No assistance on the issue other than to suggest revisiting ajax's solution or perhaps utilizing the swappable geometry function -- maybe even a readscript. However, there was an error earlier. Hair and cloth are not 3rd party applications. Both were written in house. They did, however, license the faceroom technology.

Extact: "But anyone who says surviving the boredom of economic theory is "not hard" is a better man than me ;)" Comment: In my experience, it was bring a good cd and tape the lecture, then apply the prinicples on a smaller scale that night in the local bar. Made it quite easy ;) Although recovering enough from really good study periods for a test was sometimes problematic. Extract: "...and none of which explain why I should pay more to download Poser 6." (plus additional) Comment: they do. 1 - DR determines (for some unfathomable reason that begs for derision) what currency format you can use. They choose to not allow purchase in USD for folks ourside the US. On the surface, this just screams idiocy in action -- but, in truth, judgement should be deferred until investigation reveals the reason they choose to do it that way. I certainly would not, and someone wiser in business than I recently asked proceeded to laugh in wonder when it was described. Nevertheless, this directly affects your rate -- in short, you cannot pay for it in USD. 2 - The actual bandwidth spent to download for you may be the same as for everyone else, but that does not mean that the costs for equipment to allow that download are the same. SInce fulfilment is done out of the UK for the worldwide market, the costs for equipment may be (and likely are) higher than they are for equipment in the us. Large download systems such as this are not the same as one's household server set up or even the same as the system employed by Renerosity -- they are typically much larger in scale and costs and capability. In short, Enterprise class servers and systems -- Something DR is rather proud to note they have so they can meet the obligations they contract for. THis directly affects the cost of your download as a whole -- and usually to a higher cost than similar fulfilment from a US server. 3 - Indeed, you hit it on the head with this one. It is bad business. 4 - deja vu -- see 1 ;) 5 - I am aware that Australia is not part of the UK. You seem to have misunderstood the comment. DR's set up is such that all non-US purchases are handled from the UK. SInce DR is the seller, and they re handling it through the UK, they must operate according to UK rules, not US. One possible extension of this factor could result in an issue in handling the currency conversion rates among all denominations other than USD -- if so, then that's further evidence of unwise activity. As for factual/actual -- you won't get it here. Here is only educated guesses. It is almost certain that Katherine has no idea herself -- it is outside her role within the company. Indeed, it is quite possible that CL cannot itemize the cost themselves since they are not handling that end of things. DR, on the other hand, likely could -- but most certainly will not do so in the forum, and most likely wouldn't do so in a public manner or a manner that would allow it to become public as well. An itemized cost would include revelation of potentially sensitive business data that no company with decent lawyers would share. In short, it costs more to buy it outside the US, and, other than asking CL to review (and hopefully change) the contract with DR when it is due for such, there is little that can be done about it but decide wether the value of the program to you is equal to the price that you will have to pay for it. (On the other hand, your question in a different (though related) thread likely should not have been asked -- you simply should have gone for it.Probably still should. Strikes me as the best solution to the problem -- use the inherent weaknesses of DR's system against them. I most certainly would do so in such a case, myself -- but I'm a cheap bastard.)

Extract: "So if I say "I believe God exists" it means I'm not certain God exists?" Comment: Yes. Extract: "That's what you call "not hard", just to buy a piece of software? Somehow I think if the inflated price was justified, it would be easier to prove than that." Comment: No, it is not hard to educate oneself. The effort would provide you with benefits above and beyond the simple purchase of software online. The price is not inflated. It is set according to an exchange rate predetermined by Digital River. They, in turn, do not use a standard, but apparently their own system for doing so that likely takes into acocunt their costs for handling additional currencies. So, thus far, we have dealt with several potential reasons for the additional cost, all of which are representative, and none of them have anything to do whatsoever with the trade agreement. 1 - Currency exchange rates 2 - infrastructure costs 3 - 3rd Party fees 4 - currency handling costs 5 - UK customs rules (since world wide fulfillment is handled from somewhere other than the us, it is not governed by us structures) Additional ones as well. So there are most certainly valid reasons for the additional cost -- all of which have nothing directly to do with CL. Earilier in the thread you speak of never lying down in the face of unfairness. I'll respond to that with pick your battles carefully. Af for saying that you called them a thief -- yes. And I can do so -- it is neither disparaging or reputation destroying. Were I to call you a thief, the situation would be different. I wouldn't, either, without evidence, which I strongly suspect I would never encounter as 1- I'm not looking, and 2 - You aren't likely to steal to the best of my knowledge.

