to use Clothing that is easily poseable and drapeable in real time Clothing that can be easily made to fit, or automatically resizes to fit morphed figures Clothing that can have its fit to a figure easily customized Clothing that can fit and be used with more than one figure Clothing that drapes realistically with gravity and collision effects and looks good Clothing whose shape can be altered using transmaps or some other easy to use method Clothing whose behavior can be changed from silk to denim without the aid of a rocket scientist Zippers, buttons, ties, pockets and other real clothing features

Check out: http://fp.minot.com/cobraydc/videos.htm for some video of a Mac-10 being fired. Will give you a feel for muzzle flash, smoke and casing ejection. Also give you a feel for the very real recoil of firing full auto. BTW, you may have to refresh the screen or click the "videos" tab once or twice to get it to download right.

DazStudio is OpenGL based. OpenGL is the only realistic cross platform graphics API. DirectX is pretty much a Windows only affair. OpenGL is also a whole lot easier to code. DirectX is a horror. As to performance differences between OpenGL and DirectX I personally have never seen anything significant enough to outweigh the cons of dealing with DirectX. Although a lot of games are going to DirectX, at the higher end of the graphics hardware and software spectrum, OpenGL pretty much dominates. The new OpenGL 2.0 spec will also level out the differences between OpenGL 1.x and DirectX 9 and above. Windows XP and 2K share a lot of common core code and 98/Me are close to that core. Under the hood where you are actually writing lines of code Windows 95 has a number of "issues", some age related, that made supporting it a problem.

Who would be interested in some kind of interface between one of the various 3D home modeling packages and DazStudio (if it could be done, which is a Very, Very, VERY BIG IF) OR some kind of house/ room/ floorplan/ dungeon/ temple/ interior/ exterior generator for DazStudio that might operate like one of the 2D/3D home design tools? This is a requirement that I thought that there was some community interest in but I am not sure how much interest. I would love to hear any feedback on the utility of such a widget or what you might like it to look or operate like. BEFORE ANYONE TAKES OFF WITH THIS ( too late..... ) the above are purely theoretical questions at this point. There are no immediate plans to add such a capability to DazStudio. BTW, think the house looks really cool. When I saw it the first thing that came into my head was "Miss Scarlet, in the hallway, with the wrench." :-)

Think it looks great, would be very interested in seeing the finished work. Think it would look really cool in a leaping tiger type pose. My two cents worth for possible tweaks... Bigger teeth for that Great White look, or go a little bit longer and snagglier, forget which shark has those kind of teeth but a mouth full of those is pretty scary also. Maybe a set of teeth morphs? Make the claws a little thinner in cross section, when viewed from the top, and curve them back a little to get more of a predator's hooked type claws. Raptor claws versus Triceratops. One's for pushing dirt, the other for grabbing and ripping flesh. Might lengthen up the tail a smidge ( as a morph?) seems a little short to me. Or, try squaring and flattening it up a little kinda like a gator or croc for propulsion when swimming.

FYI on DirectX versus OpenGL: Although DirectX is faster on some hardware/software combinations it's not a big factor unless you're trying to pump out 120 fps of Quake/Doom/Halflife/Unreal. DirectX is a major league PITA to work with. OpenGL is cross platform, DirectX isn't. OpenGL is supported on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. There is a new OpenGL 2.0 standard coming that will incorporate a lot of new capabilities and features, see www.opengl.org for details. It is no coincidence that it is being pushed by groups such as ATI and NVidia and that NVidia and ATI are assimilating "rendering" software and hardware technologies. They are looking to take their graphics to the next level so that my teenagers will blow their( = my ) money on the next generation of games.

To reinforce what Anton said, Daz employees, which includes me as a paid subcontractor, cannot even break the shrink wrap on a copy of P5 without running into EULA legal issues. It is hard to determine why a product, which worked well under P4, is not working on P5 when you can't try the product yourself in P5 because you can't have a copy of P5 running anywhere. I am not stating an official Daz position, but this is a basic, simple fact. If someone had problems with one of my brokered products on P5 I'd have to throw my hands and say there's no way I could try and figure it out because I do not own and cannot own or use a copy of P5. This isn't a conspiracy or an attempt to hose P5 users. This is just the way it is. Daz does not own a single copy of P5 and unless there is a drastic shift in the cosmos Daz will not ever have a copy of P5.

