Never, ever be afraid to post a render, as long as it's within the TOS. This is a very friendly place. If you want criticism, ask for it. And be prepared to accept it. Or request people IM you with their comments when you're just getting started. All in all, a more supportive group of folks you'd be hard pressed to find. Remember: you can always remove an image from your gallery. But first you have to post it.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2054636

Two cents worth from a near-noob. Your rendering skills are fine. In fact they're more than fine based on the images you have posted. Your thumbnails, however, are not. You compressed a rectangular image into a square one, distorting it. Try cropping out an interesting 200x200 pixel snippet of your image as your thumbnail next time. People are more likely to view something with an intriguing thumbnail. If you post the entire image, you've saved them the trouble of clicking on it. Go browse the galleries and see which thumbnails (or titles or whatever) make YOU want to click on them. Sneaky, but it seems to work for almost all the "biggies". Lots more "tips" can be found in the thread listd above (not to be taken too seriously).

My gallery has images ranging from 1135 to 65 viewings. My personal favorite image has 117 viewings. Am I any good? No, not really. I sometimes have some good ideas and I'm getting better at executing on them. But I sure do enjoy myself.

Art is a funny thing. Stick to what you like to do. Make it as diverse or as focussed as you want. Most of the people who pull down really huge view numbers do very focussed work, and have an established viewership. And their comments sections are almost nothing but "applause". But there are also amazing artists out there with galleries full of sub-100 view images and hardly a comment. Decide who you want to be and go after it. It will come.

I agree with caulbox. It would be very interesting to see what everyone could do with light sets and the materials room to enhance a relatively basic scene made from various freebies. I'd like to see more than a Vicky or a Judy in the scene. Some carefully selected props with good textures and bump maps would be nice to see what shader tree magic folks could come up with.

I have a question. I see that system requirements are given for a Macintosh version of Poser 6. Is this intended to be a spring 2005 release as well?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/photos/MSG2/Message2080040.txt

This very cool script by Geoff Hicks might be what you're looking for. I use it all the time to set all the materials in a scene to a single material and shader tree. It's not real fast, but it's very robust.

Stefan, That is extremely cool. Thank you. You know what else he looks like? A sugar cookie that got baked at about 2000 degrees. Thanks again.

gwhicks: I've got to tell you, your ClearAllMaterials code rocks. It has worked perfectly for me for the last three days of thrashing. Not a single crash, not a single material messed up. Thank you so much.

gwhicks: I'd love to try your script. I'm interested in how you cycle through all of the figures and propes in a scene. I have cobbled together a script, based on published scripts by Ockham and Netherworks, which will overwrite an entire figure with a hardcoded material. But, like you said, Poser 5 Mac is pretty flaky. Two fields in the shaderNodes section don't overwrite properly (easily fixed by a search & replace in a text editor), and if I try to do two consecutive figures without reinitializing Python - whamo, major Poser crash. But still, it beats changing every single material one at a time. When I get this thing a little more stable, I'll be sure to post it.

rreynolds: I'll try the Grouping Tool approach tomorrow when my P5 gets finished rendering. Thanks.

EnglishBob: I'll give it a try today. I've been trying to write a Python script to clean out the pz3, but I'm struggling with getting rid of the shadertree. I'm not much of a "search-and-replace" programmer.

That looks like the ticket. Thank you so much.

Fugazi1968: That sounds like a pretty workable solution, except I'm on a Mac, and thus no UVMapper Pro. It sounds like Material Manager over at Daz might be another solution, but again not for me. Thanks.

randym77: An excellent embodiment of the concepts presented here. You do of course realize this "experiment" is well on it's way to being the most viewed image in your gallery, don't you? Well done in the name of science. I think I'll cogitate on this rousing dialog and try to pull together an image in a couple of days or so. Maybe we can get a whole new gallery opened... nah.

Strixowl: I don't mean to slam pinups - I like them. But they do get disproportionately more viewings than other genres. As of right now, I've got 583 viewings on a pinup I posted yesterday. And It's not an image I would consider one of my best. It doesn't bother me - it was my intent to produce a damn sexy image and thumbnail. I'm glad it seems to be appreciated. 'Twas all meant in jest. Happy holidays.

PapaBlueMarlin: I call it thinning the forest. Makes it easier to see the trees. And I think people post images for a lot of reasons - all of them valid to the poster. It's part of what makes this place interesting. Cheers!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=rjbourc

lalverson: 51 GB Runtime? Mine is just under 7, and takes too long. Just curious: how long does Poser take to start up on your machine? It's just about 2 1/2 minutes on my 1.33 GHz Powerbook with 1 GB Ram running 10.3.6. Parenting props to figures sounds like a good idea. leather-guy: You're right - now that I've tried it, I can say that using low-res stand-ins is the way to go for big interactive scenes. Also, I totally agree - my Poser 5 dials start getting wonky just about the time I want to tweak for rendering. From there on out, it's all typing for me. A_: setting the camera early on is an interesting idea, but I don't think it would work for me. I always find myself searching around for the most interesting POV and generally I end up with something different than where I started. Phantast: I think that part of my problem is that I like to knock out an image in a single 2-3 hour session. I'd rather spend some of that time perfecting my image rather than just getting it done. xantor: That's the test render I start with, but I find I have to move lights frequently because I generally like to work dark and moody. I wish I could do a quick render with shadows, even a real lo-res one. I have a copy of Bryce, and I'm ashamed to say that I've barely used it. Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on setting up scenes using Poser characters and props in Bryce? Or should I try Vue first? By the way, this thread has been really helpful to me. Thanks, everyone.