Tolkien also created Orcs. The word "orc", according to Wikipedia, has more ancient origins. The fantasy race of Orcs started with Tolkien, so usage will be as risky as with using Hobbits.

Another thing to keep in mind, even if a fantasy race has old folklore roots, their specific fantasy characteristics may be of more recent origin. That also has a potential of being a copyright issue.

Attached Link: http://www.sharecg.com/v/51938/browse/11/Poser/Poser-7-Content-Visual-Index

Here are non-poserized ones that range from 3ds to LWO.

The issue isn't when it gets too real, but when it is almost real, but not real enough.

Avatar is the perfect example of getting real enough that the figures are believable. They still weren't entirely human, so our brains aren't as bothered when things aren't 100% right. Try to do the same thing with a completely animated human form and the subtle differences from reality will seem more pronounced. We know what real humans look like and how they move. The Avatar figures were close enough to human that they retained an emotional impact, but were just different enough not to trigger negative responses. Subtle differences from expectations were covered up by the alien appearance.

Polar Express and other animated efforts aren't trying to get full realism, but somewhere between realism and a cartoon affect.

I don't see actors ever becoming obsolete. Top paid actors earn a lot of money because they bring people to the theaters. Lesser known, but equally talented actors could just as easily do the movies for a fraction of the cost. It will always be cheaper to hire an unknown real person to do a movie than to do it with a computer character that isn't there. Computer voices are still way behind the state of the visuals, so real actors will be hired to do the voices. Most animated features stick to name actors even though they're never seen (which is always odd for the actors when they do movie press in countries where other actors are doing the native voices--a Johnny Depp will promote Rango in Japan even though it's not his voice the Japanese audience is seeing). Star Wars could not be made any cheaper with digital performers than with the then unknowns: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fischer. The original Star Wars was made for less money than what it would cost to get Harrison Ford to do a sequel today.

Although many people rankle at the salaries that actors get, it doesn't bother me. When a Pirates movie makes half a billion dollars, should Johnny Depp get a nice big fat paycheck or the studio head that said "yes" to making the movie? I'd rather see the talent that made the movie get the money than the fat cats that arranged for the money. In the old studio days, that's how it worked. The big money went to the studios and not the performers.

Interestingly, if you look at the top 25 grossing movies of all time, relatively few had big name actors when they were released. The top grossing movie of all time, Avatar, starred unknowns--Sigouney Weaver only had a supporting role.

When I decide to get a new HDTV, I'll probably go 3D, but that will be years from now. 

I was just figuring that a Poser audience would more likely buy a 3D HDTV than the general public. Being able to display Poser images in full 3D would be a nice plus on a big widescreen TV.

Dell is selling a 3D laptop for $900, so it might be a reason for me to puchase another laptop one of these days.

Quote - It can't be any worst than the anaglph glasses.  In all reality it should be better since there wouldn't be a color loss.  I plan on trying it in a few months or so.  I'm still trying to gauge the market to see if this 3D stuff is really going to take off and be sustainable.

3D HDTV provides about the same experience as watching a 3D movie in a theater. It's much better than anaglyph. Most stores selling the sets have a demo that you can watch (BestBuy and BJs in America). 3D HDTV ought to have a brighter picture. Theaters use polarized glasses for the 3D effect and that halves the light each eye sees. 3D HDTV shuts one glass rapidly one after the other and the higher refresh rate is essentially providing the original brightness for each eye.

In the end, I'd expect all HDTVs to eventually be 3D capable regardless of whether or not 3D movies last for the long haul. It's strictly a matter of having a faster refresh rate. The next Playstation will probably be 3D and that will provide far more content than just movies for 3D viewing.

I wound up having to fake it with multiple spheres.

I should have specified that I was under a time constraint and had to get something done Friday afternoon. It was also a case where I had an initial concept in mind and, as I played around with different things, the concept changed. I was trying to depict something with a plus and minus parameter with an interior safe zone (in meters--I said feet to stick to American units to make things easier). The first thought was to have a maximum and minimum radius and dark shade the area outside of the safe radius (the thickness of the hollow sphere).

I tried to create a boolean sphere in Bryce, but all the glass settings I tried looked weird. The core always wound up looking larger than its dimensions.

The image evolved from the original idea to one where it was necessary to show the plus/minus distances.

Now that I've played with Mark's sphere, I'm not getting the transparency look that I initially wanted. The inner core always seems to look like a solid sphere rather than a void. That doesn't seem to be duplicating what I'm familiar with when I look at a thick glass object with a hollow center. Maybe a cross section would be closer to what I'd initially envisioned. I don't need that since the faked graphic satisfied the people that needed it.

Quote - hmm...welll, at least I found some new ebooks under classics...not as many as the Gutenberg project, but these can be had as PDFs...free is free...;)

There are probably many more classics than what they've indexed. Google has been slow to index the books they scanned. That's rather silly because libraries have already done that work for them with their card catalog system. If there's a book you want, do a search for it and they may very well have it. I've mostly used Google books to find historical books written around the times that events occurred.

