If most of what you're doing is facial closeups, consider deleting the rest of the figure. . .that is, you can have a "head, shoulders and hair" model for the closeups, and then use the larger model for the full shots. Poser's geometry processing isn't particularly optimized, so that in a scene where the bulk of the body isn't visible, the geometry is still calculated. If you think about it, movie cinematographers think like this. . .detailed makeup is unnecessary in a crowd scene, mandatory for a "two shot" Think of it another way: if the amount of image area that the rendered image is going to cover is only 100 pixels square, then having 200 pixels square of texture is unnecessary and wasteful. you can downsample your textures in photoshop and have a Steff HiRes Stef MedRes and Stef LoRes. . . use them in different shots depending on how close the camera will be

Shanna, as a happy Mac Poser user, let me say welcome. What you're trying to do is install a Classic (OS 9) application onto a machine which doesn't have Classic installed. Poser 4 will not run under OS X. Poser 5 will. So you have two choices: get OS 9 properly set up, or purchase Poser 5. Whoever installed OS X on the G3 didn't leave you with an OS 9 volume-- which is strange; OS X does not run particularly well on the G3 machines. It is not a trivial thing to create an OS 9 volume -- if that's the way you want to go, then you should find someone who's competent with Macs and have them take a look at it. If you're near a city with an Apple store, they will set up software for you. . .this is what I'd suggest, because its too hard to tell from here what your current configuration is. . .

Ummm. I hate to weigh in on a subject where the less said the better, but I have to agree with Maclean. You're posting in a public gallery and asking for comments. You got 'em. I'd also question the choice of having these guys in nothing but their shorts. If the point is that gay families are like any other family, then I'd expect your guys to be a little less stereotyped. . .you've got two beefy gayclones, one in very short shorts, what's the point here? If I'm doing a straight family scene, and mom's got a thong bikini, and dad's wearing bulge revealing tight shorts, I'd think that was weird, too. .. And what's the deal with the muscles? My guess is that gay guys, like straight ones, spend a little less time at the gym when they start having a family. . .you don't get your kid to school, hold down a job, and maintain the washboard abs. . . Take a look at "Love makes a family" --photojournalist essay on gay families-- for a realistic look at what gay families look like.

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html#5

I use Reiss Studio's Body Studio and 3D Studio Max 5 -- these work excellently together. If you're a student, Max is expensive-- if you're not, its very, very expensive. The cheapest solution is probably to use Poser 4 (proPack) and Lightwave. LW is much less expensive than 3DS, plays nice with Poser geometries, and has a very fast, high quality renderer Poser 5 is less compatible, so if you're looking for the hair and cloth room stuff, you'll have more difficulty. If you're on a tight budget, I'd spend the dollars on the fastest Windows box you can buy with a lot of memory. . .and then render in Poser. Although LW is faster and better than the Poser render engine, you're still going to be going from a 900 Mhz machine to a 3 gigahertz machine (I bought mine from PC connection for under $1K)-- this is a big increase in speed. So that's your highest priority. Also, look very carefully at your render settings. Reducing the number of polygons in your scene is very important. Also, reduce the number of shadow casting lights.Poser artists tend to drop in a lot of props and models which have a huge number of polys. . .resulting in very long render times. Don't rayrtrace. Don't use giant textures. If a figure is in the distance and has a 1 meg texture, reduce resolution in Photoshop. . .loading and processing these giant textures slows everything down. My best guess without knowing more about your project is that with a new machine and optomizing your settings, you can probably get a 5X increase in render speed in Poser over what you're doing getting now.

I'm not familiar with the Marlin Studios product. If what you're looking for is to have images with alpha channel, its pretty straightforward from Photoshop or Imageready. Create your alpha channel to define transparency, and save the image with alpha out as a TIFF. (Be sure to flatten your image before saving) Tiff can store a transparency channel (so can some other formats, like PNG, but Tiff is more likely to be read correctly by the target application) I haven't used Bryce in a while, so I can't remember if it respected the alpha from a Tiff-- i think it did. Even if you've got an application that doesn't read the Tiff alpha, you can save the grayscale alpha channel as its own image (EG MyPicture.jpg is the color data; MyPictureAlpha.jpg is the transparency data) . . . almost all 3D applications will let you apply these two and more to make a clipped texture.

that's it exactly-- I was being dense and hunting in the "Render Options" menu. Thank you /Croc

I should add: Poser 5 (SR3) Windows

"What do the initials BNC stand for?" Good question; there are several answers, possibly apocryphal. Webopedia.com gives the following answer: "British Naval Connector or Bayonet Nut Connector or Bayonet Neill Concelman" The Amphenol homepage has this convincing-sounding explanation: Developed in the late 1940s as a miniature version of the Type C connector, BNC stands for Bayonet Neill Concelman and is named after Amphenol engineer Carl Concelman. The BNC product line is a miniature quick connect/disconnect RF connector. It features two bayonet lugs on the female connector; mating is achieved with only a quarter turn of the coupling nut. BNCs are ideally suited for cable termination for miniature to subminiature coaxial cable

The geometry looks very good. Your chin is more "youthful" than the photo-- not just wider. As people age, the connective tissue in the skin becomes less robust, and skin appears to "hang" on the bone, instead of maintaining its own gel-like connectivity. Your nose tip seems slightly pointed, and your browridge is "stronger" than the photo. Note the vertical furrow on brow directily between eyes in the photo. . . Lines below eyes are slightly different in photo than your render That said, you could texture and render something pretty close to photorealistic with this mesh, I'd imagine. . . most of appearance isn't really in the mesh, its in the texturing. . .getting the mesh "close enough" is good enough to start. It looks like you're rendering in P4-- do you have access to a better renderer?

obsolete: a neat idea at the time, but always pretty broken as software. did not do any graphics accleration, as i recall. . .Painfully slow screen redraws. of historical interest only (it was way ahead of its time!)

it takes time and practice. Think of it like sculpture-- you'd laugh at someone if they asked you "if I buy this chisel, will that make me a good sculptor?" It is not the tools, its the eye, the experience, and the vision. I'm always blown away by what people manage to do in Bryce --which has a very limited modeller. As I noted above, I also like Amorphium. . .fun and easy. For getting started fast on landscapes, Vue d'Esprit is excellent-- you'll be producing things you like in half an hour. . . In general, the people who do the really good work, the stuff you admire and want to emulate, are working a couple of hours a day on modelling-- that's why they're good.

"Easy to learn"? "Loads of Tutorials"? Modellers are not "easy to learn". That's a simple fact of life-- what's going on as you try to take your 3D creativity and apply it through 2D interfaces is simply going to take some getting used to. No one does good work in any modeller right off the bat. The reason that so many folks use Rhino is that its powerful, and its robust. Many modellers fall down on certain aspects of functionality--weird results with booleans is a common one. I haven't done anything much in Amapi, but I can say that learning Rhino will serve you well for industrial design, as well as animation. But there's a learning curve. Amorphium is a great product, IMO, and the learning curve is not nearly so steep. Not something to be used for precision industrial design, but easy to use, fun, and will deliver nice models for Carrara and so on. . .

I'm not a a firearms expert, but the the muzzle flash looks very different than anything I've seen. . .in the pic it looks like a brightly lit cumulus cloud. . .and its projecting straight forward. A number of weapons have "flash suppresors" which distribute the muzzle exhaust perpendicular to the barrel, at its end-- I have no idea if the weapon you're using does so, but its a neat effect, and widely used in firearms shots for film. . . Also, the exhaust should appear to be lit from within. . .