Extract: "This is really not a good time for Curious Labs to retroactively decide that web sites should not use the word "Poser."" Comment: Hmmm. The only people saying that (or, more accurately, implying that) are people outside of Curious Labs. Strikes me as a case of over reacting to someone else's breathless bull

Condescension is not free -- mockery is. If I've been condescending, I'll have to charge. Small change. Currency rates are an issue -- my understanding of the problem is that you are not allowed to purchase in USD from outside the US -- something Digital River determines, not CL. I am not familiar enough with the institutions of higher learning in Australia, but I will happily direct you to one of them near you. Seek out classes in global econmoics and marketing, information technology infrastructure, and business history. That should begin your efforts nicely, and when you've finished them, turn to macroeconomic prinicples. It might also educate you on the potential trouble that could be garnered by calling Digital River a crook in a semi-public record goverend by laws of a location that takes such things seriously. Extract: "As I said, I had waited almost a month and you did not reply to my one and only IM, and your reply made me look like a liar. For that I think I deserve an apology." Comment: You didn't read carefully enough. She said "I believe", not "I am certain". Indicates she wasn't certain she had. The cost of a product's form is irrelevant -- the downloadable version costs the same as the shipping one. Get off the blaming CL and pick on Digital River, and direct your requests and comments to a more proper location (such as the customer service department of DR) and you will likely get a more desired response without being tossed from side to side by pundits.

Extract" "False: All what the posters received was the same old corporate spin." Comment: interesting. Specifically point out how it is spin, please. Extract: "False: Giving an honest explanation would have made treads llke this uneccassary." Comment: Bullshit. The answer was direct and to the point. As I noted earlier, it would require the individuals involved to actually educate themselves on global trade issues for small software firms dealing through third party fulfilment systems. Not hard, but obviously beyond the abilties of those complaining. Extract: "False: Noone wants CL to loose money. What people want is an honest explanation. BTW, whats wrong with "Fairness" ? To be honest, discussions like these give me the impression that a few members here constantly confuse a buisiness relationship with fandom. Curious Labs is a corporation that sells software. Even though this software seems to have a big impact on many members lives, they are just that: A buisiness entity. And as long as they treat one part of their customers differently from the other part without giving a plausible explanation, they will have to face criticism. Just like any other corporation that does the same." Nothing is wrong with fairness. Fair would be to take the matter matter up with the company handling the fulfillment. Fair would be a single worldwide currency. Fair would be a world where things like human nature and difference are tolerated. Fair is a goal, but not a reality. You are correct that the fans of the software appear to be ridiculously foolish when it comes to dealing with the companies involved in it. Not just Curious Labs. DAZ and Renderosity as well seem to have some sort of active groups harboring age old grudges against them where the companies essentially will never be able to do anything without angering pollsters. However, Curious Labs does not treat one part of their cutomers differently. Digital River does that. There is a difference between Curious Labs and Digital River. They are two separate customers. Attend to the actual issue, not the one that's easy, and you might get somewhere in your goals. Extract: "Now, my order shows I have to pay this outrageous sum of 51,59 EUROS for shipping by UPS Overnight. This is what the drop down box provided. I have since found out on a DAZ forum that it should be UPS International but surely this cannot be charged at the Overnight rate. It would be impossible to Austalia anyway" Comment: This strikes me as the usual "get some profit from shipping while we're at it" scheme ar too many people use (it is especially prevalent on Ebay, based on the fees my wife has been charged). The fee you pay for