Did you try it with out the texture/transparency maps? I often get files that crash on the way in, but they make it if I just tell it cancel when it asks wher the maps are. Only had to do that once since I put the Poser patch on, though.

I think you should be able to do this, but it might be buggy- I think if you are using other programs that share Photoshop plugins (like Fractal Paint) the best way is to install them in the PhotoShop plugin folder, then point the other program to it. I've set up the schools Mac's that way, and Painter & PS share Kia Power Tools happily. Incidently, I don't think Macs, most of them anyway, can have faster Hard drives, all the older Macs are fast (narrow) SCSI for the most part, newer ones are DMA 33 (I think) IDE, if you put a faster drive you are still limited by the controller.

Cage- The only problem I've seen is the knee breakup I reported, it only effects legs if you open figures that have been scaled in length, and you can work around it. Other than that is is a big improvement, especially if you export object files. It does make it 1000% easier to use Poser with Bryce.

Phil- Real nice! Like that shade of blue against the gold trim, too! I fouund a picture from the Susie Wong movie, I used it when I was working on mine, it is longer than Bongo remembers, to just below the knee. There is also a full-length version, and a mini, of course, only the mini would ever be doable without the slit, I guess, as they are supposed to be pretty tight, and they do have to walk in 'em.

Thanks gals & guys!- The shoes are going to be combined with the negligee, as a package, along with the G-string. I don't know if anybody as done a proper G-string, one that wasn't a morph or trans map of the bikini bottom, so I did one. I'm using 3DS now, and I worked out a system to get a good fit on the straps, which are almost the hardest part. The skirt of the negligee is a straight 50% transparency, I realized early-on the only way to duplicate the varied transparency you get in a real sheer garment on the folds was to have folds, as transparency as it's implimented in 3D programs (for the most part)is an edge effect, not a volume effect.

What most guys are doing is using the Wavefront Obj importer & exporter from Habaware- OBJtoMAX, it's free, lets see if I can find the link- http://www.habware.at/duck2.htm Its not faultless, but it works pretty good. I think the Poser fix concentrated on geting the Obj export fixed first.

Real, real nice! About the best looking underwater I've seen- I got to keep playing around to get this kind of look. I assume you actually moved everything below the water plane?

Adobe's stuff is pretty solid, anyway, that is to say it doesn't crash very much. I also find Bryce 4 pretty solid, Poser 4 fairly buggy and RDS 5 increadably buggy (what, me buy Carrara after this?). I guess all in all, Adobe picking up Metacreations products would be an improvement. Getting back to Photoshop, as much as I like it, I find it sort of unbelivable that when I'm working woth paths over a B & W texture map template I have to put a partly transparent white layer in so I can see the paths- I used to use a paint program 10 years ago (ColoRix) that was smart enough to always change the color of the cursor so you could see it against the background, why doesn't Photoshop do that?

Anthony- I assume the mask is a conforming figure? Have you played with the Joint Editor yet? You could play around in the Joint Editor and adjust the scaling axis perhaps, and turn on fall-of zones if they arent already on, and then spend hours adjusting them right!

I had some trouble with the hair too- first time it was fine, after that it got sort of weird, it was sort of attaching itself to any figure I had with an open .rsr file, and the figure would open up with the hair maps, or something. What I finally did was save it as a new figure, after that it was fine, Nobody else seems to have run into this problem, though.

Diane- Super nice image! Ah, but should't the butterflies be bigger? Or maybe they are fairy butterflies .

If you have never done it, I suggest you pick a nice sharp ray-traced render and compress it in various JPEG compressions, then reopen the images and also compare file sizes. JPEG does amazingly well, it mostly suffers in hard edges, there are little artifaces around them- but most texture maps aren't all that critical on edges, anyway. I often use 1500 x 1500 texture maps, that would over 6 Mb raw filesize, probaly about 2-3 Mb as a Zipped tif, who is going to set through downloading that on a modem? A high quality JPEG will be only about 300K. One thing to remember though, don't use JPEG internally, just for sharinging files. If you keep reopening, modifing and resaving the file in JPEG the degradation keeps adding up. Incidently, I've never seen any modern program on the PC or Mac that had trouble with TIF, there is a option for Mac or PC byte ordere in Photoshop (has to do with LSB first), but there is also a flag in the file for the byte order, so it shouldn't make any difference what you pick.

Arcady- JPEGs offer by far the most compression, but they are also what is called a lossy (not lousey) format- there is some degrading of the image. Most other formats offer optional LZW compression, the same type used in a ZIP file, which will typically only compress a photo about 25 to 40% (but does a lot better on areas of solid color). Compressed BMPs are very rare (but it is in the spec), other than that it is a toss up, a LZW compresssed TIF is about the same size a compressed Photoshop file or whatever. I use Photoshop format on most all the stuff on my computer, but I have 24 GB of disk space, I put the textute maps of the file I put on the web as JPEGs. There is also the new PNG format, but I haven't used it, some have said it is non-lossy and compresses better than LZW, I don't know that for sure.

Buck- Actually, I didn't know they were yours, but I did use your fins and mask and snorkel in the Mermaid render I pointed you to from the Bryce forum, nice work! All I added was a strap for the mask. I'll post the final version in the CG gallery, with proper credit, of course!

geep- I think I saved them as Photoshop files, then I actually used every other one. I converted them to GIFs in Photoshop 5, using the same color map (Gee, I remember maps well, when I used to paint in 256 colors the first step was making up the color map- if it wasn't in the map you couldn't use it!) I had a lot of trouble with the guy in Viceraid, I think the Poser map for him is ment to be used with colored lights, it is really pale. I think all the Poser 2 (and maybe 3) figures were like that. Anyway, I aught to mention when I was helping the guys in the old Pics forum on Compserve hammer out the GIF89a spec, the thought was that GIF couldn't be used for animation, but even back then, when I saw the provision for a timing element in the multiple image control block, I just couldn'ty help myself..... (brings back old memories!)