I don't see why ? Outpost automatically downloads a patch once a month or so and updates itself. No worries at all.

I use Kaspersky AV, old horse but very solid. Norton used to be one of the best AV for PCs, but recent versions are worse then virii themselves. Also use Outpost firewall, which has an integrated spyware checker and works well.

Oh and Firefox of course, no amount of AV and spy tools will help you if you are still using IE.

Quote - I believe that caustics aren't the main issue - a flat facet will not form them - caustics are created when a curved surface focuses otherwise parallel beams of light onto  a point.

The individual shape of facets don't matter. The overall shape of the surface does. So even if each facet is flat, if they join together to form a curve (like they do in most gems) then you get caustics. The most noticeable effect in gems is the 'inner glow' they show. And this is also why most simple renders it looks like its some sort of plastic, not a gem.

eg in this (real) ruby:

http://texasvc.weblogswork.com/wp-content/images/ruby.jpg

Notice how the gem actually seems to be emitting light, and not just reflecting it. Compare this to the render you posted and tell me if it is even close ?

Attached Link: http://www.google.com/tisp/

Caustics are those patterns that light makes as it bunches up from reflections and refractions. The most typical example is when you use a magnifying glass in sunlight to focus the light in a small hot area. Or the curved sliver of light you see reflected from things like metal rings. Light patterns seen at the bottom of a pool of water is another example.

To get them in 3D, you need a renderer that simulates those rays in the form of light photons. Poser (AFAIK) doesn't as yet have this feature so you cant really get the look of diamonds exactly. Most you can do is get a render with nice refractions and reflections and then paint the caustics in photoshop.

"300 dpi gives you a higher quality render then 72 dpi"

The dpi question gets discussed every few weeks, and there's always someone giving out wrong info about it. The fact is unless you are working in real world units like inches, the dpi makes absolutely no difference to anything. It's just a tag stored in some image formats for printing purposes.

Renderers only deal with pixels, and the pixel resolution are the only numbers that matter. A 512 x 512 pixel render at 300 dpi has much less quality then a 2048 x 2048 render at 72 dpi. And a 2048 x 2048 render at 300 dpi has the exact same quality as the 72 dpi one.

Quote - So i think this plan i have is great. So here's my question. Should i vary the time that each frame stays on the screen AND to make it more like a continous animation...Should i make one image at the just the main points of the story or could i do some variations. like if there's a fight, a coupld of fast changing( 4 seconds each) pictures of the fight.

This kinda depends on what you are actually making. ie are you doing an animation that happens to be told with still frames, or are you doing a comic with special effects. If you are doing a comic, then the timing doesnt matter much IMO, just make sure each page stays long enough for the reader to take everything in (or better yet add a button to flip the page)

If you are going for an animation, then that is a whole different ball game. The key here is to use smart camera moves to cover for the 'missing frames'. ie say you want to make a character walk from his bed to the window. You would start with a keyframe of him at the bed (and secondary keyframes for yawning, getting up and so on) and then do a cut to the keyframe of him standing at the window. And you time the various frames according to how much time it would take in real life. Like go lie down on a bed and time yourself getting up. Use a stopwatch if necessary. That is the timing you want in the anim. You can also fill in gaps with 2D pans and zooms that dont need to be rendered out.

If you do it well enough, the viewer's imagination will fill in all the rest. Many low budget TV toons and anime use this limited motion technique and it works very well. In fact i would say go rent a few anime shows and watch them for reference. These guys put out 20-30 mins of entertaining animation on a shoestring budget.  You can learn a lot of tricks by studying them.

Anyways best of luck and keep us posted :)

Just to point out the obvious, Poser (any version) does not have Vista on its list of supported OS, so it really shouldn't be any surprise if it doesn't work. I'm amazed so many people keep trying it on Vista expecting otherwise.

