One phrase: Price elasticity of demand. There are only two factors that affect profit in a marketplace. The price elasticity of demand is one and the unit cost is the other. Clearly with Poser products, the unit cost is low (and can probably be approximated in some cases by zero). And that tends to amplify some problems with the standard formula, as the PED may actually vary a bit with price, possibly not even linearly. So, if a 10% drop in the price does not increase sales by at least 10%, then you're going in the wrong direction for most Poser items. But you may find that a 20% increase does result in a more than 20% decrease in sales. You're working blind on a curve you can't see, and the only way to get data points is to experiment with pricing a bit. And the resulsts can vary, depending on promotion and other things that actually affect PED. If your item is the only one of its kind, you will be able to sell it for more than some item that there are 40 or 50 of in the marketplace. Presentation can matter, too. Selling two items at half price might not bring in as many sales as a one-cent sale (buy one get the other for a penny). And, for what it's worth, I use a lot of freebies, make props and morph my own characters, but will pay for good character meshes like Dina. My wishlist right now is topped by Vicky 3 and will stay that way until I can afford her and a bunch of morphs for her.

It's my opinion that P5 is written with its internal priorities all skewed. Proper programming protocol puts hardware events at the top of the priority food chain. Poser really doesn't have any of these to deal with, as the OS looks after the disks, etc. The next thing should be the keyboard and mouse. Then should come the screen updates. Renders and draping should be at the very bottom, given the remaining cycles after all these other tasks are taken care of. Someone at CL seems to think this would hamper performance, but it won't. High priority tasks should be things that happen rarely. Things that take a long time should be at the bottom of the chain. At least that's what I've been trying to tell them. Right now, if you start a hair drape with collisions on in P5, then go run an email client for a while and come back to P5, the screen will not update and it will look like P5 is gibbled. It probably isn't, but it will look that way. In note I got today from tech support, they claimed that you shouldn't multitask with P5. That's code for they are still not willing to change the priorities....despite having been told about it several times now. But the program does work. It's just clunky. I'm getting beautiful results now that SR3 has fixed the hair collision problm. But I have to wait hours for them on this PIII-550. And Firefly is a real memory pig, but what renderer is not? This is especially true with dynamic hair in a picture. The answer is more RAM. As much as you can put in the machine!

Long hair, of course, will continue to move after a character stops. It's best to give it a few animation frames in which to do so, if you're making a clip. This is because, in real life, hair is affected by air resistance and its own inertia. Are you saying it keeps moving forever? I only do stills usually, so it's not that big an issue....

SimonWM That's just my point. The program is not handling priorities right and it tends to lock out the mouse and screen updates (basically the whole UI thing) when those should be at the TOP of the program's internal priorities and background things like rendering and draping should be on the bottom of it. The priorities have been assigned upside down. And there's no cure for it short of going into the source code, setting them properly and recompiling it. You guys at CL hearing this?

Are people reporting lockups experiencing actual lockups or is the program just so busy that it won't permit its own screen updates. I mentioned this back during the SR2 beta. Essentially tasks like rendering, hair draping, cloth draping, etc. are locking out the housekeeping tasks like screen updates. And the program still is and always will be a memory pig. That means it's very easy to get into a condition where your machine is swapping heavily. At that point your 2.2ghz machine is not much better than my 450Mhz machine because the throughput is governed by the disk controllers. The trick is to relearn some of the tricks we all knew when running P3 and P4 an smaller machines. Build a scene in layers and paste the layers to the background. This is even easy to do with animations now that a movie can be used for background in P5. But don't be too hasty to call the program "locked up" when it's using 100% CPU resources and has 100Mb or more free RAM. It's probably just working (as mine is right now draping hair in the background). So far the hair collision problem looks fixed. At least the first two drapes I did came out fine, without the "hairdo from hell" syndrome. Now I'm working on the last part of her hair and we'll see how that goes as it's draped over the shoulders and there is another figure involved. Should be interesting.... Even if the program says "not responding" in the Task Manager, that's not necessarily a lockup. Best way to test is put the program's window up front and wait about an hour. If it starts to update, then the program is actually still processing in there!

