Here occurs a critical part of the model-builder's art. The lines of the mesh must be laid out in such a way and be of sufficient density around the skeleton's joints so that when the user "bends" the joints the mesh does not deform in unexpected ways.

For my sperm whales, I made the mesh in the back half of the whale much more dense than I made the head area. Sperm whales do not have a very flexible head or any real neck. So, the mesh is made to have lower density and somewhat less detail in the front than at the rear. And, as you can see in the prior illustrations, the skeleton is much more detailed (has more and smaller joints) in the rear than it does in the front.

In this illustration, I am going to pose the whale so that he is just beginning a dive. I'll start by selecting a joint midway down the tail, and rotate it very slightly so that the back half of the body starts to curl upward.

Hopefully, the model-builder has given each of the joints a good set of names so that you can guess where they fit in the model, and what function they might serve.

If the model-builder is using professional 3d modelling conventions (non-Poser), the beginning part of the skeleton will move the entire model (or will rotate it), and there will be pieces at the end of each major joint chain that don't really do anything but signify the end.

Forgive me if I try to answer these questions in a little more depth, particularly so as to give some answer to the last question as well.

OK, in Vue, a "poseable object" consists of a conventional 3d mesh and a "skeleton" of joints to which that mesh is bound. (Click on each of the illustrations to expand them to a good viewing size.)

Here is the mesh for one of my adult sperm whale models, with the skeleton for it displayed in green.

The earliest  available human figures for Vue were designed for middle or background use, I believe. They were accompanied with some simple animations. And, yes, the clothes are part of the body - akin to game figures or the figures used in architectural work. 

Yes, I've been known to do some water models.  And, I hung out at EE for years! EE saved my bacon on many a day.

Would write more but I'm still trying to get past Shawn's stupendous statement above.  Actually, Shawn, I'm really curious. What do you do for a living?

Thanks for following up with the final result, Chuck!

Glad Christie was able to help - she is on vacation, you know. So pretty good of her to do that.

OK, I just installed Firefox 4, and am not having any difficulty either. Something else seems to be going on - on your particular internet connection or your particular machine.

One thing I did note, and that is that it took a unch of minutes for their downloader to prepare the files. I did not want the installer to be used, as I was just testing the on your behalf - don't want the installer to mess up my mother's machine.

Anyhow, I am wondering if you have some BIG purchased files, and the thing you are seeing is a very large, large delay due to preping all those files for download. I have a big stack of 47 purchases, but all relatively small file sizes  in my queue, and it took quite a long time to get the prep work finished for all of them on my second test. But, if you have purchased any very big files, .....

Hello Chuck.

I am away from home, and have access only to IE. I just tried to download some of my files from C3D, and had no problems at all.  Sorry it is taking so long for someone to rescue you. Which antivirus product are you using, and with which type of firewall product. Reason I ask is that I had just installed the latest AVG Security Suite 2011 on this machine (my mother's) and had to tinker with its settings to download some products from two other sites (not C3D). AVG is not playing nice with IE, I believe.

BTW, I thought IE was no longer the most commonly used browser in the world. Hasn't that title passed to Firefox?

Hi Dale. Will be happy to do the benchmarking thing whenever you are ready.

Not enough Messiah users, I suspect.

Ah, let it go, Dale. He's just irritating in a very minor and ignorant kind of way. Actually, kind of amusing.

Any semi-interested party could go look at the record of DOS attack on a couple of the more prominant UK-French providers of last week. It's a matter of public record. Plus more attack yesterday - apparently directed at the English Parlament host systems - also part of the public record.

A little patience and a tad bit of charity, Folks! Site was taken down for maintenance, and to fix a bad error that popped up when a lot of users tried to log on at the same time. During the middle of the week to minimize impact on users. Quite a few broken links resulting from the denial of service attack from the week before that were hard to spot and didn't get repaired in the effort to restore the site as quickly as possible.. Don't know about you guys, but many of us have been pretty busy locating the broken links and reporting them to E-On and C3D. This is going to go on for a little bit longer, probably.

Also, the staff is a more than alittle fatigued. Much of the site had to be re-built by hand, including most of the data base and linkages to it. A lot of people have worked for more than 24-48 hours with no sleep.

Alexcoppo, can you display some of your models for us?  Are you giving them away for free?

Both bruno and I try to regularly post good quality models for free at Cornucopia. Can we see yours? Will you consider giving them away for free to the community?

Glad to hear that you have become a model-builder, Alexcoppo! We all started out as you have. The more good builders of models, the better!

LOL - good minds reason in similiar ways!