IMO unless you want to play the new DX 10 games that will soon be coming along, there is absolutely no reason at all to use Vista. (And there also you could simply set up a dual boot for the games) XP 64 is a very capable OS that gives you all the benefits of 64 bit without any of the crap of Vista and I for one will not touch Vista for my work rig.

Oh and yeh DosBOX rocks, it lets you run almost any DOS based app you can think of and it emulates a VGA card and a SBlaster sound card so you can play all them old games as well. And its free !

Yep its not just BMP or JPG but depends on what the native format of the renderer is. If a renderer uses 8 bit per channel (or 32 bit per pixel RGBA like many renderers do including Poser) then any and all texture files are converted to this when loading into RAM. It wont matter if your image is 8 bit or 24 bit or 32 bit they will all occupy the same space, depending only on their uncompressed resolution size. Some renderers like those of Lightwave and mentalray even use 32 bit per channel float images as native and in those renderers every pic actually gets upsampled to 128 bit images but they also have special methods to not load the whole pic at once and they can get by with much less RAM.

OBJ works fine but you wont get the bone info into Poser that way AFAIK. You will have to open her up in Poser and then re-rig her there using Posers native tools. Prolly be easier to just do the final output from MAX itself unless you want to distribute her as a Poser figure or something.

As for the modelling part, its coming along decently enough. Much better then my own feeble attempts when i first started modelling, they didnt even look human much less female LOL. Have to see wire to be sure but i think the breast area needs some relooping to get rid of the squarish shape there and to connect it more naturally to the shoulder area. Using some refs of real females (which you can get from 3d.sk) will also help.

For something like jewelry which has lots of precise little pieces, zBrush might not be the best choice IMO. You can do this with Poser alone as well (to some extent) but a traditional modeller like WIngs or even Hexagon would give you better and more efficient results

-my .2 c anyway :)

Some interesting points in this thread, and good suggestions as well.. To this i would add that lighting isnt as simple a thing as many people think, it is a complex artform in itself and not everyone is (or even wants to be) naturally good at it. However the lighting in any scene (no matter which renderer you use) plays a crucial role in the final look. Everything from the positioning, color, brightness etc can make or break the image so you shouldnt ignore it.

So my suggestion is that anyone who feels that their scene is flat or chalky or just uninteresting should get a decent book on lighting techniques. Jeremy Brin's "Digital lighting and rendering " is the industry standard guide on lighting and one of the best books to get on this topic (The guy works at Pixar, what else do you need to know) It is written in a very nice informal manner and never becomes too technical. It isnt specific to any particular software either so you can apply its ideas and settings anywhere. There are also many free tutorials around that cover the basics if you just want a quick look. This is probably a much more sensible thing to try before you dump your current renderer only to find that you get similarly bad results in the next one you pick, because frankly until you know just what is wrong with your image, you wont get better results no matter where you go.

"I am not saying there are not exceptions, what this whole thread is about is not what individuals can or cannot do, but what Poser models can or cannot do, and what they can't do is bend like people." This is not a poser only problem... every character creator/user faces the same sort of problems in even the most high end apps. Human motion and musculature is a tricky thing and it is only recently that technology is making advances in properly simulating it. They really need to incorporate some of this in Poser's rigging system before you will get really decent looking deformations and posing. Take something like rotating your hand/wrist... currently not a single poser figure can do this motion properly. In reality the wrist doesnt just rotate your forearm around its axis. Instead the bones in the forearm actually twist together and cross each other, producing a very characteristic deformation of the skin that no figure i have seen does properly. And this is an example of a very basic motion, forget anything complex like muscle contraction/expansion, skin sliding, tendon movement, inter-skin collision, object-skin collision, skin color changes etc... Here's a simple thing anyone can try to see just how far short of 'reality' our attempts really are: Turn a hand palm downwards, study the back of the hand and clench/unclench your hand. In that little area, you will see so much variety of skin motion, that poser (and most other 3d apps to be fair) dont even simulate 1/10th of it. See how the skin slides around and over the knuckles, losing color as it expands and becoming darker where it bunches up. See how the tendons slide around under the skin like fat little cables. Notice how the muscles expand and contract, how the webbing folds and unfolds. Or how the skin in the fingers pushes against itself and the palm when you make a fist...