Go with the GeForce4 if you've got the cash, the 4600 is the top of the line and I believe that it has at least one DVI port. If you've got even more cash ( ~$950) check out PNY's quadro 4 card. It's a GeForce4 on steroids and has dual DVI out. I just got one and it is a serious ass kicker. Running some day job stuff on it and I am beginning to believe NVidia when they saw they are close to the level of a Wildcat card with the Quadro 4's. FYI, I've had some oddball compatability issues with the Radeon cards with my kids games and the like. FYI for all concerned. One of the differences between a Quadro and a regular GeForce is how they handle multiple windows up at once. A lot of the game cards are very powerful but internally they're really optimized to have only one main window in view. If you're going to be doing a lot of real work with multiple windows up at once, then forking a little more for a Quadro or equivalent high end card may be worth it. Depends on what you're going to be doing with it.

It's Vaporware, not Vapourware. Next thing you'll know you'll start spelling gray as grey :-) That was a really nice starter entry on the list! Thanks!!!!!!!!!!

KateTheShrew - what would you like instead of a trackball? BTW, you are not the only person to express the desire for something other than the trackball. Although the trackball has a certain intuitive feel for newbies, a lot of the more advanced users have expressed varying levels of dissatisfaction with it.

Unfortunately I can't do it either as I would immediately be in conflict myself since I am currently trying to beat my portion of the new Daz code into submission. That's why I was asking users to go ahead and post on the various forums where it will be relatively open and free to all. CL had/has a wishlist but the take is closed to everyone but CL and Daz does not have one at this time.

The new program is real and under development. How gaseous it is you will have to judge for yourself as time goes on. I posted in an earlier thread a request that users post wishlists for what they would want in a desktop 3D app. If there is something that you would like to see please post it. Even if it does not appear in any initial versions it may be included later. Think big, think out of the box. Think about the entire process you go through to create an image or animation. What would you like to see to make that process easier, faster, less painful? In a perfect, blue sky world, what would you like to have? What would you like to be able to do that you can't do now? New, fresh ideas are always welcome. Developers don't read minds so if you don't ask for it, it will not be considered a priority. The first stage in properly managed software development is getting and analyzing user requirements. Well constructed software will also have flexibity to expand and include new requirements over time. You usually can't get everything that everyone wants every time so you try and make a well-balanced app that meets as many of the requirements as possible. Even if CL or Daz don't pick up on a request, there are a number of other developers out there who might. BTW, before anyone bitches at me about the Daz e-store I can truthfully say I had nothing to do with it. I don't do that web programming stuff.

Please, please keep posting wishlists for any features you'd like to see in desktop modeling apps, be it Poser specific or in general. Developers such as myself check the forums for user requests and complaints such as those above. My morph mapping scripts, the "Tailor", "UVMapper", "CR2Edit" and the other apps out there did not evolve in a vacuum. User complaints and requests are the basis for starting new development.

Sorry about the glitch in Poser 4 Pro Pack f/x & Design. When looping over the geometry's you almost always need to try/except the actor.Geometry() call because there is no other way of finding out if the actor, such as the Body, has a real geometry or not. FYI, there are a couple of other coffin corners in the Poser-Python implementation. try looping over: actor.Geometry().Vertex(vertIndex).X() where actor is a high poly part, like the head, and the vertIndex runs the range over the number of verts in the geometry. MAKE SURE YOU CAN CRASH YOUR SYSTEM WHEN YOU TRY THIS! Now, after rebooting, try : vertices=geometry.Vertices() then loop over vertices[vertIndex] to get to each vertex instead of doing the Geometry().Vertex(vertIndex).X() As near as I can tell, Python creates a copy of the geometry every time you call Geometry().Vertex(). Soooo... if you loop over the vertices in Vicky's head you get something like 10,000 x 10,000 polygons being created in your system RAM. There are some other memory leaks in the interface. Watch your system monitor when you do things to see if your start bleeding too much memory. Curious Labs is aware of this bug but I got it to them after SR3 was allready in the can. Presume that Poser 5 will have a fix.

Poser will generally only use one of the CPU's. As far as I can tell, it's not wired for multi-processor support. That said, if you're doing a long render or something you can let Poser eat one CPU and do something else with the other. I was doing multi-hour Python script runs and I could still do email, web troll, word process, etc on the second CPU while Poser chugged on the first. More RAM is always better. Right now it's so cheap I'd buy all you could.