Interesting insight, geep! I can actually understand and sympathize with the part about faster rendering, but if realism is the goal, then slower rendertimes should be expected. And it seems realism is the goal of most folks in the galleries. I never noticed this when viewing other galleries though, so it seems to be something related to Poser itself. I guess shadows are a tough thing to weild correctly, but if you got the correct lighting, then shadows should come naturally.

Ah yes. Standing on toes is another thing I just don't get. I see a lot of that too.

I thought strand hair was only needed when you wanted to use something like wind or other high dramatic things. If all you're doing is moving the character's head a little bit, why do you even need dynamic hair? Couldn't you get a good prop hair with movement morphs to get a realistic effect for soemthing like that? Plus, with all the rendering time you'd save yourself by not using strand hair, you can make the lighting and skin all the more realistic!! Think about it that way too.

I've only seen softbody stuff work on mesh hair that's modelled into pigtails, ponytails, or braids. Nothing on the level of what dynamic hair does. I've never seen it used in Carrara like this either. IIRC, it was someone using AnimationMaster.

Thanks, Operaguy!

Thanks for the reply! I guess I should have mentioned up front that this is for animation. I don't think the re-use shaddow maps method will work for animated scenes.

Poser 6.

EXCELLENT! Well done and very cool!

I don't know if it's possible either, but what you have done there sure does look cool!

I don't consider myself an animator yet, but the hardest part of trying to learn it in Poser has always been working with the graph editor. I've never had any luck with it. I feel animation should be something more natural than messing around with curves and graphs. On the other hand, I once used Character Studio in 3dsmax 8 demo version, and it seemed a lot more intuitive to me. I was able to get at least some natural looking motion out of the biped without having to fiddle about with the graph curves. It seemed really cool. Unfortunately, I was just teasing myself since I can't afford 3dsmax or Maya anyway, but it was nice to dream. haha. I now have Carrara, and hope to continue learning animation with it. Hopefully, I won't have to go into the motion editor as often as I had in Poser.

"It might be because I don't care much for chidren" LMAO! Ok, that one took me by surprise. hehe. Hopefully you don't have any of your own then! If you do, please give them to someone who cares. LOL :) You have a point though. I always found the dancing baby extremely annoying! After all, it's damn strange... a baby... dancing about like a buffoon! It scared me more than anything. Reminds me of that dream sequence in the movie Trainspotting, where the dead baby was crawling on the ceiling. hehe

The dropfigtofloorAllFrames python script works even if the figure's feet are under the floor, lesbentley.

Why do figures suffer from that "bendy knee" syndrome when they go through the Walk Designer? That's an annoying problem that seems to plague all figures in Poser.

ApolloMaximus is rigged a lot better than any of the Millenium figures I think. It bends much better at the elbow and knees and hips. Anton seems to have a better way of rigging figures in Poser than anyone else has found so far. One of the biggest problems with almost all Poser characters are the shoulders and buttocks. Vicki has some really horrible bending at the hips. Her butt blows up whenever she bends over. Carrara 5 Pro has weight mapping now, and it will convert Poser figures over to a native Carrara bones rig so you can take advantage of it.

LOL! GrantMH, I think you misunderstood me about the particles thing. Poser does NOT have a real particle system. What I was trying to say is that I fell in love with the node-based particle system in 3dsMax 8, which reminded me of Poser 6's material room, since it is also based on nodes, and can be quite powerful for creating procedural textures. Sorry bout that. hehe