The hair at Daz is certainly not amongst the best (free Kozaburo,...) and the skins/characters are no match for the best ones you can find here at R. or at runtimedna. Try a look in freestuff first, search Vali. These are good V3 characters and skins to start with. There are some other good ones for free too. Daz is great for their meshes, but the prices for the other items are rather high, except when there is a promotion. Also look at the free stuff at runtimedna and the (free!) proclub items at poserpros. As for that generation 2005: there have been some threads with serious critique on it. a quick search on this forum (page three, four???) may show you what it's all about.

never worry when you have a warm human heart. What mooch says is also true: when too many people would try to contact a hospital or send mails to some private search site with limited bandwidth (and none has unlimited!), they would crash the mailbox and so prevent real communication. this was not your intention, zorares. No one did think it was.

Once again: this is an offer. You may download both meshes for free now. But you are not forced to. If you do, and you want to use the characters people created, you will either have to buy the morphs also, or get the characters that are morphed by the artists themselves. (a few very good ones here ate R.!) As the best skins and clothes are sold here and at RDNA, just to name a few, as the best hair if free, or to be found on the same marketplaces, Daz will only have the morph packs. Imo it is an all or nothing move. But then I am not a commercial strategist. I know that V3 and M3 are quite impressive meshes within the limitations of Poser (joints, especially the shoulder, and the size of some parts of the body) and that Daz will need quite impressive servers to cope with the downloads. But whether you feel the need to download and start the money threadmill or not: that is your own personal choice and responsability.

this is a very difficult question as a/ many of the people here at the forum are merchants and b/ it's a question of personal preferences and also of what you need. (how close, photographic or not, pale skin, mediterranean, black, asian,..., lots of irregularities or supermodel,...) either you purchase UTC with evt the necessary plugins or you buy a number of skins, depending on what you fancy. or both.

I have seen and enjoyed all three Harry Potter movies (I have not read the books), and from the very first moment, Sneep has been my favourite character. You can sense that he is severe and a bit bitter, a loner, a steppenwolf, but fundamentally honest and living up to his own standard. I never pay attention to actor's names. For me, he is Sneep, and as such he is a perfect actor. The best of the lot. When he appears ion screen, the others fade to greyscale. I hope he gets cloned, and all ye womanfolk get yer own copy! (what was that spell...errr....???)

And to all humans, most of them children, who die each year from malnutrition and lack of medical treatment (money)in less spectacular circumstances.

Please don't forget that not everyone has a broadband connection and that a title is what the thread/question is all about.

Be glad with what you have. Perhaps you can contact the merchant that made the item you fancy personally and ask? V2 had a good hisory. Many a thing has been done for that mesh. For Stephanie, there was much less support. When it comes to skins, you can use the UTC utility and, evt the necessary plugins for characters. It redraws the texture on the UV map of the mesh of your choice.

"When people spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a 3D program they don't want to admit someone else can produce an image that looks as good for a fraction of the price." A top-notch 3D application costs far less that what many people spent on merchandise for their runtime. (XSI for less than $500). The main reasons against Poser are/have always been: 1/ Very recognisable (all millenium characters look alike because based on that same mesh) 2/ Spend enough money on merchandise and you can create extremely good looking images but nothing is really yours except perhaps some pllacing of the items in your scene and some tweaking. 3/ The joints. The -very complex- shoulder joint is a disaster in Poser. 4/ Very often a bit of jealousy as many (most?) people who own and use a top 3D application are not capable of creating a fully morphable and poseable human mesh of the quality of say, V3 or M3. Poser is a wonderful app, outdated as it is in many ways. But when you want to really use it, you have to work your way through the many options. Hey: if the top 3D apps had someone like DrGeep, they would be more popular, believe me!

