Gotta agree with you on David, randy. He's a cool figure and I like him alot, but there is a real dearth of material out there for him...at DAZ anyway. If they'd have devoted a tenth of the effort to him that they have The Girl, he'd have a complete wardrobe by now, scads of props and cool sets to play around in. He's getting quite short-changed. Good look at how to do this right is look at RTDNA's release of their new Laroo version. Not that I'm interested in her, either, but they just hit with a second wave of all kinds of stuff for her while at the same time continuing to release other things for the other characters. Oh, and mac, it's not that I fault DAZ for supporting the new stuff. It's only natural. I'd just like to see a few other things here and there along with them. Spread things out a bit more. That's all.

Bobbie: Of Course the bundle is going to be Bryce intensive! It's their newest acquisition, so naturally they're gonna push it. Think I've figured their MO: start a new project and then devote all resources to it to the exclusion of (just about) everything else. Look at the release of "The Girl" and more recently their "Jungle" stuff. Since I'm not interested in Bryce, Girl or Jungle, I'm buying off my wish list and haven't added to it in a LOOOONG time.

Both the Hair and Cloth rooms in P5 have me Completely Flumoxed (as do magnets, but that's another story for another forum!) I just leave those rooms ALONE and shell out my hard-earned dinero for the hair models that others have sweated to create.

;D

Saving some time and space: 1. Once a figure is clothed I make everything underneath invisible, or at the very least go into the materials room and delete all the un-needed textures. 2. For anything transmaped, I ususally use the Cartoon display in order to see it. You can usually disconnect the transmap(s) in the materials room as well. Just be sure to reconnect before rendering. 3. More than one shadow source-light usually just wastes time and memory resources. Pick your source light, set the shadow to either 7 or 8 for a realistic cast shadow, and render. And I never have the map set higher than 512. Shadows look just fine. 4. When it comes time to render, disconnect your 'puter from the internet, turn off your firewall/antivirus programs, go into Poser, turn off all the tools and tiles so all you're left with is the display window, make Everything display as wireframe only, and Then render. All that other stuff takes up resources, and the fewer you have running in the background, the faster the render will go. Hope these help!

My problem with it was that a)the details of the offer confused the !@#$ outta me--had to read it over a couple of times and check the details in the forum they posted to better explain it; and b)I simply can't justify the expense of it compared to other "basics" I want that AREN'T included in the package. And hey, I'm still learning Poser, so until I've got a better handle on it, I'm not about to tackle Bryce. Pretty good idea, but overall poor execution, IMHO.

I've been running into all of the same problems as PixelPunk, and was referred to this thread from the Nut'sNBolts forum over at Daz. Thanks for all the suggestions and links! I will definitely be doing some reading and practicing!

EnglishBob, Thanks for the link, first of all! Secondly, I DO use a floor prop of some sort now with all my renders for the very reason you state. And I am certain my character is ON the prop, not above it, so that's not it. I'll give the spotlight camera trick a try, tho. Mungo, I hope I don't have to go that far, esp. after completing a complex scene only to discover the shadows are wonky! Keeping my fingers crossed for other suggestions.

"TWell you might have to spend some money on the Clothes Converter by markDC...Its $39.95, but its worth the money."

That is if you can get it to work! I bought the CC, thinking it would be just what I wanted to get clothing to fit a morphed V3 character, or so I could buy Steph clothes that I liked and fit them to Vicky. I wound up returning it. Everytime I tried to open the program, it threw an error, "Please set your Poser Preferences first" and then hang my computer so bad that I had to cold-boot in order to restart it. If you check the Daz forums, you'll see I'm not the only one to be frustrated--in various ways--by the Converter program. It's long on promise and short on results. NOT recommended.

I'm seeing something curious in a few of my renders related to this topic. (Like other newbies I quickly found the need for an "actual" ground prop which I now use.) I'm using Richabri's "Light of Day" Set--highly recommended--but occasionally I get a render where the shadows don't meet the character, giving the impression that she's floating above the ground plane when, in fact, she's not. I usually have one of the infinite lights casting shadows with the settings between 0.7 and 0.9, and a map size of 1024. I've tried altering these settings, camera angle, which light casts the shadow, light intensity, etc., and even tried changing the shadow light to a spotlight, but I keep seeing the same result. Any suggestions?

Moebius, please add my vote to those above for a close-up version of Dystopia! To try it out, I downloaded the first freebie set, and quickly saw this was not something I could really use as a city set, other than background--as is its intent. A modern or slightly futuristic city setting seems to be seriously lacking for Poser. Everyone wants to do fantasy or historic buildings. My stuff is meant to be set in the 21st century or, as Max Headroom used to say, "20-minutes in the future." I've found very little to create a photorealistic city street(s) scene, but from the look of Dystopia, you and Ajax seem to be the blokes to do it!

Unzipped, I've bought the Blackeyes package here, and they are great other than having to adjust the positioning a bit once I've loaded them, even though I'm using the right eyes for the right figures. Yeah, they are quite realistic, but having done a couple of renders with them, I find that the ones that come with Daz's Glamour make-up set work just fine for me. When I want something close-up, I'll substitute the prop eyes. One thing I do to increase the realism is after I've loaded all the Mats, I pop into the Materials room and add an anistropic specular Node to the cornea. Gives them a nice, natural sparkle. (And if you don't know how to do that, say so, and I'll walk you through it...as others have with me on other things.) Just paying it forward!
Spire