Attached Link: http://www.briangreen.org/movies/

I just got the Mil Girls a week or two ago. It's true that they're not nearly as well supplied as Vicky or Mike, but some nice stuff is out there--try PoserFashion.net for some good free dresses. There were also a number of Japanese artists who offering excellent free clothes (overalls, shirts, school uniforms, leotards) for both girls during Yamato's TenTen Fair. PoserStyle is starting to support them, too--there was a PT conversion pack for the PoserStyle Vicki archer, and now there are Character Construction Sets for both and an Expression Construction Set for the Preschooler. Koshini looks fun too, but I'm not sure my student loans will let me go there.... :) Anyway, don't lose hope!

Fortunately, her head scales up very smoothly.

Victoria 3?

What's the file size of your movie once you squeeze all the still images back into frames? Sometimes hi-res stuff can really bog down your video player. If you compress the finished video (Sorenson 3 and MPEG-4 are some of the best codecs for balancing quality and file size), that might help. Saving without using keyframes sometimes makes playback smoother, too.

We just have to wait and see, I guess. I've been checking their site too, but it's still on the V3 contest. The contest isn't supposed to end for a couple of months, I think, so we have plenty of time to prepare, no? But some instructions would be nice.

Okay... now the vouchers are covering the DAZ Original items I wanted to buy from the Platinum Club, but they still aren't being applied to the brokered PC products. And it used to be that all PC items, DAZ Original or otherwise, could be bought with vouchers. Is that going to be fixed too?

I'd like to ditto what jkm said--the new Platinum Club financing system seems good in some ways, but it's really a shame we can't use vouchers on Platinum Club items anymore. After getting that $30 voucher for upgrading Mimic, I was looking forward to loading up on Platinum Club items, but now I'll have to restrict it to some other DAZ item and buy less in the Platinum Club. Membership is still nice because PC items are only $1.99, and the discounts work well for big-ticket items like Mimic 2 and Victoria 3, but since most of my purchases are in the Platinum Club, it would be nice to be able to use the vouchers on them, too.

rbtwhiz, May we construe that "(right now)" as a hint that DAZ|Studio will be able to create injection poses directly? :) greenbd

Another thing to remember about V3 is that she comes with a morphless version that will result in .pz3 file sizes of less than 1MB if it's just her in the scene. Makes it very fast to work with and pose her, and then you can just swap in the version that includes the morph channels, inject and dial up the morphs you want (especially easy if you get DAZ's Injection Pose Builder), and render. That base version is great for animating body movements before you add facial expressions.

I'm using Mimic 2 Pro in Mac OS X 10.2.6 (and QuickTime 6.2) on a PowerBook G4/400MHz with 1024MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive, and although Mimic's potential is great, it seems to be the buggiest program I've ever used. It will frequently freeze up, causing the whole Mimic window to go white and stay that way even if I quit and restart Mimic. Although it doesn't freeze the system, I have to restart my computer to get Mimic 2 to work again. I've only been able to save Mimic scenes and config files a couple of times, because it frequently locks up at all stages of a project--I've had crashes in the session manager, when adding expressions and phonemes, and while attempting to save and export files. It has problems importing certain .cr2s, such as a Victoria 2 (which works fine in Poser) that I stripped of most body morphs. Also, the audio graph doesn't show up when I'm working on a file, and even with OpenGL, the preview is slower than real time, so I have to export the pose and render a movie in Poser to get real-time feedback. If I then re-import that movie in Mimic 2 and attempt to play it back, it goes just as slowly and jerkily as the "real-time" OpenGL preview, so I have to view it separately in QuickTime. And sfrench, I agree with you about the windows-in-windows design being a poor choice. The windows are conveniently resizable and movable (the interface feels a lot like Apple's Final Cut video-editing software, actually) but the menus really ought to be in the Mac menu bar rather than a separate menu bar within the Mimic window. It feels as if the program is running in a Windows emulator, rather than being a truly Mac-native program. Having Photoshop-style tear-off windows so you could separate the expressions and phonemes palettes would be nice, too. All that said, I still think DAZ is a great company with stellar customer service and otherwise excellent products. From the limited use I have gotten out of Mimic 2, it's clear that it will be a wonderful asset once the bugs are resolved, and given DAZ's responsiveness to customer feedback, I am confident that the bugs will be resolved. I just wish that DAZ had issued Mimic 2 as a public beta, as it's planning to do with DAZ|Studio, so that the bugs could have been fixed before we paid for the program. I wrote to DAZ about these problems on Saturday, and I hope to hear back from them today. Maybe there will be a Mimic 2.1 in the near future. :)

Attached Link: http://www.daz3d.com/products/michael.php

I've averaged about $43 per month from DAZ since I bought Victoria in November 2001, but that includes special purchases such as Platinum Club membership and Mimic. Usually I spend $25-$30 a month at DAZ and none elsewhere, though I have bought one texture set and the magazine subscription from Renderosity. There's also my PoserStyle membership of roughly $60 per year, and the cost of Poser itself. To LaurieA: PoserStyle has its first V3 product out now, but it's pretty skimpy. I don't know if I'd consider it to be "supporting" V3 just yet.

Home render farms... very nice idea. It's possible with Windows NT (and OS X and other Unix platforms) when you're running Maya and other high-end 3D software. And some high-end PowerMacs are dual-processor. I would expect adding more processors within a single computer to be handy, but software would have to be written to make good use of them, and consumers would have to be willing to pay more.

Attached Link: http://www.apple.com/powerbook/superdrive.html