First impressions (and download fop non-commercial use is free): Clear visual design May need a lot of memory for a complex object. May need video driver updates. It doesn't look as though I'll get the full use of it on my machine, but for props and similar less complex models it's worth a look. On more complex models, my system hung. It may be a little limited on the paint side, trading off the 3D aspect for paint-program features, but it wouldn't be hard to produce a texture with the right shapes in the right places, ready to refine in a conventional program. It may be just a little too different from what I'm used to, but the colour picking seemed a little imprecise.

Picking up on the "invisible art" idea, and skirting around whether the art should or should not be visible in the storytelling, I think there's a general "new language" problem. Using photographs was once a new language in comics, and until people understand the language the results can be like reading a poem written by somebody learning a new language. Look at the examples in that article. The face in the "Kingdom Come" panel is an idiom slipping through from another language. Telling a story in still pictures isn't like a movie, and it doesn't matter if the pictures are drawings, photographs, or 3D renders. But they're distinct dialects, perhaps related, and perhaps akin to a pidgin or a creole or some other evolving mix of older tongues. After all, isn't the composition of a picture; the alignment of eyes and lines in the scene, a language which tells us where to look, creating a sequence in a single image.

My experience of CD-RW is also poor. At current prices, they're just not worth it. Though RW for DVD-sized media is a bit more tempting. I did use to use packet-writing on CD-R, but for reliable back-up I reckon it's still better to burn a whole disk at once. And hard drives are enough bigger than even DVD that it just doesn't seem worth the fiddle. Or you can do what I used to, the Zipdrives and CD-R, only using CD-R and writing a set to DVD. [looks at Runtime...] Floppy disks are pointless.

The legalities are complicated by potential trademark protection for movie characters. And also differences between countries. What may be legal in one place may be illegal in another. But never mind who "owns" a person's face. Who owns the photographs which you used as the base for the texture map? That's a copyright violation that would be pretty well universal. Sometimes, lawyers do seem to have no sense of fun, but considering what Poser figures can be used for, on this I have some sympathey with them.

I'm sorry, I found it hard to pick out just what in the pictures actually was the waterfall. Which, I'm afraid, leaves me thinking you have more than just exposure as a problem. As you may have noticed, I tend to go for older tech, and back in the fifties of the last century, contrast range for colour film was less than for monochrome, and the manual for a Weston meter recommended concentrating on colour difference, rather than brightness difference. There are some good colours in these pictures, but I'd certainly use a longer lens, and rotate the camera through 90 degrees for a portrait format shot. Sorry, don't recognise the film name. Print or transparency? I'm reluctant to suggest taking advantage of alternative exposure/processing options for transparency film, but the do affect contrast, and so might help. Screen resolution isn't enough to judge things such as motion blur and depth of field, but I do know that the "sparklies" from falling water can be very different with motion blur.

Well, joking apart, a bit of exaggeration can look more real, but it depends a lot on the pose and the viewing angle. And a lot of the "references" you might find on the net are a little unreliable. Silicone implants and such are routine. Maybe some models have better morphs, but the ones I have seen are biased towards naked breasts. Clothes tend to bring the breasts together, making the cleavage a little more prominent. And there are gravity effects. But all these things have been something artists have had to deal with for centuries. All those nude models and life art classes are more than just lechery. We don't have to learn the same mechanics of putting lines on paper, but we're in the same business. And it's OK to feel a little embarrassed. It hits me sometimes, but when you're actually making the art, working on the image, it sort of drifts to one side. The process, whatever the medium, puts a distance between you and the reality. Usually.

Remember that you can also use layers and stuff. Put the UVMapper output in one layer, in a distinct colour, and the texture-map in other layers. Base colour in one, details in another, the bit you're working on in a third. Adjust the transparencies of the layers so you can see the mesh. Choose colours to make the details you're editing clear, rather than working with the final colours. Use the polygon mesh of the UV map as a texture and save those renders so you can relate the mesh to the object. Do a render with a checkerboard texture to get a feel for the flow of patterns, and the distortions. A lot of this is equally applicable to transparency maps, which are used to modify clothing. And, while I've not tried it yet myself, bump/displacement maps can give you those small changes at seams and hems, or for pockets. I don't claim to be an expert, but what I found is that it pays off to practise doing this stuff, and sometimes you need to go and look at the tools the paint program gives you and forget about Poser for a while.

Helium. not silicone? Though I'll have to track down the sources you mention.

Am I the only one who thought, "You have it easy in Poser. RL can get painful."? Yes, Magnets are the way to go. Look at photographs and you/ll see that clothes affect the breasts too. There are few morphs which look right for large, clothed, breasts. Or even for small ones. But keep checking the view from other directions.

Over the years, I've seen claims that $camera-maker has the best $stuff for $job, and it's quite possible that Canon and Nikon do different things better. Whether the differences are significant for an ordinary user is another question. Whether my opinions on current stuff are worth anything, since I'm using a camera and light-meter from 1957, is also another question. There's one advantage to starting with film -- there is a lot of good used hardware which is being sold cheap.

A basic non-digital set-up can be pretty inexpensive, until you figure in the costs of film and processing. But a cheap film camera can be a useful back-up to a digital set-up. You can get film pretty well anywhere. Of course, I started in the days when digital photography wasn't even a dream (uphill, both ways, in the snow) and so I may have a bias against relying on batteries.

Even using inks which are at different shades of grey, those printers are going to be doing the usual inkjet half-toning. Still sounds pretty good.

Be careful about using fluorescent lights. They very a lot, and the effects can include strong colour casts, not just colour temperature effects. It's right about Poser's use of "texture". Though shadow effects can be useful, if they do match the scene lighting. But Poser (and other software) also uses a distorted mapping of the figure surface onto a plane -- it's the same general problem as putting a spherical surface on a flat map.

If that is an official statement of the Competition Rules, it seems that the objective is achievable. It's a style of figure I'm interested in, and which I've worked with. I'm familiar with the body of 2-D art on the theme. I would like to try. But, if the demo version is any guide at all, the prizes are not worth winning. The program uses a fixed-size window, which needs a monitor setting of 1280x1024, yet has a non-standard aspect ratio. It breaks many of the standard UI rules for Windows. It keeps missing mouse events. OK, so I doubt I would succeed at modifying the mesh this program can produce. "boning" is one of the dark and secret arts to me. But when I use the program of move or re-scale a part, and the mesh tears, it doesn't look right. Believe me, I have enough problems with bugs and misfeatures in Poser. I do not want to waste my time on another bug-ridden program. And, for the sort of anthropomorphic cat I want to use, I might as well start from Posette as from what Creature Creator produces. Yes, set a difficult target for a competition. But lets have a prixe that seems more worth the effort.

I'd suggest that small imperfections are an essential to a realistic image. Those perfect people on fashion photographs depend on skilled make-up artists, and there can be a lot of safety-pins holding the clothes on the hidden side. Some very slight lack of symmetry also looks more real. Like a lot of stuff, it's the small things that matter.