Check the properties for your lights. You need to turn shadows on. Mapped shadows take longer to render, but can have fuzzy edges. Raytraced shadows are quicker (but you need raytracing on for those) and tend to have sharp edges.

In P4 you probably can't. In P5, convert the clothes you want to pile into obj objects or props then import them as props, clothify them in the cloth room over where you want to drop them and set the cloth/cloth collisions on and collide with the ground and the other stuff already on your pile. It will work on most things, though the odd piece of clothing is not open at the ends, in which case you might have to fiddle with the grouping tool before exporting as an obj or prop. Use about 30 drape frames (you needn't have more than 1 frame in the actual pic). Make sure you untick drape from zero pose for this, it only wastes time and will screw you up if there is anything that's a figure that you're colliding with. I've done some this way and they turned out quite believable.

Don't be confused by the whited-out previews. The preview renderer cannot show raytraced reflections. Do the actual render to check them.

Sure you must OBEY US laws. But the day they make a law saying you can't protest a bad law, there is no more US. The constitution will be scrap on that day.... Anyway...this is all off topic unless there is some case specifically dealing with poser meshes that we possess and use.

Yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so it's time to attack all instances of handbaskets. It's national hysteria time! This is the REAL problem. The average American's (and Canadian's) ability to think logically has been sapped by a steady diet of TV sound bytes and ridiculous commercials. It started back at the beginning of the drug war when we were told that some large percentage of heroin addicts had a history of marijuana use. Nobody bothered to mention that 100% of them had a history of drinking soda pop!

You might try going back to a box filter for the hair shadows. Are you using ray-traced shadows on your lights? Try using mapped shadows. They can be blurred to your taste (though they will increase render time and memory).

Most of the fairy stuff is just cute fantasy and has minimal sexual connotation anyway. Showing them naked might be a bit prurient and obviously showing them copulating is arguably pornographic. But I get the impression that these people want to ban possession of the meshes themselves! Make no mistake, the worst of them want your Eve4 and Victoria 3 meshes erased from your computer! We had a case here in Canada a while back where drawings or other digital pictures were confiscated and the Supreme Court threw it out because no children were abused anywhere in the creation of the material. But some of the laws that the moronic morals policers want to pass are just ludicrous--even to the point of banning a writer from writing about things it is legal for him to DO!! I hate real child porn with a passion and the people who make it should be taken down hard because they are abusing children to make their stuff. But sculptures and paintings (which is what Poser art is really) should be exempt, since the only source is the artist's imagination.

Brycetech has a good tutorial for texturing P4/P5 characters in Bryce on the Brycetech website.

One thing you might try (I had a file that made my entire work area vanish like yours) is to save a UI dot of a working window. Then try to load your file and reset the UI with the dot. This may not help, but it got me out of a jam last week.

I wonder if they had enough of a sales increase dropping from $25k to $12k to even make an estimate of the price elasticity of demand. Clearly their executives are ignorant of the fact that profits depend entirely on that and unit cost. The fact that you spent a gazillion dollars developing the product is irrelevant. You ain't gettin' any of it back if you don't sell any! I went through this with an associate who was marketing a Pascal compiler I had some input on back in the days of CP/M and Z80 computers. He insisted that $350 was the right price. Some guy named Phil came along with an upstart company called Borland and offered one nearly as good for $50. It's interesting. Practically the only software company that actually seems to pay attention to these marketing factors is Microsoft! You'd think by now some others would get the general idea. I use displacement maps all the time. Much more realistic than bump mapping (though both have their places). I've been using the Brycetech bump maps with some success and use the built-in fractal noise for home-brew skins. Another thing is that textures can now be layered and combined using color math. It's easy as pie to stick a tatoo on a model (or any other kind of mark, such as dirt smears, blood, etc.).