When I was having radiation therapy, I was told by my doctor that if I travel, best to declare it, because some airport security is set up to detect radiation, and I could set the alarms off!! :P

It's actually really easy to create your own flag (I'm presently creating a scene with a flag). ..if I can do it, anybody can, within Poser. Basically, take a Poser cylinder primitive, scale to taste, go to the setup room and make it a figure. You can add a simple sphere finial to the end of the flag pole.

Go back to the cloth room, load a hi-res plane primitive, scale to taste and line one edge up to the flag pole. In the vertex editor, create a line of constrained vertices on the edge aligned to the pole. The rest of the vertices add to the dynamic group. You can leave everything default for the dynamic group, except change the fold resistance to 20.

Add a wind force object, adjust to taste, try an amplitude of 15 for a start. Let the dynamics do its thing (60 frames should do)...viola! you have your flag.

I created a texture for the flag in Illustrator and Photoshop, but I'm sure there must be plenty of flag textures on the internet.

Obviously a flag attached to draw rope, connected to a pole, would be more complex, but still possible in Poser, by using different dynamic and constrain groups.

Quote - Solid is white, transparent is black; white is high, black is low to Poser. Vue used to be the opposite. LOL Not sure if it still is, but at least you could reverse it in the program :)

Laurie

Yep, Vue is still the same Laurie lol!

As I said, Digital Lighting & Rendering is the bible for lighting in the digital world...why go to the messenger when you can go to the source. You can be sure that any educator uses that book as their reference also.

I can afirm - If you only ever, ever make one book purchase, make sure it's "Digital Lighting & Rendering". I got mine when it was first released, and the info in there is as relevant today, as it was back then. It is THE Bible of 3D lighting techniques...ANYWHERE!

There is really no need for a "rule of thirds" grid at all on the monitor/infront of the camera/in the scene - as long as you are aware of it, you should be able to divide the viewport by eye, close enough. Why, try to be exacting, when it's not an exacting science.

I actually think people are being miss-guided as far as what Luxrender can do for a charcter, or even architectural/landscape render. Yes it will give you realistic lighting, but that alone wont give you a realistic character. The devil is in the detail - the displacement and colour variation in the skin from pores, muscle tone, veins, wrinkles, blushing etc.

One thing that I find when looking at the majority market place items here or anywhere else (especially skin textures), is that they almost all have that perfectly smooth, unblemished skin, stylized characters with just variations on makeup. Perfection isn't realism...even in Luxrender.

Some venders, have recognized this and are trying to address it, Zev0 here and Syyd over at RDNA spring to mind. For me imperfection, grunge, dirt etc, etc add far more realism, then any render engine.

Oh, I woud also question that the last image in your post is actually bad composition. Even though it's using the rule of thirds, the main characters position  leads the eye to the edge of the image and not into the image.

The rule of thirds is a good rule to keep in mind, but sometimes it just doesn't work for a particular scene. There are various methods to add emphasis to an image...DOF, scale etc. There are also other rules - the "Golden Rule", "Diagonal Rule" - infact some will say that, if you're going to use composition rules, then the rule of thirds is just a step that gets you to the "Golden Ratio" ("Phi").

In other words - don't use the rule of thirds as the be all and end all of composiition, because generally people agree that all the proportions that "Phi" introduces is the most pleasing to the eye (rule of thirds being just one aspect of it).

...and Vue's certified driver list is quite strict, so basically (if I'm not mistaken), if you can't run the software using OpenGL 2.1 (shader 4), then you don't get GPU rendering - you can check it in the render settings, but I believe it doesn't do anything...although there is a good chance I'm wrong :P

Yeh, I have been using a photoshop plugin (a Fred Miranda plugin) for about 10 years that does the same thing. Basically it uses something called "stair" interpolation - they found that with different alogorisms and sharpening applied incrementally, you could retain detail better when enlarging a photo, then you could if you just used (lets say) bicubic once to get to the same size image.

Detail is added to new pixels, by averaging the data in surrounding pixels.

Tis an excellent render, 3dOutlaw! Not much to fault with it at all ;)

I will just say one thing about unbiased renderers, and thats my thought about grain in most unbiased renderers - some people are put off by it, and I can understand why, but my view has always been to treat render engines like people used to treat different camera film types (you remember, the days before digital ;)) - each has it's own characteristic and should be treated as such, and not as a fault.

I really trust my hardware profile and that what I see on the screen is an accurate representation, no matter if it's textures, lighting etc. In image creation, lighting and the tweaking of it takes a great proportion of my time - firstly, you don't won't anything that makes your image look flat. You may find the perfect lighting, then realise a texture doesn't react as it should for some reason (i.e. specular too intense), so tweaking textures is a given.

All my textures are set up to use the gamma setting specified in the Render Settings. Now, with the way I work, the only real issue I have with textures is reflection maps, which I usually have to adjust on a per texture basis...and thats all really.

Yer, I've yet to see transmapped hair look better in anything other than Poser Firefly...even in Vue Infinte it never looks quite as good as in Poser.

Oh I just wanted to add, I have noticed that some older transmapped hair doesn't render correctly when Poser is set to output at a Gamma of 2.2 - something to have in mind if your character looks as if their hair is falling out when you render.

OT, Just noticed it's my 12th anniversary here...oh joy :P