What about some of the other characters that I've heard of but don't have or use? Like David and The Guy. I've heard of them but don't have them. Are they also morphs from the same mesh as M4?

Thanks! I didn't realize that. You know, that clears up a lot of questions that I had about the different figures and the characters that are based on them.

Thanks so very much!

Thanks so much, ECLark1894. That's exactly what I was looking for. I need it because I want to do a poolside scene from the backyard and will have to buy the rooms (and the roof) that I don't have yet so that the house will be visible in the background of the scene.

THANKS! Now I know which rooms to get.
Dkal 

FightingWolf,

My hope is that your e-book will cover methods for lighting multiple figures inside of complex interiors.

I'm trying to light a wide view of an interior of a horse barn with a milhorse in the near stall, lo-res horses in other stalls, a couple of people, a couple of barnyard animals and a few other props.

Because of all of the horse stalls and rafters inside of the horse barn, and because of the number of figures, I'm finding that this is an extremely difficult shot for me to light realistically.

Simple 3-point "photo studio" lighting isn't that difficult to figure out but "realistic" real-world lighting, in general, is the toughest part of Poser for me...especially in wide interior views where both the figure(s) and the interior need very different lighting considerations. 

Thanks, and good luck to you, FightingWolf!

Dkal 

Excellent topic and great insights! Thanks to all who are contributing their real-world experiences. Hope that this thread just keeps on growing!

Dkal

Thanks, all.

Yeah, cspear. I just downloaded Harry for the third time and now seem to have all of the textures. The installation "seemed" to finish up okay but gave me a weird error message. Said something about "parsing" and to "try single-quoting" it. This was obviously an error message meant for the programmer who put together the installer, not for me.

Any way, I've waited 4 days now for DAZ to give me the solution. I'm glad that I finally have him though. Harry is a wonderful character because he's so "real" meaning he looks like just an average kind of guy, not some kind of athlete or super-model.

Love the worker's tans, don't you?

:-)

Thanks, Acadia!

What a cool site and one I never heard of before. I speak and read just a little Japanese but I have a friend who is fluent in Japanese and will help to guide me through that site.

Also great suggestions from benney, mattymanx, mrsparky, flyrerx and Tucan-tiki. I'm been checking them all out too.

Tucan-tiki ... still checking on that converter that you mentioned. Searched but didn't find it yet. Do you have a direct link maybe?

Thanks all!
Dkal 

Parts of your response was very helpful to me too, hborre. Thanks!

I bought the very first version of Poser many, many years ago and upgraded probably to version 3 or 4 before losing interest because it was far too buggy and unstable and kept crashing. I hadn't really learned that much about using Poser back then. Was just playing with it and not serious. So now I'm back. Bought Poser 2010 which seems about 99% stable (on the Mac) but does obviously have a few bugs which I've learned to work around.

Any way, WCSALLY, I'm determined to fully learn Poser this time. There are plenty of free tutorials that can be found by doing a Google search. However, there is one very thorough and excellent set of video tutorials that I'm going to highly recommend to you. It's not inexpensive but I guarantee that it is very, very good. It's distributed by a company called Infinite Skills. Here's a link...

http://www.infiniteskills.com/training/learning-poser8-poser-pro-2010.html

There's also these tutorials for sale by a company called VTC...
http://www.vtc.com/products/Poser-8-Tutorials.htm

And there is another set of tutorials that are half the price of VTC's and Infinite Skills tutorials but they don't really appear to go into too much detail. Might be good as a basic introduction. They're by PhotoshopCafe and the running time is 2.5 hours (23 lessons). The running time of VTC's tutorials is 7.5 hours (117 lessons) and Infinite Skills tutorials run even 5.5 hours longer at 13 hours (240 lessons).

Here's a link to PhotoshopCafe's tutorials... 
http://www.photoshopcafe.com/video/products/poser8Intro.htm

All three products are downloadable or you can purchase them on disc. I didn't buy the VTC or PhotoshopCafe tutorials. I bought the Infinite Skills tutorials and so I can only really vouch for them and the Infinite Skills set of tutorials is excellent!

Good luck!
Dkal 

Oh! I see. Thanks msg24_7.

I thought it might be something like that but didn't know what the process name would be. I think in Windows even the main application process is running in 64-bit. If so, then it's different on the Mac I guess.

Any thoughts on the way I've got the Render Process preferences set up? Not sure what the best settings would be because I'm not really sure what the render "threads" are, or what "separate process" means. Another Mac person who's running a dual-core MacPro said he set them up with "8" threads and to check "Separate Process."

Thanks again.
Dkal 

Quote - A pose file would be a nice help

Check out CauriBlackthorne's message a couple of messages back. Cauri has one in her freestuff and it works like magic.

:-)

Thanks very much, markschum. A couple of messages earlier, I was kindly directed to the member's website to download a freebie MAT that automatically accomplishes the task very nicely. But thanks for letting me know the name of the file and the tip about the free gens which I've downloaded even though I do have the M4 gens.

Initially my question wasn't really about getting the full nude texture in order to use the gens. I just thought it was weird that it seemed impossible to show any skin in the boxer shorts area to be able to use, for example, a pair of Speedos on Mike. I don't remember seeing anything in the M4 documentation saying how to find and use the full body texture.

Thank heavens for the good people here on Renderosity or I'd probably never know. Asked in the Platinum forum on DAZ and didn't get this much great help!

Any way, even ranting. Thank you very much.

Oh my!!! That's exactly what was needed CauriBlackthorne!!! Thank you SOOO much.

I owe you dinner, or at least a cup of coffee. :-)

You're the greatest!

Dkal

In any event, it seems kind of foolish for DAZ to have given us the basic M4 wearing boxer shorts. Should have been briefs IMHO.

:-)

Thanks, hborre and Bejaymac.

I looked for a full body texture in the mat room but couldn't find it. Have any idea what the name is?

I might not mind it being low res or even not matching exactly if it was only used when Mike is far from the camera, like wearing Speedos and standing in the distance on the beach. That kind of thing. Wouldn't be something I'd use very often.

Wow, that seems like an extremely useful tip, Keith. I'm going to try that!

Are you manually deleting all of the unused morphs by editing them or? Just wondering because this was mentioned earlier and I've never tried doing that yet.

Thanks,
Dkal