Quote - I hadn't noticed that before, tekmonk, and I'm not clear why it should be. You can see that the seam is a light area on the bump map, so it should appear to be sticking out, as the side seam does.

Its because for the texture map, you have created one side of the texture then mirrored it for the other side, then copied one of the seams on the middle. This works fine for textures, cause textures don't affect lighting of a material. But bumps are different. When you flip/mirror a bump map, you are also mirroring the direction of light that created that bump. So when you render a bump map that has this sort of conflicting light in it, the odd parts will look reversed from the rest of the image.

Its easy enough to fix, but not if you only rely on the texture map.

Yes and it shows exactly the problem with doing bump maps from desat color maps. If you look at the seam in the center of the back of the skirt, you will find that it is actually reversed from what it should be. ie the bump map has gotten its dips and bumps flipped.

No offense to anyone, but this is a quite common problem and i wish more merchants would actually take the time to learn to do proper bumps. Too many times i get bumps like this that i have to go in and manually correct which is not something desirable on a deadline.

Well i'm not saying its hard, and it is way easier then with a mouse. But it feels very different then drawing on paper. For one, when you draw on paper, you can always see your hand/pencil and see where its going with the line. With a tablet, your eyes are always on the screen, while your hand is moving on the tablet. So you can only sort of guess where your hand will go next. And secondly, the size of the tablet is usually not the same as the size of the monitor. So the stroke you make on the tablet is not the same size as the one you see on screen. These things throw off your visual sense and like JQP said, its more like drawing by feel.

Some people can manage with this and some cant. Only way to know is to try it yourself and see.

Quote - I'd agree with this except, what's the alternative.  You have to learn to draw by feel with a tablet, and that's not easy, but in any case it's far better than a mouse and I know of nothing better.

The Cintiqs are the alternative, but given their price not a solution for everyone. Hopefully they will become cheaper in the future, cause they are a dream to use over a normal tablet.

Dont worry, the difference between a graphire and an intuos isnt that extreme. The biggest difference is in how the 2 respond to a light touch. But that isn't something you need to worry about too much for something like hair. The graphire is an excellent tablet otherwise, i used one for years before getting an intuos.

Plus if this is your first tablet then you definitely want the cheapest one you can get (wacom of course) cause the fact is not everyone is able to adapt to using a tablet. It requires a certain sort of hand-eye approach to drawing that some artists find very hard to master. Best to try with a cheaper model first (or even a borrowed one if you can) You can always save for the better models if you need to.

As you can see its a real beast to work with, so its not like a push button, get cool skin thing at all. You have to create hand painted maps for a lot of these settings to get those kind of results

The problem is that those portrait renders are all using fastskin, mentalray's amazing skin shader. It's real hard to get that kind of results without it, even in other high end renderers.

Poser doesn't even have a real SSS node, so i don't think you should expect too much here. Even in the otherwise great images posted by people, note that areas of the skin where SSS is very prominent, like the ears or the nose look very plastic and waxy in the poser renders. HDRI alone just wont cut it, maybe when poser 8 or 9 gets SSS then we can do more.

I use XSI for much the same reason... it renders so much faster then poser its not even a choice. In fact I cant afford not to render in it or i would lose all my clients that want their stuff finished yesterday LOL.

About the rigging, MAX and XSI don't (AFAIK) have one click solutions to rigging, but they do make it a lot easier then something like the setup room. In XSI eg i have a low rez mesh rigged to a skeleton that i have tuned to my needs. And i just morph the char i need in poser, export as OBJ and import into XSI. I can then quickly transfer the rigging from the low rez fig to the poser one and with a little tweaking it works quite well. I don't need the morphs to be animatable in XSI cause i mainly do stills but a friend of mine uses a similar approach to transfer those as well. Basically he has the major face morphs already applied on a low rez head in XSI (various expressions, phonemes etc) and he transfers them to other figure heads as and when needed.

Though i haven't used MAX, it probably has similar tools as well.