biomekk texture extractor is something very useful. You can find it here in the marketplace part of the readme: Texture Extractor 2 (Textract) by Biomekk, Copyright 2004 support@biomekk.com This program searches for and gathers texture files referenced in MTL (material definition), 3DS (3DStudio), and now in this version, almost any 3D file format out there. When importing OBJ files into a 3D program for rendering, that 3D program typically reads the MTL file associated with the OBJ. The MTL file includes information such as color, transparency, specularity, and texture information. It's with the texture information that the problem usually occurs. That problem being the MTL file only includes texture file names, not paths (locations). And chances are your 3D program has no idea where to look for the texture files. This is where Texture Extractor comes in. This utility can scour your computer in search of these files, and when it finds them, it copies them to the location of the MTL file (or any folder you tell it to), making it a breeze to get your Poser figures into almost any 3D software package out there. New in this version: - MTL Overhaul Utility to rebuild Poser exported MTL files from the Poser scene files. This ensures that everything that Poser leaves out (such as transparency maps) will be included. - Scan any file with a new "Brute Force" scanning method which allows you to open almost any 3D file format. - Enhanced Interface (seperate preview, tons of new options, etc...). - Enhanced preview (now supports tif, png, etc...). - Many more improvements and fixes.

refund? I bought an item that was unsatisfactory. After a long while, the author had, in their words, taken care of the problem. I saw no difference, and controlled in Photoshop. No changes where the problem was (neck texture). So I mailed back. I was being difficult, so I asked for a refund. I only got a part back of what I paid. So refund is not what you think it is. I liked Daz for their Vickies and Mikes -those is very good jobs, seen Poser's limitations on joints- but that's about it. Their merchandise is, in my opinion, not of the level of what one can find here, at Poserpros or RDNA. It is seldom I find an item I really want. Which I why I quit the PC. But that is my opinion, and I'm glad for those who do find items they like and get fantastic reductions and vouchers etc for them.

"I had heard that the big companies dont really bother much about piracy because people who have pirated versions of programs generally couldnt afford to buy them full price anyway." Bwhahaha...go ahead and tell that to Adobe or Microsoft. "Wouldn't it be great if you could tell the software to light an outdoor scene as if it were 12 noon on a sunny or overcast day?" This is completely impossible. There are a few simulations, most of them based on HDRI, but no monitor will ever be able to give you the differences between the intensity of sunlight and full darkness. It would burn your eyes out. As someone who is working for television you should know this. They can do a lot to make the subdivisions smaller by going to 16 bit/channel, but the overall intensity is out of reach. Let alone imitating/calculating the atmospheric conditions of dust and humidity. Noon...where? Zabriskie Point or Alaska? Toscane or Macchu Picchu? There are far too many variables for that.

Right. And the next level would be wizard to create Gollem or JarJar Binks? When you start nowadays in 3D without having followed its growth through the years and versions, it is by far the most complicated thing that can be done on a puter. Poser's basic level is shockingly simple. You just buy everything, pose it and you render. You can even avoid clothesif these are too difficult for you. This is it's greatest strength. Yet from the moment you want more, when you want to add something personal, it suddenly becomes clear that Poser is a very powerful application with an incredible lot of options, not in the least because it allows you to create your own morphs and fully poseable characters and objects. And these you will have to study and experiment with, just like anyone else. The other ones you mention, 3DSMax, XSI, Maya, Lightwave, C4D,...those are professional applications, made to give people who are and artists and engineers the ability to create whatever their inspiration brings them. It took me three years to get what I call "a basic insight" in 3D. But it was worth it. It's a question of arriving at the point of the "aha" experience. From then on, all you need is experience. There is no app that can make movies of your dreams. Not yet.

• you can use all V3 skins on SP - poses need some tweaking - clothes are normally not exchangeable. To get a more "real" looking V3, you would need to do a lot of tweaking and saving morphs (changing sizes of individual polygons). SP is very versatile, less stereotypic than V3, and more "human". Her weakest point is the head. There are tutorials around (and it is not difficult at all!) to use V3's head on SP's body. This gives you a very good combination as you get the best of both. I am personally very happy I purchased SP.

Thanks, DunjeonProductions: you hit the nail on the head. I also use Cinema4D, and I am used to surf the net ororganise stuff on my pc whilst Cinema is rendering. Or even go on working on another scene or material. Which is why I suppose Poser was not really made for the things we now use it for. Otoh: it did do the job and didn't crash, so I only complain about the lack of sleep. as for any app running better when connected to the net: I cannot believe this as it would mean that divided forces are stronger than united ones. Sp either this has to do with the Content Rom (that you can better eliminate asap) or with the fact that P5sr4 wants to check the network to see whether there are other versions of itself running. But when you uninstalled the Content Room and are not connected to a network, P5 runs like a freight train.