oh, brilliant!  i must try rotating the scene immediately.  i think you're right, i've never yet seen bucket size go back up after it's through with the hair.  i tend to render hair separately in area render to cut down on render time, and composite later in photoshop.

the grouping tool hides among the editing tools -- it's the button with the dotted square enclosing a dot, 4th from the right in default setup.

what defines pornography is that it really is politics?

what defines it for legal purposes, sure, i think so.  beyond that my favourite sarcastic definition is:  Sexually oriented material that is not considered acceptable to the viewer; the same material when judged subjectively acceptable is often referred to as "erotica".  because that's my impression of the majority opinion after decades of listening to these types of discussions.  and those people vote for the politicians who make the law.  heck, we only have the term pornography to discuss today because in the 19th century some people in power decided that sex was bad for the masses, it sapped their precious energy which was needed to make the new industrial society run run run.  anything that distracted from that was dangerous.  and what better way to control people than to control their most primal drives?  i think gore vidal hit the nail on the head when he said "sex is politics".

Phantast, judging by intent doesn't work for me at all -- because first and foremost it requires access to the artist.  that's right out.  unless if we had access to all artists everywhere, and could raise the dead for this purpose, and assure all artists of safety from prosecution, and invented the perfect truth serum that can not only detect lies but also when people fool themselves, and give everyone the power of erudition, we would still require some external validation of that intent.  until then the jury will remain out.

and the US legal code's definition of obscenity fails for me as well because it can't stand on its own -- somebody has to be elevated to over the rest of us judge what's literally, artistically, politically, or scientifically valuable.  and those values change as society changes.  so at best we have a definition that relies on subjective criteria, "community standards", and an "average person". that definition is intrinsically bound to its time, place, and culture (as momodot so aptly pointed out with remarks about that ethnic/religious group).

i don't mind elevating experts to judge when it comes to relatively clearly measurable factors -- the FDA is a good idea (though there too one can easily see how experts might fail when the factors become complex).  i do mind it a lot when it comes to what i may or may not look at, or share with my friends, or do with my own body.  the repression of sexual imagery really bugs me because it vilifies a basic human need.

on a tangent, has anyone else noticed how the word "porn" has been taken over by some people to use in non-sexual contexts, to indicate some form of sensually loaded consumption?  there is a "food porn" community on livejournal, for example, where people talk and share pictures about great meals.

some comments about gif (or rather the LZW compression algorithm, which isn't just used in gifs), and why i don't think the fact that it's still alive is a good yardstick.

gif was released as an open format, and was firmly entrenched by the time unisys made the first noises about enforcing its patent 7 years later.  it seems that nobody who had anything to do with designing gif was even aware that patent existed.  then when unisys said "oh, and by the way, now that the LZW algorithm has become so successful, we want y'all to pay" all hell broke loose (complete with large-scale replacement of gif files by conversions to other formats), and consequently a lot of frantic damage control by unisys could be seen.  

in the end unisys only imposed licensing fees on software that wrote LZW (not on the thusly created files themselves), at a fairly low rate, and exempted software written before 1995, as well as non-commercial and non-profit software.  but they fumbled even that badly by coming out with more restrictive requirements later, and a lot of developers were permanently turned off by the whole rigamarole, and turned towards alternatives.

and that's why we have png today (unofficially that stands for "png not gif" :).  i am pretty sure gif would have completely died if it hadn't been for netscape and microsoft dragging their asses in implementing png in their web browsers. oh, look, microsoft dragging its ass implementing a freely available, open format.  what a surprise that is, n'est-ce pas.

and now?  all but one of the LZW patents have expired, so gif is free and clear to live for as long as people find use for its limited capabilities.  (there's still the IBM patent which will expire in august, but that's another story, and never had any effect.)

microsoft would be completely bananas to unveil a spiffy new format with difficult licensing requirements; lmckenzie is absolutely correct.  but many of us have learned from the gif debacle, and are not gonna embrace another proprietary format easily, no matter how spiffy.   because as unisys showed, the proprietor can pretty much do to you what they want, and once that format becomes an integral part of your operations, you're up the creek without a paddle if they decide to change their mind.  none of us small guys could afford a court battle with microsoft, so it's a lot safer to just stay away.

