"I am really looking at things like video game cut scenes and they have nice hair!" If it's in a video game, chances are it was produced with either 3dsMax or SoftimageXSI, since they're the two top 3D softwares used for video game creation. The hair you see in some games was probably produced via Shag:Hair by Digimation. It's far more powerful than the hair room in P5 currently is (that's not to say future versions of Poser won't improve upon the hair room), but there's some less than desirable things about it in terms of using it in animations as it is now. That being said, I think it's use for still images is much more meaningful than any transmapped hair is. Since you can position it spline by spline, it makes for some powerful posing and shaping techniques, which is ideal for realistic still images without having to "paint" the hair in later. The key for successfully making Dynamic hair look as real as the best transmapped hair is in the shader and render settings.

I prefer V3 by far. Contrary to what seems to be the popular opinion, I feel she's much more versitile and natural looking. Her joints and morphs allow me much more freedom in posing the figure in "unusual" positions. However, for animation, her mesh is a little too dense, and can slow things up quite a bit when you have all the morphs loaded in. I still use V2 for most of my animation projects. If you have a fast computer with lots of RAM and disk space, and don't mind having to "load" or inject the body and face morphs, then V3 is a superior choice in my opinion. If you create your own textures, then again V3 is the choice because of her superior UV mapping. The downfall is she's a memory hog. But let's not forget Judy Plus by Hmann... he did a great job expanding the morphs of that model, and making her much more useful. ;)

" As much as I like the P5 face room, it's hit or miss with getting resemblances to specific people, whereas I've seen some dead ringers done in facegen." P5 face room has it's uses, but digital cloning doesn't seem to be one of them. For the most part it's due to the limitations of both Don and Judy's meshes. But as you pointed out, Facegen (provided you have suitable photos to use) can output some incredible likenesses. Then of course you can use them in Poser if you wish. ;)

I'd convert it to OBJ rather than .3ds for importing into Poser. Poser likes OBJ better than the 3ds format it seems. IM me if you still need someone to convert it for you.

"Your Beyonce clone is quite stunning." Correct me if I am mistaken, but I do not believe that the Beyonce clone above was created using Poser morphs. I recall seeing a thread about that in the Yahoo group recently, and the creator said it was made in FaceGen with Photofit, which is a photo modeling or face cloning software. However, the resulting mesh could be "frankensteined" onto a poser body, which I believe is the case there.

" Maybe they need to keep it as evidence when they ask the warez dude's ISP to terminate his account." That could be, but I doubt they actually do that. "Since I assume you are reffering to "the clown", below, why don't we all gang up, contact a spammer and flood his e-mail..." LOL!! Now there's an idea. Anyone know some good spammers? ;P

" Geez. Just spend the money, assclown. It's a bargain for what you get." LOL, "assclown" is a classic.

" The trailer looks like a mix of 3D animation and 2d "paper-doll" animation. Looks a lot like that deliberately cheap animation in the Quizno's Sub Sandwich ads! Wonder if it's the same artists?" I think you are referring to the intro to the trailer, and not the actual trailer itself, which seems to be high quality 3D animation (probably done in Maya or some such app) and integrated into live action sequences (ala Scooby-Doo). I don't like the fact that they didn't animate Odie in 3D as well though. Thats a load of crap, since Odie was more popular than Garfield among the junior high girls I went to school with. He was "cuter", so they said.

Yeah, I've done this and it's fine for a single pose, but for animation there are still some collision problems, even with all the collision detection options selected. But thanks for the info!

Oh, and it just occured to me to suggest that you make sure you have conformed the hair to the figure using the conform option only IF the hair is conforming hair. Check your documentation on the product to find out. Perhaps posting a sample image of the problem would help resolve it as well.

This seems to be quite the popular complaint today. ;-) I'm not familiar with the hair model you mentioned, but if it's not dynamic hair, there's really not a whole lot of things you could do aside from resizing the figure or the hair or both. I know you mentioned already you played with the dials for a while. If the final render is going to be for a still image, then at least you'll have the option of postworking out the imperfections. If it's for animation, then I feel for you. :-( If it's dynamic hair you're working with, then try checking the other thread about the subject several posts down and you'll see it's an ongoing problem, again fixable for still images, but not so fixable for animations.

Yes, it's possible. There's a couple ways to do this. One is to just create a walk cycle in the walk designer that goes for 300 frames (you can specify the length in the walk designer). OR... search for a python script called "repeater". You can tell it to take the first 30 frames of an animation, and repeat them as many times as you want (in your case 10 times) starting from whatever frame until whatever frame. You can specify to repeat only certain body parts or the entire motion of the figure (all body parts). I've used repeater, and it works OK, but remember to tell it to start at the next frame after the last frame you want to repeat, and have the target number of frames present in the animation... for instance, if you want the animation to repeat for 300 frames, make sure you add those extra frames to the existing animation before running repeater. PS: Always BACK UP your existing animation to a PZ3 file before running any python script, just in case. Poser sometimes does unpredictable things with animations along the timeline that you might have to go back and fix.

Biped is AWESOME, and a great way to rig your character. However you won't be able to use the same rig in poser, but you can just grab the obj of Vicki or Posette (whoever) and rig that natively in Max via biped. I've done that myself, and it's absolutely worth the time. Forget animating in Poser as it is now, unless you're just doing simple things. There's no comparison.

I wish Poser would allow us to translate pre-existing rigs from other programs. How sweet life would be if I could bring one of my Character Studio rigged characters to use in Poser and vice-versa.

I haven't tested that yet, but I don't see why they wouldn't work. You can always change them back to shadow maps if not. Anyway, you can try also raising the pixel samples if you're using firefly for cleaner edges.. Expect a little longer rendertimes the higher the pixel sample though.