There are several misconceptions about copyright laws:

1- The US copyright laws are not the world's copyright laws. It are valid only in the US.

2- Each country has its own copyright laws. These laws can have parts that are equal or similar to other countries or can be quite different or even do not exist. In general are very similar, but the most significative difference between the US and other countries is when the non commercial use is involved.

3- The Berne's Convention is only a convention (agreement between countries) and not the US law. This means that the parts of the copyright laws that are common to both countries can be applied from one country to another. The parts that are not common cannot be applied. For example, the Berne Convention stipulates that the duration of copyright is 50 years. In most countries it is 50 years, but the US copyright law says that is 80 years and some countries can have othe duration, smaller or greater. If some work is 30 years old there will be very little doubt and the work will be under copyright in most of the countries signatory of the convention, but if the work is 60 years old, it will be public domain and free to use in most of the countries, but still under copyright in the US.

4- Not all the countries of the world have signed the Berne's Convention. One country that have not signed can have the same copyright laws as the US, but one country cannot enforce the copyright laws in another, even in both countries is a crime. It's like the extradiction agreements.

5- ACTA was rejected by the EU until now. The aceptance of ACTA would mean that the copyright laws in the EU would be exactly the US laws and this was rejected by the European population.

6- The US has refused to sign into the ICC, so the US ins not part of the International Justice.

7- Don't forget that copyrights laws do not exist in Communist countries. China is a Communist country and in real terms is the first economy of the world or if you consider the fake stocks papers, the second economy. You can like it or not, but you must accept that today is China that sets the rules.

8- As for Renderosity as is a site in the US, so is the US copyright that must be applied there for products or anything uploded to the site. For downloads you must obbey the laws of your country. Some things can be legal in the US and illegal in other countries. For example, Poser is illegal in Saudi Arabia.

Quote - Better yet, maybe there's a local tattoo artist that might let you use some of his/her designs in return for some cash or maybe just credit. My neighbor's son does some really nice, albeit a bit creepy designs.

This solves nothing the problem. People that makes tatoos also copy them from somewhere. "I want a tatoo like this" and he does it for you !

Bookmark

Quote - He basically said that the only time that copyright enfringment takes place is if you try to save the image, and you get blocked from saving it, you can't use it.  Otherwise, you are free to use those tattoo designs that you saw online.

Quote - Do we really have to start putting right-click-save-as disabling javascript on all of our websites to stop idiots from rationalizing their infringement?

How??? In mine FireFox browser I don't know what can be saved or not, all can be saved and right click always works. Even copy and paste in this forum post do work !

Quote - No, Windows won't. When a program tries to allocate more memory than is available to it, the allocation will return with an error code. The program can then respond to the error code.

This is the theory, but not always happens. The programm code can request a memory block, but the programmer forgot to chect if the returned handle was valid. Later the code will try to use this memory that does not exist and in some point Windows will crash.

Another case is more subtle. Let suppose that you have 500 Mb of still available memory (physicall + virtual) and the programm requests 490 Mb of memory so Windows will return a valid handle and the programm will be able to use it, but this only left 10 Mb of free memory. Windows also needs memory and if your program wants to open a dialog box or menu, Wndows will not have memory to do it, so the dialog box opens empty, the icons from your destok begin to vanish and in the end you will not able to do anything. Restart the computer or at least shut down your program with CTL-ALT-DEL.

Another case is more complicated. You have 2 GB of free memory (physical + virtual) the program request a block of 400 MB and this time the programm displays a message that there is not enough memory, why???, how is possible to not have memory if there are 2 GB of free memory. Well you have 2 GB of available memory, but the memory is so fragmented that there do not exist a continuous block of 400 MB of free memory. Restart the computer.

Do you want make Poser out of memory?

Take some cr2 file and open with a text editor, for example Vicky4. You will find at the begining of the file

figureResFile :Runtime:Geometries:DAZPeople:blMilWom_v4b.obj

Replace this line by

figureResFile :Runtime:Geometries:DAZPeople:this one does not exist.obj

Then look forward in the cr2 file until you find again the same thing repeated. Replace the line again and save the cr2 with other name (to not destroy the original file).

