Yes, thats also how I made the Candycane prop in the freestuff, but using Cinema4D rather than Max. It started as a cylinder, with a nice, flat texture map to paint the stripes on. Once the UV coordinates were nailed down, I bent the cylinder around a spline into the candycane shape. It works very well. Unfortunately I don't know what other 3D packages can do it.

Wow, its done. It looks amazingly cool, and I placed my order as soon as I saw this posting. I'm not sure I can even imagine the amount of work required to pull this off, it boggles the imagination.

Their web site does not appear to be down anymore. http://www.maxon-computer.com/ C4D XL6 costs US $2195.00, though a competetive upgrade is available for $1295 for owners of Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, 3DS Max, Electricimage, Strata, Raydream, Infini-D, Carrera, and Pixel3D. There is also a cheaper package available, Cinema4D GO, for US $195.00. It is missing some of the features of the XL version, in particular NURBS, but is still useful. I used GO for several months before getting XL. Maxon has demos of both programs available for free download.

Hey, neat. I like the way it turned out. 'Tis a fine steed, set to carry War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.

We'll miss you! But don't worry, we'll survive.

That is a good idea, I hadn't thought of doing it that way. That is the effect I was looking for, thanks.

Is there a way to add the transparency to the entire group, and not each part individually? For example, I import the Poser figure into Bryce, and now want to make the whole figure 50% transparent. When I select each mesh in turn and apply 50% transparency to its Materials, I end up with each part being individually transparent. You can see her breasts through her clothing now, which is not the result I wanted. I'm trying to create a ghostly effect, so I'd like to make the combined group transparent without making formerly hidden polygons visible. Is there a way to do this in Bryce? I tried editing the OBJ file to remove all groupings, thinking this would make it into a single large Mesh, but Bryce creates Meshes for each material in the OBJ so I'm back to the same problem.

In the freestuff is a utility by MartinC called MacConverter, which can take care of just about any PC<->Mac Poser file conversion tasks. You should drop all of the files from the zip onto MacConverter first, and let it do its thing, then put them in their respective folders, and then the props should be useable in Poser.

(I actually don't know if brainmuffin is a he or a she. Perhaps I should say *e.)

You're probably thinking of brainmuffin, who is planning to sell a Dungeon Creators Kit soon on bbay.com. The thread he started about it is here. If you search the Freestuff you'll find a few pieces of a Dungeon Construction Kit from me, posted over the last six months or so. These are entirely seperate from brainmuffin's work (and brainmuffin's preview pictures look fabulous!)

I first went there with Netscape 4.7.4. I got shunted off to the "non-IE4" page, which is pretty sparse. I then went there using IE 5.0 on a Macintosh. I get a page which says "P.D.Blakes Poser Store" and "Welcome To The Poser Store", and nothing else. No links, no images, no obvious way to get to the store.

I checked, rechecked, and triple checked. Those triangles are not in the geometry, facing away from the camera or otherwise. I haven't figured out what causes it, but I figured out how to fix it: when I uncheck bending for that body part, the wierd triangles go away. Fortunately I intended to turn off bending anyway as this is a mechanical character. I don't know what I'd do if it was supposed to be organic. The blemished areas visible below spheres in the right side of the image also went away when I disabled bending on those body parts.

Goodness. Those folk at Zygote are good at what they do.

Schlabber, 'bro' is American slang for 'brother'. Its a term of friendship in this context.

Wow, thats a great troll! Gotta get me one.