A lot of illustrated book references can be found by using the advanced search. Click the "Full View Only" radial to limit hits to books that can mostly be downloaded (I only recently found an art book that could be seen full online, but not downloadable). Add the word "pictorial" in the title box and only those books will be displayed.

I paged through the Bridgman Constructive Anatomy book and it's complete. The bottom of the book page has a feedback link that could be used to report bad scans. Up till now, I've mostly been looking for pre-1800 books and hadn't had any problems with bad scans. I did find some this time around.

I suspect that Microsoft required a payment to test products for compatibility. You're sort of getting your suggestion through stores that do a quick check that content works correctly. The best developers go through a quick playtesting process by letting a few people try out their product before marketing them. Don't forget that DAZ studio also has a large following and can have a different installation path.

Most commercial products meet your requirements. PNGs are in all newer products because any item saved to a libary (Poser 5 or later) generates a PNG thumbnail. Developers had to do extra work to save an RSR thumb to maintain compatibility with Poser 4. You're stuck with older products that only provided RSRs unless a store wants to repackage everything into new installers (not likely to happen). Commercial items provide readmes that typically will state at a minimum the store license and locations of files (though may not provide much info on how to use the product).

Freebies are a mixed bag for the simple reason that people are donating something for nothing. For the most part, even freebies do a decent job of providing a good installation. When they don't, it's hard to complain (though I've seen posts by freebie providers that are sick and tired of the number of complaints they do sometimes get).

What you'll probably find as you install more and more content into Poser is that you've got to rearrange everything anyway even if installations are good. You'll want to group like items together where they usually get installed in a seller's named directory. Unless you decide, for instance, to group all swords together, you'll have to otherwise try to remember what products have swords and search all over your runtime to find them. I've tried to brainstorm a logical way to install everything, but there simply isn't one that will be satisfactory to everybody. If you were to start a thread to see how everybody organizes their runtimes, you'll probably find a hundred different ways of doing it.

If you get a bad installation from a store, contact the store to see if they'll fix it and provide a new download. If it's a freebie, just thank the freebie provider for giving something away. If a freebie provider gets more complaints than thanks, they'll think twice of offering one in the future.

Quote - New Poser User buys Poser 8 or Pro 2010, then pays a boatload of money for content that only has RSR's. Without proper documentation in either the Software or Content explaining why some content images won't show properly in the library, this user is left up the proverbial creek without a paddle wondering why his purchases aren't working as expected.

Even seasoned Poser users can have a problem. In the original post I linked above, that made me decide to ask the question, the poster has been a Renderosity member for a decade. Poser 8 has been around for over a year and users are still finding themselves frustrated by missing thumbnails. The odds are that they wasted a lot of time trying to troubleshoot the problem before coming here to get a solution.

I wonder, in your example, if the new user would complain to DAZ tech support instead of SmithMicro since that's where they bought the content. It would be hilarious if DAZ support told the customer that the file won't open correctly in Poser 8 because SM stopped supporting the thumbnail format they developed. They could advise the customer to download the free DAZ Studio and open the files in DS to get the thumbs and--by the way--the free program will do most  of the things they wanted to do with the $250 software they just bought.

Workarounds are solutions to fix products that didn't do what customers expected. How many workarounds does anybody have for things Photoshop doesn't do well?

Unlike most software, today's Poser is not a standalone product (Poser 1 and 2 were). Poser has negligible capabilities to create new content and relies on additional products to provide more figures, clothing, and environments to create the illustrations users want. That reliance on external content, nearly all by third party vendors, makes it all the more important for Poser to maintain at least the compatibility levels it had in the past.

Why does anybody even care how much code it would take to restore RSR support? That's SM's problem. How easy it is to incorporate depends on the level of effort, whether there's a ready contract in place to handle doing new work not in the original P8 spec, and a variety of other considerations. That has no bearing on what we want to see--it only bears on the probability of it happening.

Quote - I'll observe (again) that as they removed the code implementing this, it seems highly unlikely it will be put back in.

It wasn't so much removed as not required to be added when the new library was coded from scratch. Whether that was deliberate, an oversight, a lack of awareness of the amount of content that is still available that's only RSR, or something else; who knows? Ratscloset said it was a Feature Request at SM, so there's a chance it might be brought back versus making a statement that there are no plans to include it.

You're right that RSR compatibility with P4 continued their existence long past when they should have been dropped. Since all versions of Poser, till P8, could do RSR thumbs, it was easier to only include RSRs in files to keep filesizes down. That's why we're stuck today with thousands of readily available files that don't have PNGs and won't natively show thumbnails in the latest versions of Poser.

I think Steve's referring to the additional code to incorporate the existing P7 RSR conversion routine to P8. Since you've made your own converter, how much effort do you think it would be to add it to P8?