As for making printed copies, I have been surprised how big you can go, and still get something that looks good at a normal viewing distance. Newspapers, of course, use such a low resolution that they can get away with big images from low pizel-counts. A side-thought: how do these figures compare with digital cameras.

The phrase "gradiemt fill" comes to mind. And remember, for these sorts of effect, you don't need a big graphic, or one which is square. For the flared trousers, you could use a quite narrow bumpmap, perhaps 10 pizels wide and only a couple of hundred high.

Well, I see more young women with a body like Posette than with a body like V3. Me, I need to lose weight.

It would help a little if some sort of lining material were showing at the armholes and neck, possibly with the metal looking a little less close-fitting.

Trouble is, just using the normal texture as a bump map can do odd things. It's the greyscale value that decides how high a bump is -- now imagine what will happen if you use a texture map for a character who didn't take off their swinsuit to get an all-over tan.

3DGuy, would that be a Viewmaster -- a disk mounting a whole set of 3D pictures, and you pressed a lever to move to the next pair. Not what I was talking of, but I remember them from way back.

As it happens, I turned up a stereo transparency viewer, letting you view two standard 35mm slides as a steroe pair. It wouldn't be hard to duplicate with a pair of those cheap slide-viewer gadgets. Taking the pictures, that would be harder, but as I recall the method was to choose a non-moving subject, and then shift balance from one foot to the other between shots.

Digital rangefinder? I thought the only one was the Epson/Cosina collaboration. Does the phrase have some other meaning? To be honest, the rangefinder cameras aren't so good with the long lenses needed for some sorts of sport photography. Now, where did I put my Lubital? :)

You know, I'm just wondering if the change in the shape of the rose was in Shakespeare's time. "A rose by any other name" and all that.

Well, if you're trying to be serious, you may have a bigger problem. OK, I'd want to check, but I don't think roses of that form were around in medieval Europe.

Open an MS-DOS window. You want to put file1.txt at the end of file2.txt Type in the command: type file1.txt >> file2.txt Alternatively, just use a good text editor, use select all on file1.txt, copy, switch to file2.txt, put the cursor where you want to, and paste. Those are the simple methods. It gets tedious with a lot of files, and I expect that's why you want something more from the software.

I think you could do it with what would be like multiple overlapping skirts, transmapped to form the strips. It's be a bit hard on the system if you used P5 dynamic cloth, but I don't think you'd ned to model every strip. UV maapping might be tricky. I think it would help to have lots of materials, which could use different colours, texturemaps, etc. I've not seen one close-to, but I think they often use a lot of scrim, which is a fairly fine mesh made of coarse fibre, sort of like a fishnet stocking made of coarse twine. Start off with one of Anthony Appleyard's figures in overalls, and then add smart-propped skirt-like objects to give the structure. In P5, displacement maps would be good. There's lots of ideas. Has anyone ever done camouflaged face texturemaps?

Technically, it's part of his estate, and any payments from sites should go to whoever the executor is. Simple principle, but one which can be difficult to sort out. Folks, think about what records you might have, for whoever might have to sort things out.

Any sort of close-up photography will have limited depth of field. even with the lens stopped right down. And the autofocus might have locked onto one of the bubbles in the glass. and been affected by the curvature acting as a lens, or picked up the reflections, again with lensing effects.

Sure, I realise they're different things. But, if you want to post a series of pics, there's no problem using fotopages, and giving a link here. Me, I sometimes have a single picture that works really well, but I'm mostly working with a serial record in mind, And, come to think about it, I doubt all this stuff about artistic photography is quite what they had in mind, It's not really supporting the CGI stuff that's at the heart of Renderosity.