yes, wouldn't it be sweet. Take to heart that CL stated recently that they are working on dynamic, strand-based hair in the Poser 5 product. Hair you see in movies these days is a completely different technique than the hair used in the current Poser. FF and Monster's Inc, etc, all use particle based hair systems...like the Sasquatch plug-in for Lightwave. These hair models are typically not 'hand animated' but rely on physics to drive the realistic animation of the hair pieces.

Oddly enough I'm currently developing a graphically pleasing version of Solitaire to run on the Pocket PC. It's about to undergo its initial beta testing phase. Anyhow, I bring it up because I did consider using Poser images as a source for artwork on the cards and the background screen. I did not envision doing any animation, however, since storage is an issue on machines with limited resources. p.s. On a side note, if anyone has access to a Pocket PC device and would like participate in my beta testing, please contact me.

This has been brought up many times (by me too!) and it's something we gotta live with for now. Curious Labs obviously went for the cool GUI look, and pulled it off, but once you start to use it a lot, the fanciness hinders the usability. Frankly, I'd LOVE to see CL rethink the whole interface, and use more Windows' common, faster, and easier to read GUI element. There is so much that could be done in Poser, and hats off to CL for their great work.. I only wish someone would dump tons of money into the company to let the team make all the great enhancements we all want. If I were rich, I'd donate to em! Unfortunately for us all..I'm not rich :)

I agree with Eric -- if you can afford the $60, then Vicky 2 is well worth it. Depending on what you use Poser for, you may find Vicky 2 to be far more realistic and enjoyable to work with. Ron had a good suggestion with the upgrade...but if you're only ever going to get one -- then get Vicky 2 if at all possible -- she is a GREAT model!

I have one suggestion.. put a floor in the picture cuz they appear to be magically levitating. But as hot as those figures are perhaps its possible! :)

I've done this work extensively. Please check out the gallery and search for my work to see examples of stuff I've done. If this is the type of compositing you mean, then I can give you tons of pointers I've learned over the years. In short order tho, yes, you can import a background photo into Poser via the File menuImport. Also, you will likely want to touch it up a bit and do other fancy stuff in an editor like Photoshop. I 'highly' recommend you save the resulting images in a format with an alpha channel so you isolate the rendered section of the image from the photo background. Note, be careful here because there is a bug in Poser they never fixed that results in corrupted alpha channels for various images. I know how to fix this but won't go into it unless you wanna know. Have fun. -Jeff

If particle-based hair (a la Sasquach) is somehow integrated into Poser 5 I will have a total nerdasm! (that's a nerd inspired orgasm) haha

It depends if you are going for realism or artistry (or both) in your clothing. Doing realistic clothes is a mix of natural artistic ability and practice, practice, practice. I think your image is very good tho..not terribly realistic, but quite convincing as clothing. Don't forget that clothing casts shadows on the body, so make sure you add shadows to characters body where appropriate (you can mask out clothing layer and apply the shadow in a lower layer).

I just don't get it...what's the deal with Dina. To me, Vicky 2 looks to be a far more realistic model and has a very large selection of morphs. If a new model came out that would allow better joint handling (e.g., so you could actually bend the model realistically in a full range of motion) then I could understand. But, not trying to be a nay-sayer, but Dina seems a step back at least in terms of realism of the model. Maybe its me..someone tell me what advantages Dina has, cus it's certainly not apparent from any of the renders I've seen.

Thanks for all the replies... I will check out the products mentioned :)

Jackson, you are entirely right here. It blows my mind that this has not been addressed in a Poser patch or included in a previous release. There is so much constant interaction with the dials, yet they are VERY hard to see. I've adjusted my colors, have a large 19" monitory, cranked up the gamma, contrast, etc, but it still aggravates the hell out of me. A SOLID background would be highly desirable and brighter, sans serif font would do here. Curious Labs often reads this group and asks for suggestions for Poser 5. I can only hope that this relatively simple enhancement is made. Frankly, I'd be much happier if they scrapped the whole fancy GUI and just use standards Windows look-and-feel. The fancy GUI was cool, especially as a programmer I admired their per-pixel transparency for the GUI elements, but it is not very user friendly in the end. Had to get that off my mind after all these years! :)

One suggestion, blood does not feather out at all, but is antialiased of course. Your blood color looks good; just make it very shiny, dark, and unfeathered.

You mean there were people here doing art 'without' a Wacom tablet! :) Seriously, tho, Wacom products are awesome and if you can afford it, no digital artist should be without one.

Painting anything, clothing or not, is an artistic endevour. Mere technical advice will only yield so-so results. However, in my experience, one technical tidbit that is critical is to shadow the clothing appropriately on the figure. I've seen drawn clothes with no shadowing and it always falls flat (both literally and figuratively) :)

She should use a different shampoo!! Yikes! :)