shipping there -- and the specific options you have (international is a different service from overnight, and both exist) -- are determined by Digital River. If I were in this boat, I would feel an overwhelming need to cause harm to digital river's business. Extract: "This thread started by pointing out that our FTA means THERE ARE NO ADDITIONAL TAXES OR DUTIES added to the US prices." Comment: And, as near as I can determine, there are none. Your particular interpretation of the fees being applied is wrong. A Tax or Duty is applied under Law. In other words, the governments state these things need to be charged. A difference in price based on currency rates is not the same thing. Grasp that concept. It will do you a world of good. Extract: "ANYWAY, this has exactly NOTHING to do with the fact that CL and/or DR overcharge their Non-US customers for downloadable goods. Claiming that "They will lose money" again and again is just spin if you cant back it up." Comment: 1 - CL is not overcharging. Digital River is. 2 - You need to look up the specific definition of spin as you applied it and rephrase that statement. Spin, in case you hadn't noticed, is just another way of stating the truth. The concept you are seeking is misdirection, or perhaps lying. Regardless of that, however, there is no "backing up" a statement like "they will lose money". Absurdist posturing. It is not the role of a customer to determine what constitutes an acceptable loss to a company, it is the role of those who run the company. Extract: "- What would happen if I decided to charge US customers $15 for that program - but let everyone else buy it for the normal price of $10?" Comment: Irrelevant. You can't do that here. Also, inaccurate. A more accurate comparison would be you submit a product to Renderosity and state your wholesale price and sign a fulfilment contract. You provide them with the price in your native currency, and they they do the rest -- including pricing the product according to whatever agreement you have established. They then proceed to charge more. BEing renderosity, they would get their rear's chewed for it, but ignore the complaints, you would get your money, and either have to deal with it until you could pull your product (by which time the damage in sales will have been done) or be quiet and smile and offer little tidbits like the above. In short, the same thing that is going on now. Extract: "Hmm, I could use that explanation to justify racism, sexism..." Comment: Yes. And agitating for greater fairness is always a good thing. Just agitate int he right way and to the right people. Screaming about the unfairness of black society to white people will do you no good in a town with no white people. Extract: "Wonder why they didn't do this. They at least took preorders of P5 themselves and we were able to buy in US dollars." Comment: Entirely second guessing them, but one would estimate that the reason is they did not have the wherewithal to do so in a manner that was satisfactory to them. Althought he basic mechanics of such sites are easy in principle to set up, the back end support -- customer service, fulfilment (server hostings for multiple downloads in the thousands at once as well as additional handling and backups), and similar -- is not easily nor inexpensively done. A simple set up to handle something where only a mere 1000 downloads a second could be concurrently run worldwide would require a small investment of around 40,000 to start, and goes up from there. That's not counting the training, hiring expenses, and location for the servers, nor the expenses for a business to install and maintain the appropriate mirrors abroad. So I would say it is because they don't have the ability to do so to a level that they felt comfortable with. I would also say that is a simplistic and unaware suggestion. General Comment: Beyond that, I will second the comments of this Hauksdottir person. If you don't like the price, then do not buy it, and do not go to a forum and complain about it when the purpose of that forum is stated to be for other purposes -- and then get upset when folks take you to task for it. If you post, someone will respond. And in kind. If you post to incite -- as I admittedly do -- then people will respond heatedly. If you post in kindness, you recieve those as well. Which is not to say do not complain about it -- but when you do, do it in a manner that gets something done, which posting to here does not do.

