I didn't want my comment to come off sounding critical . . . I'm really impressed. Walk cycles are just one of those things that the eye catches.

I thought it was brilliant, and to have achieved it with inexpensive software -- well, wow.

I guess the question I'd ask is: under what circumstances would you want to actually have this many meshes in movement in a scene, vs instancing? Or multipass?

I think of low poly for realtime applications . . .

Its just wonderful, and I love the narration "there's happiness elsewhere" -- so true!

I thought the rendering was terrific, weakest point was the similarity of the speeds and gaits of the people.

Quote - As a newbie to Photoshop, can you recommend some good tutorials/books for working with layers?

Can I make a suggestion?

Play with layers before watching a tute.

if you go into the tutorials, you'll be watching -- what you need is to be doing.

Once you've played with them a bit, and gotten the feeling for them -- then watch some tutorials.

Photoshop won't break . . .

I'll amend this: I tried using my Mac, and I found that it was very easy to use DownThemAll [Selection] and rapidly dlownload my purchases.

I have no idea why it didn't work on the PC (they're both running Firefox), but the difference in convenience is huge

The world of Web3D is in flux at the moment.

For the largest audience access, make a fly through and upload to YouTube.

If you really want 3d interactivity, Flash would have been the way to go-- but of course that means no iPad or iPhone viewers.

Use point lights with falloff. Poser's "out of the box" lighting are distant lights, which don't make any sense for night scenes.

Turn 'em all off, and place lights yourself.

For stuff like lit windows on a building, instead of placing zillions of lights, you can do a texture map for ambient-- that'll light up the windows without the render cost of the lights.

Remember, in a city night scene, there are zillions of visible light emitters. Its very different than a day scene, where most light is coming from the sun, either directly or reflected.

Getting night scenes right is mostly about getting the lights right

Quote - it almost looks like a dandelion puff

Ah, almost, but those would require a lot more work in Poser. The problem is that you can't "branch" at the end of a displacement, the way the puffs do.

To do [i]that[/i] would require Python, you'd have to offset little star shapes from the surface of the sphere; it could be done with Python, but much easier in something that supports growth and branching, like Bryce or Vue's Trees.

As a Poser Python exercise, it would be a great exam question, actually . . .

Firefly has a very strong micropoly displacement engine, which means you can create very complex geometry out of a very simple primitive, and a procedural texture plugged into the displacement. In the image, note that the displaced geometry actually casts real shadows . . . so there are real polys being created on the fly at render time

Is better than trying to cook up custom fractal geometry, as that's very poly heavy, and not at all interactive (if you do fee like it, Groboto is a lot of fun, as already mentioned)

The other thing that's great about using a procedural texture to generate geometry at render time is that its dynamic-- you can always bump up the precison of the render to "get more geometry" without having to go model it.

You can also animate the texture, and get deforming geometry with a lot less hassle than trying to set up morphs.

Your problem is more that you're imagining something than describing it.  People have "an idea" of what volumetric light looks like, but what it actually looks like in any given setting is very dependant on the particulars. With these kinds of volume effects, you have to be very precise about particle size . . . the effect that produces a good volumetric fog won't necessarily give you a good dust cloud.

In 3D applications, the general term for this is "participating media" (meaning that the "empty space" that the light travels through actually has some optical properties) or "volumetric lighting". Google "Vray volumetric lighting" or "mental ray volumetric lighting" and you'll find a lot discussion. You'll find a thread discussing dust in volume lights in Blender here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=164715&page=1

In 2D applications, the effect can be faked at much lower compute cost with particle systems, these work well for the bright discrete dust flakes that you seem be trying to achieve. In Photoshop, I think I'd just make a brush with a bunch of fleck samples, assign a layer, and start painting.

The big thing is that volumetric lighting is usually very contrasty-- a shaft of sunlight coming into a dark basement, for example-- and things reflecting in the beam of light shold be brighter than you might think.

Sure, the Firefly Engine can do abstract stuff using the fractal nodes; the caveat is that they're relative slow, and they're not recursive (meaning you can't plug the output of a node back into the input). Its not designed for speed or efficiency in fractal evaluation the way that applications that are only about fractals are, but that's part of the fun of it.

The place to start is with very simple hi resolution geometry (the high resolution sphere primitive is ideal), and plugging noise functions into the displacement map. That can give you some very complex 3D geometry out of very simple scenes.

Remember-- Google automates everything; eBook pricing is going to be whatever the publisher and the Google algorithm agree to . . . there's no human in the loop to review a price "hey this doesn't make sense"

Long way of saying that some prices will be attractive, others less so.

In general, I find technical handbooks are vastly more useful as eBooks than on paper

Attached are a some examples. Remember, you can scale each part of a prop independently, not just the prop as a whole. I've captured the parameter dials, so you can see some values that work

Quote - Croc, the guy's FAT. Chunky, obese, hefty. He's much bigger than the pants. If I turn the pokethrough parts invisible, then he's basically invisible below the waist. If I composite the two, then he's a fat man above the waist who somehow wears skinny pants.

Don't turn the pants invisible, turn the body invisible. Now you don't have anything poking through, and as he's wearing long pants, you're not missing seeing any flesh, because its under the pants.

The pants themselves can be scaled to taste-- remember that there are two different ways to do it-- there are dials for the pants as a whole, and also dials for the individual parts of the pants. This gives you a lot of flexibility to size them to whatever proportion you'd like

There are many solutions to pokethroughs, sophisticated and elegant one.

Here's the easy wasteful one-- that I use all the time.

Do two renders.

In render one, everything is visible.

In render two, you turn off visibility for the parts which are poking through

Composite the two renders in Photoshop

(In some cases, you won't even have to do this . . . sometimes, the part that is poking through is completely covered in the render, in which case you don't have to do the "part visible' render)

Also remember that you can spot render-- in a lot of cases with torso stuff, you can turn off the neck down of the figure for the main render, and then just do a few small regional selection renders, and composite them in Photoshop (or whatever you prefer).

Again, this isn't the "right way" -- but its fast, simple, and it always works. Much less frustrating than trying to get magnets right.

(to quickly adjust visibility for various parts, use the hierarchy editor shift-ctrl-E, the little "Eye" icon toggles the visibility of a given part)

Quote -
I know they are referencing lost revenue, but what I'm trying to get at is that they inflate numbers based on worldwide piracy and use it to try and influence law makers in the US. For example trying to exert pressure on ISPs to block people etc.
If 95% of music sold in America was pirated, then music would not exist in this country as there would be no way to make a profit of it.

No one is claiming that %95 of the music sold is pirated.

Pirated music is very rarely sold-- its "shared". You can argue that sites like Rapidshare are, in effect, selling access to a stock of pirated material . . . but since these are all offshore private companies, we have no idea what their revenues are. Looking at the bandwidth they eat up, they must be very large in deed (Rapidshare has been, according to Alexa, as much as %4 of total Internet traffic!, and if you add up all the "share" sites, it looks to be at least %10 of all traffic)

Quote -
If 95% of music sold in America was pirated, then music would not exist in this country as there would be no way to make a profit of it.

Sales for the music industry are dismal. Any number of bands will tell you that piracy has destroyed their record sales, and they're quite right. If you look at sales figures, its clear that unless people mysteriously stopped listening to music, they're getting their music without paying for it.

Its also notable that in segments of the record business where piracy is hard (vinyl) or doesn't match the demographic (country/urban/classical), sales remain pretty good. Any band that appeals to a technically literate user with a broadband connection and internet savvy pretty quickly finds their stuff is pirated, often before its released  . . . and it has a very obvious effect on sales.