Next open Poser and load this new created cr2 and see what happens with Poser.

It's an old bug that never was fixed and has nothing to do with memory. One common source of this error is when Poser loads a figure or prop with external geometry and is unable to locate the associated obj file, then gives an "out of memory" message instead of telling that was unable to find "xxxxx.obj".

When Poser runs out of memory it gives no message, it only stop working or crash or its windows and dialogs begin to vanish and any other effect, but no "out of memory message". Probably you will need to restart the computer

Bidirectional SurfaceIntegrator does not work properly in LuxRender, it has problem with surfaces with high reflectivity. Use path integrator instead, the image will not be so nice, but at least you will be able to have an useful image after some time.

Decreasing the specularity of the materials can help, but then you will lose all the benefits and beauty of bidirectional surface integrator

But MeshLab can do things that nobody else can do such as turning a cloud of points into a mesh. For example you take a face obj morph target (only vertices information) and then reconstruct the morph face mesh.

The mesh decimations also are very good.

MeshLab has a lot of very useful features, but is not stable and often it crashes. The crashes depend on the mesh and what you want to do.

The orst problem is that destroys the groups of an obj mesh and turns all into triangles.

Quote - out of curiosity, what OS are you using where poser 4 still works?  cuz mine croaked :/

With Windows XP Poser 4.01 runs fine, with XP64 I had to upgrade it to 4.03 and works without any problem. I don't have Windows 7 and don't want to have it, so I don't know.

One more important detail is that human eyes respond very little to color with low illumination, so night scenes are in black & white with very little color. I don't know if there is a B&W node in Poser. What thing that will complicate is when the main object has direct illumination from the Moon (Moon behind the camer). In this case the object will have some color, but the buildings in the back will be in B&W.

No blue light, only grey scales. Blue illumination is used in movies, it creates a nice psychological effect associated with, night, ghosts, dreams, but no blue light in real life.

You have two scenarios:

1- Moon in the back

The Moon is not visible and is illuminating your personaje and a forest behind. A single directional light will not work. The Moon light is directional and a directional light will work fine with your character, but will fail to work with the trees in the background because the refelected light from the trees is not more directional and it will depend on distace, more far away the tree more darker it is. You will have to use a spot light and play with the start and end settings to achieve the illumination you want. Then add some background plane with stars and with some ambient illumination on it.

2- Moon in the front.

The Moon is visible, this is much complicated. The Moon light is directional and is coming from the front, but it will illuminate very little the scene and only in the borders and the ground. What illumionates your character and trees is the reflected light by backscattering on the ground and objects. Plants have a very strong backscattering. What is worst is that the Moon light passing through the trees produce a shadowing effect very difficult to simulate.

You will need several spot lights illuminating your figures and trees, a directional light coming from the Moon position and a background star plane and a Moon Prop with ambient color.

Quote - However, the light from objects it's hitting, the light reflected, or what you see is acting like that object is the source and not just a reflecting object.  That is, the intensity of what one would see is obeying the inverse square law for the distance from that object to the eyeball.

You got a very important point here. The light comming from the Moon is a plane wave that doesn't depend on the distance, so you must use a directional light. But the reflected Moon light is not more a plane wave, so it will have some function of distance, not necessarly inverse square, and this reflected light will illuminate the scene. You will need to use extra spot or point lights to simulate the reflected Moon light illumination. The illumination of the reflected light is much stronger and the direct Moon light is much weaker.

The number of light, its settings and position can be tricky. In general three or four lights should be enough. You can use a skydome or background to make stars visible and/or use it as a secondary illumination that can be very strong in some nights or none at all.

Unless you have a rendering engine able to deal with wave optics where only one directional Moon light would be enough.

Another thing, Someone did or has an idea how can be done:

valueParm1 = sin(valueParm2)

It doesn't necessarly need to be exactly a sinus function, any periodical function with a similar shape can work. With a sinus and cosinus I can make a centipede walk with only one dial.