So they are UK editions... Oh, woe and thrice woe! More clutter... (Imagines Poser-pic of hand reaching out from mound of old 'puter magazines)

Was watching "South Pacific" on TV recently, the original movie version. The clothes the sailors are wearing for the "Nothing Like a Dame" number -- it's not blatantly military, mostly, but general purpose. Apart from the hats and the bell-bottom trousers, anyway.

Some of that list is pretty timeless. Cooking pots, blanket roll, and the canteen could all be useful for other periods, or something similar found. But you do get a change in a lot of stuff when the industrial revolution started. I assume you know about Questor's Western Guns set on DAZ, in their free stuff? Check 3-D Arena too where he has other stuff. There's odd bits and pieces all over the place, all the usual suspects, such as hats.

It's not a revolver, that's for sure, but I can't tell much more from the angle. I suspect it's a quite low-power cartridge, and it doesn't look big enough for a double-column magazine, but I could be wrong. I'd call it a "Lady's Gun" if the shooting ladies I know didn't enthuse over .44 magnum revolvers.

It's like that with real guitars... Anyone want to buy a guitar? :)

I recognise the some of the magazine titles, but I'm in the UK, not the USA, and things might be different. For one thing, here in the UK, the May cover-date issues are appearing. It can be confusing.

It's not just texture-maps. The whole range of 2D images that can modify a model use the system. One very common use is a transparency map, which can let you change the length of a sleeve or skirt. Just the texture-map/transparency-map combination allows you to do a lot of neat stuff.

Yep, try everything you can. Some programs are about as free as you can get. I've downloaded Anim8or, Wings 3D, and Blender. Any others? I'm still learning, and you really need to read the manuals. Then I heard about NURBS, and get even more puzzled. Anybody care to try grouping the various programs according to how they lead you to think about a model?

I'll just say that it seems that most of the free stuff for Poser characters is "white", with Japanese/Chinese coming second in numbers. I've found a few "african" character morphs, and very few textures for them. I think a part of this may be little more than the distribution of Poser users -- think MayaDoll and all the Japanese=language sites -- rather than conscious bias. It's still the sort of thing I'd worry more about than such things as what "ethnic" means.

I gather that Poser will handle some .obj files that other programs will not. And does a few other things differently. There's probably some info out on the web, but three aspects come to mind. 1: Poser meshes don't require all faces to be triangular. 2: Poser tends to smooth edges, though later versions can switch this off for an object, so Poser meshes might be made with with a few features to limit the smoothing. 3: Poser uses a different scale. I suppose every rendering program has some little quirks in how they handle a mesh.

The Tamron 90mm SP, regarded as a hot macro lens about 20 years ago in its Adaptall-2 form, could be used with a Tamron x2 teleconverter specifically for the extra magnification. All the Tamron tele-zooms of the time had magnification scales too, one of the features of the range. When you think about it, the difference between magnifying the image and increasing the focal length is practically non-existent. Put a wide-angle shot into your computer (easier than doing it in an enlarger), crop and scale to match the same view through a long lens, and the only obvious difference is the image resolution -- pixels or grain, do the magnification with the camera if you can. But I hadn't much thought about the extension-tube effect. I have a set, but if I wanted big macro images, I still have a Tamron 80-200mm and teleconverter. But that particular Tamron converter has to go between the lens and the Adaptall mount. The teleconverter quality will certainly make a difference, and they give you that longer lens too, without adding a lot of weight to your kit.

Another photoblog sort of site is fotopages.com Very much centred on the actual photographs, and it does something with java or javascript which seems to bypass the usual browser methods for saving a local copy.

I'm just wondering what characteristics a desktop image really ought to have... I've seen one or two which really needed better-placed icons to be work-safe. And others which made things a trifle unreadable. And I'm having a few really evil ideas...

I think I have a book about the making of Star Trek that has a plan of the studio sets. Yes, you can do a lot with a few corridor sections... Another trick is to render a set of corridor sections and composite that shot with foreground scenery, but you're very limited in camera movements -- little more than z-translation -- without breaking perspective. Corridor sections I'd like to see: T-junction Bulkhead with door, across corridor. There's a lot of other bits and pieces which would be nice to have, but that would let the scene stop without needing a dead end. As far as generic ship models go, try to give us some choices. Use bump maps as much as possible. Done right, the same mesh of a hatch could provide for several distinct designs, with morphs, bump maps, transparency maps, and textures.

I maay be a little confused here. Poser, as far as I can tell, has a default scale used for the figures, where 1 unit on the translation dial seems to be 96 inches. I don't know of any Poser setting which changes this. Is there one? Numanoid's proposal seems to make sense. Whether we talk about 1/10 standard, or 25 metres to a Poser-unit, we're talking about the same thing, but when I've made physical models, it's the ratio between reality and the model which I've used, not between one scale model and another. So be careful about how you use terms like 1/10 scale. OK?