Well, I'm currently mugging the local pimps and drug dealers, so I will shortly be able to afford a top-of-the-line graphics-oriented heavily frankensteined Dell ;) Hopefully that'll take care of the power issue. Given what I am reading here of the security measures in P5 - linking a copy to the harddrive - I'll have to wait on the upgrade before buying P5 (unless I am misunderstanding something.

I never use the tools in P4 - too imprecise, and annoying. I always use the parameter dials - except for the camera and light controls.

do you want realistic plausable armor or fantasy stuff?

"always" is an awful long time. I don't have P5 yet, but here's an observation. It seems strange that the transform parameters'd have their own sub-folder header if they are listed in the morph target sub-folder. Are you sure you are looking in the right place? That really seems odd, almost as odd as if there are indeed no MTs for the left collar.

is the setup room as advertised? will it really take the agony out of converting acad-generated .3ds geometries into fully poseable new figures? since you do -quite well- what I am trying to learn to do, your opinion counts bigtime.

God DAMN it! This is the second time in 24 hours the damned message board script has failed to load a reply. And this one was a long one, too long to reconstruct. the high points: 1.Yes 2.No - they are all individually drawn in ACAD 3.I can get them across to poser with no difficulty 4.Not really. Go to PM if you want details - I no longer wish to bother with this buggy damned board.

(darned msgscript!) if P5-derived figures/props/products can be used in earlier releases, that's dandy. If not, that'd be yet more money out of my pocket with no yield to my earlier investment. trying to make some money here.

thanks, all. I will continue looking at tutorials, but I reiterate that what I seek is a TEXT BOOK. By the way, I do have a modelling program with which to generate the original surfaces/geometries: AutoCAD2000. I can successfully export .3ds files from acad, import them into P4, and turn them into wavefront .obj files. Generating the parts is not a problem in any way. The problems arise in the assembly, joint editing, blend zones, bend zones, and the supposedly "automatic" creation of joints between parts - which I assure you DOES NOT HAPPEN as the P4 manual so blithely assures me. It is impossible to figure out exactly what is going awry, because every time I have a specific question the bloody book assumes I have Raydream! There are far too many variables to track down by trial and error when I am flying blind. Aggravating is an understatement.

the ones I have sampled thus far fail in categories 1, 2, and 4. As well as being rather hit-or-miss in terms of quality and/or relevance. As well as not being BOOKS. They are thus mere fragments, and require either a lot of printing OR switching back and forth from window to window - which I find tedious, annoying, and distracting from the lesson plan. I am very old-fashioned, and prefer reading detailed data in hardcopy to doing so on-screen. Thanks, though. But my question stands as stated.

Thanks for the clarification, Blacksteel. I disagree with your legal assessment, since it runs counter to my limited experience in such matters, but that is neither here nor there. Your new post has at least soothed my suspicious nature.
In answer to the trivial:
No, I do not have a speech impediment (one should of course be aware that a speech impediment is usually not related to intellect) but I am balding and acne-scarred, so feel free to needle me with that, if you are of a mind to do so.
Yes, I did take the name of the nemesis of Phillip II of Macedon (in words, at least... the poor dear did rather poorly on the battlefield by all accounts). Cute demonstration of your own erudition, by the way. Not subtle, and certainly a little comical after your long chastizement of what could be called Mensa-bation, but cute nonetheless. Now, if, by "misspell", you wonder why my nik is not capitalized, the reason is simple - I prefer lower case for all passwords and user IDs I use, for the sake of simplicity. If, on the other hand, you are curious about the "_aborigin", the reason for that is also simple - someone had already laid claim to "demosthenes" when I joined up at this site, so I had to make a modification. As I have been using the pen-name "demosthenes" since 1986 I felt justified in adding a tag indicating this long-standing use. I translated "from the beginning" into Latin (sorry, my Attic Greek was never worth a tinker's dam) and typed it in. Unfortunately, it over-ran the character allowance and I was left with a somewhat odd-looking suffix.
I do hope this answers your question.

As to all the folks who did not read the details... I seem to have forgotten that most people do not notice limiting and modifying terms, phrases, and paragraphs. Little things, like: "seems" and "appears" and "resembles" and "I am not saying..." and "maybe" and "perhaps" and... the list is actually rather long. I used them deliberately to avoid making an accusation, but it seems they were not sufficiently prominent to catch your attention. This is a problem I have often encountered, but I have yet to find a solution to it. My bad.

For those who engage in an argument and, having had their counters thrashed line by line, then decide to retreat to a false moral high ground ("I didn't know it was a contest" etc...)- shame on you. I started with a simple observation, for Blacksteel, with an implicitly expressed doubt of either his competence and/or veracity based on an obvious apparent contradiction. YOU OTHERS began the argument. You post broad and spurious generalities, I respond with specific facts. Facts trump pabulum. Now you say you were not arguing?
Shame on you.
That's the last I have to say on that matter. If you MUST have the last word, knock yourselves out.

Finally, the only important part of this post -
for Stormrage: Whatever course of action you decide to take, may the best of fortune go with you.

I am amazed you made the error of treading this path. Truly. My IQ has been measured consistently between 155 and 175. The statistical average IQ is 100. Normal statistically significant deviation is supposedly 15 points. I am thus supposedly 4-5 deviations above "average". Supposedly this renders me a genius. This is horsepuckey - I have known real geniuses and their intellects utterly eclipse mine. I am, however, literate. Some things are black and white. So there, Nyagh! ;)- waiting for the next unnecessary attempt to excuse the absurd and essentially meaningless (in other words, you might wish to consider taking my friendly suggestion and "nevermind, forget I said anything." This is a silly side argument, one you cannot possibly win, and one which I have no need to continue. Pax?)

a truly lighthearted rebuttal: My brother was an international business lawyer. Prior to, during, and after this period in his career he was and remains quite thoroughly literate. So there, nyagh! My personal lawyer is among the most literate people I know. Again, so there, nyagh! My mother is a physician. She is also one of the most literate people I know. AGAIN, so there, nyagh! If you desire to see true illiteracy among those whom you might presume to be intelligent and well educated, try software engineers. All of them seem to be aliens translating from their arcane gobbledygook by use of a poorly comprehended thesaurus.

..."typos" do not equate to the morass above. Nevermind. Forget I said anything.