oh, and for my kneejerk reaction:  the US patent office doesn't know its head from its ass when it comes to what's obvious and what's truly novel in the field of algorithms, and their prior art searches are insufficient.  also, 20 years for a software patent is too damn long; the granting of monopolies does not benefit society.  as a small software developer and as a member of society, i won't support unmitigated greed; it's not good for us.

yes, you remember correctly; targa can also save an alpha channel.

yes, momodot, make my neurons churn!  :)  the cultural aspects of art are very interesting, and you made me think of another example:  we don't just reach back in time, but we also view and acquire items as art that are no such thing in their contemporary culture of origin, where they're instead purely functional items.  i don't know how meaningful that is -- we often completely shift the meaning of the item when we do that.  maybe something becomes art a lot more easily when its original cultural context is removed?

the only people assuming anything here are the ones who blab about things for which they've been too lazy to do the research.  of course pharmaceutical companies are involved in funding at stanford med school -- i can even tell you how much, because i looked into that during merck's attempt to silence criticism of vioxx:  in 2004 $29 million came from drug companies.   that's 9% of its total research budget.  and it's not an unusual amount for med schools of stanford's caliber.

but it is completely irrelevant in this case, since the non-profit group running this program is not going to sell the data.  the data will be freely available to everyone.

i dislike big pharm as much as the next little guy, but i usually reserve my accusations for stuff for which i can show some evidence.  is doing a wee bit of research before dissing a project too much to ask for?  i highly recommend it; it preserves one's bile production for issues that actually deserve it.

from the FAQ:
Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them? Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

gif is 8-bits.

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but if you're gonna do your animation outside of poser anyway, the dynamic hair route is not the way to go, since i believe it doesn't export.

nod.  yes, very good point.  IME most discussions would be more fruitful if they were preceded by a definition of terms.

and wow, i feel sorry for the person who said "i don't get it, it must be art.".  it shows pretty clearly how left out of it many regular people feel, which is too bad.

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if you want to do animation, you're looking at dynamic hair, which has the advantage that you can style it to your own specs.  however, it also comes with a steep learning curve, and long render times.

bobasaur, i don't think anyone is forgetting that, it's just that for some people that's not the most relevant distinguishing factor.  :)  phantast thinks it's the artistic component that makes the difference, while you think it's the subject (its explicitness).  that's one more reason why i believe the distinction between erotica and porn isn't as useful as one might think at first glance, and why people will be arguing about it until the cows come home -- those definitions are along completely different axes, and they're not even the only definitions in existence.

phantast, when i say that art is in the eye of the beholder that isn't a snap judgment, it's a carefully considered one. yes, there is art theory and art criticism -- and have you noticed the immense disagreements within those over the centuries?  the arguments continue to this day:  should art teach us something about reality, should it be an articulate expression of the artist's emotions (ie. should it communicate), should it be harmonious -- and what constitutes harmony, should it be representational, should it be morally uplifting, does its true source lie in the mysterious (like religion), what about technical merit, does intent matter, does it indeed require a human creator at all (if it's carved by wind, can it be art)...

those discussions can be interesting and enlightening, and people who want to talk sensibly about art should know something about those questions.  but outside of that, when it comes to each of us here, and what we appreciate as art, it's personal.  i am decidedly unsure whether we can define art anymore.  it probably was easier before warhol, but i came to it afterwards  :).  there's value in the discussions for me, not in hammering down The Definition.

also, i find borderline conditions inherently more interesting, which is why i focus on them -- that doesn't imply a core doesn't exist (though truly, in this case i doubt whether one single core of art exists), it just says that i think that core gets plenty of attention as it is, and that borderliners get marginalized and invalidated by defendants of the core.  which is pretty much a given as soon as morality gets into the equation.

wow.  that's some "improvement" -- whatever were DAZ thinking there?  thanks for showing the comparison -- the changes i see are not minor, they make the figure undesirable for me.  i had been eyeing the she-freak because, yay, different female figure and one that's not anorexic, but now that i see this, i'll try to find the old one.  that mesh jives overall, this new morph set looks freaky in all the wrong ways.