I would buy Poser 6 because my son would likely enjoy it. And my best friend would really enjoy a copy of it. And I might futz around with it once every six months, and I do so dislike using old software. It so, well, bleh. I would not buy poser 6 becuase I might actually be inclined to hang around these forums consistently. For educational and commiseration forums, they are passable at best -- but for whining/bitching/complaining, they seem to be the favored locale. I would buy Poser 6 because I am not familiar with the tales and regaled half remembered and now unsupported events that apparently have all the folks up in arms. I did purchase Poser 5 when it came out, and it sucked wind. So Did Mac OS8, Linux 4, Windows Me, Photoshop 5, and if I were to sit and really put thought into it I could probably come up with several more exmples (there was a lotus version, and a filemaker one that made us switch to a different software at a higher cost, and some others). They patched it. Made it work. Big deal. I would not Purchase poser 6 because I bought Poser 5 when it first came out and it sucked wind. I would Buy Poser 6 because it looks interesting and meets the needs that I have. I wouldn't because I'm broke.

At the risk of being terribly annoying: It appears to me that she did indeed answer the questions as posed. What she did not address was the fairness of the issue -- something that she not only cannot address effectively without a common ground of understanding (lacking wholly among the people asking as evidenced by the fact they asked -- if they had the knowledge of why the inequity, they wouldn't be asking the question). Do not whine to Curious Labs. They do not apparently have the resources to operate their own store to their satisfaction. Therefore, they have chosen a third party to provide these services. In simplest terms, you are not buying from CL, you are buying from Digitial River, who basically have a link in the curious labs site. You don't have to like it. But complaining about it to them at this point isn't going to do you any good now, becuase the system is in place already, contracts signed, etc. You could always wait the couple of months it will take for the product to hit store shelves and purchase it there. Odds are you'll get a better price anyway. Complaining may do some good, mind you -- they may choose, at the expiry of the current contracts, to use a different company or set up an internal fulfilment system. If anything, the best method to resolving these issues is to hound the hell out of Digital River. And I do mean the holy hell out of them. They agreed to handle these transactions, and they have been falling down terribly in the process. As for the fairness of issue, it is a certainty that the higher prices are, in some way, related directly to the nature of the fulfillment contract. Curious Labs Has changed the pricing, in an attmept to be more fair. The orginal pricing for it was going to be, as she noted above, in line with most other small companies. That would be a 1 to 1 rate. Which would suck even more for international buyers. Blaming Free Trade agreements is asinine, incidentally, for the pricing issue here -- rather than accept the "conventional" meaning of them, perhaps learning what they specifically deal with would be in one's interest. Beyond that, to deal with the inequities, act to improve the exchange rate of the currency you have to deal in. Long term, doing something to assist that (which, sadly, will help all those evil companies you despise so much) will provide you with the equity you seek.

Strictly a few observations: The image linked to above appears to be the Poser 5 walk designer modified in appearance only -- meaning that the P5 motions are unseen. IF so, it also indicates that the P6 figures will use a similar leg, hip, and arm rigging to the P5 figures. As to the supporting DAZ figures, it is the responsibility of a content creator -- any content creator -- to make their products work with Poser if that is what they intend those products to be used with. This applies to everyone. Be it the walk designer, face room, cloth room, hair room, lights, whatever. The fact that the most popular figures for Poser are made by a thrid party and are not fully compatible with it (figure heights, face room, walk designer) is not the fault of the company providing the program, but of the makers of those figures, who did not feel that the functionality was all that critical. Part of the reason for their not being interested in doing so, if I remember correctly, is that their rigging for those figures was more advance than the one the walk designer was built around in order to provide a smoother bend in the leg area -- which, at the time, was an acceptable trade off in the view of most, since the figures were much better looking than the default ones. Speed can be controlled by using low values in the walk motion and extended frame count.

The production quality render settings are a general render setting, not a "works for all" setting. THey need to be adjusted both for draft and for production according to the specific needs of the render itself. In this case, it is likely that your settings are not ideal for the image you are rendering, as you are likely running out of memory for calculations or encountering some issue for which the settings are not suited. Based on the scant information provided and reasonable extrapolation of the images provided thus far, it would appear that there is a great improvement to the lighting toolset in Poser 6, but that the learning curve will remain (meaning that effective use will require learning to light scenes properly still) and that, indeed, they have set up Poser 6 so that more than the two presets ("draft" and "production" in Poser 5) can be saved -- reducing the confusion caused by the misleading labels of the Poser 5 presets.

but evil does triumph in the end. Or at least, it better, or those remakes of the first three are gonna really interesting. SOmewhere among all the stored stuff I still have the original TIme magazine where the story structure for all nine episodes was described for the first time in public. I was rather disappointed that he chose not to make the 7th to 9th sequence. Of course, that would sorta screw up the continuity of all the novels and graphic novels, and assorted miscellany that has already been done. Hmmm. Star Wars and Poser -- both at 6, in the same year. And star trek canceled. Damn. The end of the world has arrived...

There is a new product out from Greenbriar available at that bastion of effective equipment called DAZ that allows you to do exactly this. The ToolBox set -- and the Poser version is effective enough -- allows you to essentially rig & morph a figure (make one, even, apparently) completely, then export it as a Poser file directly (no importing into Poser), including joint parameters and other fashionable joys. It even includes a set up that create inj and rem settings automatically, including the file formats, that are either set up for their own channels or that use one of the preexisting ones. Basically, it is exactly what has long been asked for in regards to morphing.

err, actually, I don't see how this has a damn thing to do with "Art". It strikes me as more befitting the concepts of "Interpretation" and "Social Acceptability" than "Art" itself. Using art as a shield is a disservice as it will distract from the core issues at hand, which, ultimately, have a questionable place in this forum. Pedophilia, apparent age of majority and minority in a cultural subtext, and the propriety of secondary sex characteristics extremism in mesh deformation are all subjects that have little to do with a forum for Poser. Unless, that is, you have nothing better to do.

thwack oops. Sorry, it slipped.

The quadro should, given the information provided by Nvidia regarding their implementation of the OpenGL spec, be more than adequate to the task. Indeed -- it should actually do better than the "gaming" cards that will be more often in use.