Always quick, courteous, and helpful. That is a dying art, whether related to art or not! :) Their customer service is "All that DAZ". BYS

You mean in the image in the post above yours, holding the Poser 5 box? Yes, it is. BYS

C4D is not inexpensive, but the base app is about $600. The two modules worth having besides the base app are Advanced Render and, especially for animation, MOCCA (Soft IK and easier interface to rigging), which are $500 and $400 respectively. It's actually cheaper to get the XL Bundle for $1700, since you also get Net Render, Pyrocluster, and Thinking Particles modules (saving several hundred dollars). If you can live without radiosity, caustics, and depth of field in renders, you can avoid Advanced Render. As you can still do bone rigging, IK, etc. without MOCCA, it is optional as well. But, and the big "But!", features of MOCCA may be necessary for including morphs into C4D (not certain about this yet). LightWave is still the same price, $1600. Netherworks, I hope to implement morphs and ERC after bone rigging. These Poser features are mostly supported within C4D (in their own forms), but they are not as easy to translate between Poser and C4D as I'd like. :) BYS

What question? There really wasn't a question, it was a statement (and plea, I guess). The second message was still sort of a comment. As for using multiple complex figures, my solution is LW or C4D. ;0) Not only can they handle much more complexity with less bogdown, but rendering times are ridiculously fast compared to Poser (I rendered a 1024x768 image with a Don character using a high-res texture in 9 seconds in C4D - try that in Poser). I'm working on a plugin for extracting the bones from the Poser character files to rig them in C4D. Greenbriar Studios has already released a LW plugin that does the same. At some point, this will make using Poser somewhat moot, except that you will still need to own Poser to use the plugins. BYS

If you have Pro Pack for 4, then it's a tough judgement call. If not, Poser 5 is now cheaper than adding Pro Pack to 4.

In Poser 5, you get:

• Hierarchical Library folders - very nice feature
• Firefly renderer + old renderer
• Pro Pack's Setup Room (for character creation)
• Pro Pack's Python scripting support
• Face Room - use photos for faces, limited
• Hair Room - only good for eating memory
• Cloth Room - cloth dynamics is a nice feature
• Content Paradise tabs - convenience links to Poser stuff
• Material Room using new node-based shaders - some love it, some hate it. :)
• No Pro Pack plugins available yet
• Some of the same bugs that have persisted for some time. You'll get them in Pro Pack as well.

So, it's really depends on what you need to do and how confident you feel about Poser 5's stability. The latest Service Release fixes many problems and removes the nasty protection system, so that is a consolation. Pro Pack, on the other hand, is rock solid. BYS

Smoothing does add a level of complexity since backface culling is mainly restricted to flat, unaltered polygons, but in the display and render engine, this should be done prior to smoothing (or other polygon interpolations, such as Phong et al). The basic process is: 1. Transform objects into world space (build the scene) 2. Transform into view space (build the camera view) 3. Object level cull (stuff outside of view frustrum) 4. Backface cull remaining objects 5. Clip remaining stuff against view frustrum 6. Project onto view plane (convert 3D pts into 2D) 7. Render If their smoothing is being done before step 4., that could cause some grief. Question is how smoothing is implemented. If it involves polygon subdivision, then backface culling still works in either case. If it's a form of Phong interpolation, it should really occur at step 7.. One would hope that they do smoothing only during step 7. (?). BYS

It isn't perfect? That's pretty sad. As a long-time 3D programmer, I'd have to say from experience that backface culling is the EASIEST thing to do, ever, in 3D graphics (if the polygon's normal is at an angle greater than 90 degrees from the camera LOS, it's culled). It takes a simple, well-known, very well-documented algorithm to do it correctly every single time. How could they screw that up? If they want, I have a book from 1988 that explains really simply with C code. ;0) BYS

