I think kaciasea has a bowl haircut here in the Renderosity marketplace that fits the Mill Kid boys and girls. It doesn't take a whole lot of morph dial twisting to turn a Mill Kid preschool girl into a convincing boy. Just scale up the whole body for height, maybe increase the Y scale a tad, square up the head a bit. That might be your best solution.

There are several files involved with this hair. I just downloaded "Koz_Long.zip" and installed it on Poser 5 and it works fine. You also need "appendix_files.zip" to conform to other figures besides the Victorias. Perhaps you downloaded and installed "LongHair_INV.zip" which requires that "Koz_Long.zip" be installed first. Did you remember to unzip the files?

You could try attaching single Poser hairs to various objects. Would be bit tricky to guide the free ends to where you want them...

Don't anybody here dare feel embarrassed about being a Poser artist!

Years ago I toyed with Poser 2 a bit, and decided it was a toy. Since then I've written a few plugins for 3DSMax and Maya, so I know generally what's been going on with those. When I tried out Poser 5 a few months ago, I was blown away by the fact that "hobbyists" could produce photo-realistic human images equal to the best work done by "pro's" who were using much higher end tools. And a whole lot faster...and cheaper!

Surf some of these "high-end" galleries...you won't have to look long to find figure images that even the Poser newbys here (like me) would be embarrassed to post.

At a recent "Christmas Crafts Faire" I sold several cards (with envelopes) of my very first Poser image. I made about $20.00 on that image. Does this make me a Pro? Was I a hobbyist before? Really, words like Hobbyist and Pro have no meaning. Just do what you like as well as you can, and forget the labels.

Happy Winter Equinox! The real meaning of this time is that the days have stopped getting shorter, and will gradually get longer and warmer. Those Johnny-come-lately modern religions are just "me-too'ing" this perfectly natural event...they're worse than a bunch of texture thieves! As far as I can tell, the Pagans pretty much had it right...

Anybody working on a V3 "I Dream of Jeannie" scene?

Can't help, but I sure like your illustration!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/tut.ez?Form.ViewPages=100

Kewel! Very dynamic, something strangely lacking from most Poser work...

Thanks to all for your input. Those third party program recommendations were very helpful! It's sure daunting for a newbie to get a handle on all these Poser files, but it's starting to make sense now. Other newbies should note that I also learned a lot by using a text editor to look at the distribution .CR2 files (and other files) on various commercial figures and comparing that to what is presented in Poser. I'm making progress from the help I've received on this forum. I'm sure there are many Poser users who would just have given up without this resource.

Attached Link: http://valentin3d.free.fr/characterskids.htm

Personally, I would always chose a more developed software package before a brand new one. Poser 5 may or may not have a few bugs, but I have never seen a first-release software package that did not have TONS of bugs - like the early releases of Poser 5!

Also, if you post a newbie Poser question here on Renderosity, you can count on about a million very insightful replies...it will take a while for DAZ to reach that point.

XP handles program priority dynamically. It automatically allocates resources to programs with equal priority based on activity and other considerations. The best approach for big applications is to leave them all at NORMAL priority, and let XP figure out who gets what and when. XP juggles RAM and other resources based on what each program asks for, how active it is, and also things like how often you switch from one program to another. But if you assign memory-hog programs to above normal priority, you can actually reduce total system performance since XP is less likely to "borrow" RAM from a high priority (but idle) program to allow running programs to go faster. The worst case is when two resource hungry programs both have high priority - they get in each other's way.

I've been running Photoshop and Poser at the same time. I've noticed that the program that is not running really has very little impact on the system performance, EXCEPT that when Photoshop is idle but contains a large image it can easily tie up 200+ megabytes of RAM. The RAM tied up by Photoshop can not be used by Poser, and vice-versa. So there's another reason for lots of RAM. There are exceptions of course, such as if you don't use a loaded program for a long time XP will finally stash that program's data to disc to free up some RAM for more active programs.

You can monitor how much memory any particular scene requires using the "Windows Task Manager" screen. Press the "Ctrl" and "Alt" and "Delete" buttons all at the same time - this brings up the Task Manager screen. Now click the "Performance" tab button. Down at the lower left you will see "Commit Charge" and "Total." Total is the amount of memory your system is using at that instant. "Total" goes WAY up during renders. Once the Total exceeds your RAM memory, your hard disc will start to work overtime to simulate addition "ram", and your system will slow down horrifically. Bottom line, when that hard disc light starts coming on a lot during renders, it's time to buy more RAM. But based on my limited experience, 1 gig is plenty for almost anything, except maybe for really, really crowded scenes, or scenes which use more than roughly 20,000 Poser hairs. Just monitor "Commit Charge Total" during renders to get a realistic idea of how much memory you really need for the type of scenes you do.