Umm, my only question is this: Why is the original poster worried about abandoning V2 clothing for V3? Aren't there, and correct if I'm totally insane here, like a BILLION pieces of clothing for V2 at this stage? I mean, you can find enough shoes for V2 to make Imelda Marcos envious. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, just that V3 has maybe 20 or 50 pieces of clothes right now and V2 has a K-Mart, Walmart, Abercrombies&Finch, JCPenny, several storehouses and a fleet of oil tankers with cargo for clothes. And your complaining? Hmmm... BYS

UVMapper is essential for making undistorted texture mappings and creating texture template images. There are other programs to do this, but this one is excellent for the cost (free for the non-Pro version). You can use a CR2Editor or a text editor (if you know what needs to be done). If using Pro Pack or Poser 5, you can do most of the work there in the Setup Room and with the Joint Parameter and Hierarchy Windows. Photoshop will suffice very well in creating the textures. I use it for creating texture maps all of the time. Just open the texture template saved with UVMapper and create the color, transparency, bump, etc. maps as layers over it. Save that for editing. Then you can turn off certain layers, flatten, and save each texture map as an individual image. PhilC has one of the best tutorials on making clothes for Poser. It is not online, but a CD that you can purchase here in the Marketplace. Here's his weblink: PhilC Designs Ltd.. PoserPros Character and Clothing Workshop Making UV Maps for Poser using UVMapper 3D Commune Poser Tutorials 3DLinks Poser Tutorials Nerd 3D's Conforming Clothing Tutorial And, of course, you should ask questions. Lots of questions. I'm not very good at creating Poser clothes, but there are those here with tons of experience and knowledge to get you over the bumps. BYS

That's going to be difficult. How are you going to create the texture template? Poser can't create them. You could model the clothes in Poser, but it will be brutal since Poser isn't really a 3D modelling program. It's a layout/render program. What am I saying? You'll need "special softwares" to create new clothes for Poser. You can use free software, but at some point, it's going to require something other than Poser to create the new clothes models themselves and something else to fix the UV mapping and save out a texture template. BYS

I have a question about this manga character. There are a bunch of morph target objects and the morph dials don't seem to do anything to the head, even though there are deltas specified. And when I try to load them as morphs, I get "Target Geometry has wrong number of vertices." There is also a lot file looking during loading of the .pz3, even though all of the referenced files are basic P4 stuff (not texture files or others that I can find being referenced). Hmmm BYS

That looks very promising, Kalypso! Cool stuff. BYS

The only "manga"-style male that I know of is the character for DAZ Michael 2 - Bishonen. You could always try getting one from P4 yourself with morphs and magnets. Wish I could be of more assistance. BYS

Anthony :) jobcontrol, I realize that the .obj file as intermediate compiler-linkage object has been around for a long time. It's just that there are many extensions that are used to mean various things, and collisions occur more frequently than noted. But the extension should not be considered the end all of filetype. I come from an Amiga background, where file extension meant diddly. The same goes for many *nix systems. I believe that the same goes for MacOS (but am not certain). Actions about how the files were handled was totally dependent upon the content, especially binary files. If the format was plain text, but had no specific handler, it would open in a text editor-browser. But if it had information that, for instance, singled it out as an A|W 3D object exchange format, it could be set to take the appropriate action. This poor gentleman in Hong Kong obviously has no conception of this. It's a .obj and he's a programmer, then it must be a compiler object. Wrong! If I were to rename every file on my system .obj, under Windows, it is quite clear that Windows would never boot again (and that not all of the files are A|W 3D objects or compiler objects). That's not my fault, that's M$'s fault for using a flawed system of file type determination. Not certain how long .obj has been used as a 3D object, but it has been around for at least a decade, maybe two. BYS

I'll just throw my 2 shillings in here. ochkam is correct. Each C/C++ (and other) source code file is compiled into a .obj which is then used by the linker to assemble them into an executable (or library, dynamic link library (dll), plugin, etc). M$ has done everybody a disservice by using the extension as a determination of file type instead of the contents (MIME type or whatever). There are basically two types of file: text and binary. The contents should determine what the exact use and association of the file are and not the extension. That should only be a "clue" as to what the contents might be, but not the definition. This is why Windows is such an easy target for viruses, malicious scripts, and whatnot. BYS