Well im someone who started with Poser, went on to Lightwave, and currently work in Maya, but im not a master or anything like that so take my post as a 2c take on this... I agree with all that is posted above and IMO your choice of poser or something like MAX/Maya/XSI/etc really depends on what you intend to do with your chars. ie are they destined to be standins in an archi viz, or are they leads in an animation, or extras in an ad or what ? Also just what level of realism are you looking for ? And what is then final destination of your chars, will they be rendered in poser itself or do you intend to export them into MAX ? Poser is generally a great app for creating lots of customised chars in a fast and easy manner. Just twist the dials around and you can quickly build up the kind of char you need. Posing is a snap, as is simple animation. The latest render engine has lots of featuers, rivalling high end apps in this and you can do a lot with its node based materials (which even MAX doesnt have IIRC) You can buy lots of inexpensive content for it (like clothes, props, armors etc) so you dont always have to waste time creating something boring or tedious. I often buy poser content just because of this, even though i may not ever use it in Poser itself. However, even with all this, Poser is not : 1. An animation app, it has nothing like contraints or controllers, and any kind of complex animation is painful to do in it. 2. A dynamics app, it has no real particles, and its hair/softbody/cloth systems are weak at best. Maya and MAX are a lot lot better at it in this area. 3. A content creation app, it has primitive modelling tools, and anything original you need, you are gonna have to create in a 3rd party app, and convert it for use in Poser. Which for organic type characters is a very convoluted/painful process. 4. A fast renderer, even with all the nice features, firefly and the native renderer are several magnitudes slower then mentalray, VRay or renderman etc. The nature of posers skinning and content also leads to situations where post work is a necessity for decent results. Which may or may not be feasible for your project (eg you cant paint away elbow joint errors on 200 frames of an animation) 5. An app for complex scenes, or at least not for single layer complex scenes. To do a scene with lots of characters and such you are gonna have to render your stuff in layers and comp them later on. Which may or may not be an option for you. Cause unlike both XSI and Maya, Poser doesnt have a native layer manager. In Maya for example you can setup multilayer scenes with overrides and passes per layer (like shadow, diffuse, reflection etc), use different objects/lights/cams/materials in each layer and so on. And have all the layers render and composite into one image on the fly with the click of one button. XSI also lets you do something quite similar. In short even now when i'm pretty proficient in Maya i use poser plenty of times, but only where its appropriate. Like i recently had to do some work for a diet tonic ad. And rather then waste time creating and morphing a human from scratch, i just used V3's morphs to setup a before/after type animation in Maya. Rendering was done in Maya so i could use its advanced SSS shaders and its fluid system. Which gave me fast and flexible results, as in the best of both worlds. I could have done the whole thing in Maya, or maybe even in Poser, but both these options would prolly have taken longer and been harder then the hybrid approach.

You can also try the loomis set of books on illustration/drawing etc. You should be able to find free pdf vesions on the net by searching a bit. They are very well written books on how to make images that are not only well composed, but also attractive to look at.

And hang out at the Art theory forum of CGTalk, which is dedicated to this sort of thing :

Clicky...

Try the tutorials here:

http://www.onona3d.com/tutorials.htm

They arent exactly about making nicks or scratches, but they have a lot of good info about texturing in general that you can use to create whatever kind of texture you need.

I really dont see what all the fuss is about (and why this topic is so popular every month..) What does 'art' have to do with the medium it has been created with ? People produce horribly bad output with the most high end of 3d apps, its not like poser has a monoply on this. And even using the most high end of apps wont make anyone an artist or anything either. Now i am primarily a modeller, and i can understand some of the pride that modellers feel cause IMO modelling is the most satisfying and direct of all the 3d disciplines. It lets you see instant results and is closest to the feeling of 'creating something with your own hand' as you can get in 3d. However this doesnt mean that its the only game in 3d, cause other disciplines are just as (if not more) important, even if they are more subtle in the results they produce. As long as the result shows the creator's hard work and care in producing it, im happy to give it a thumbs up, even if its lighting, texturing or even arranging/posing. I do confess some distaste in looking at 'poserart', where its just a bunch of randomly thrown together props/figures and the user is too lazy to make of use of the wonderful things he has in there. But then perhaps not everyone uses poser with the same aims, and some might be getting enough satisfaction from just playing with it. Bottomline, some of the more pretentious 'artists' out there (on both sides of this fence) just need to get off their high horse is all... And the really talented/skilled artists dont have this kind of elitist attitude in the first place.

A little less lipstick would also help !

Since we'r all showing off our renderers, thought i'd mention that Lightwave isn't bad either: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=499728&Start=1&Artist=tekn0m0nk&ByArtist=Yes http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=499726&Start=1&Artist=tekn0m0nk&ByArtist=Yes

Hey Hiram that's very very good work ! Wow ! Wish i could do post work like that.. I'm a total klutz when it comes to drawing by hand, so i have to to do it the long way around, by making sure the render itself is as good as it can be. Not an easy or fun task to be sure, mostly lot's of repetitive tweaking. For animations of course this can be a real timesaver, but for stills it's a real pain !

Thanks ! Way i see it is that not everyone can or should be an expert in character modeling. But that doesn't mean you can't become good at other kinds of stuff like lighting, texturing, animation etc. Personally i'm a reasonably decent modeler, but i rarely get the time to be able to create something like a whole realistic human. So i use premade stuff to learn the other stuff till i do find time. Whatever else you think about Poser, you have to admit that it certainly has some excellent (and cheap) content available which can be used outside the proggie also. eg here with V3, i plan to practice how to do realistic skin shading and rigging a high detail model in LW. Maybe create some short anims also...

Nice ! Maybe we could have an 'All app vicky convention' or something :) Gotta complain though that V3 really deserves a better renderer than the one in Poser, well in Poser 4 anyway. Don't know if Poser 5 is nicer. ernyoka1: Yeah that's how i'm doing it now. But i really hate those nasty defroms you get at the joints in poser. I was hoping to re rig it in LW, and then import the morfs someway... Have to do some more experiments i guess. Only problem, the damn mesh is so heavy, i'm afraid it'l crash or something. "Remember, with v3 you can inject a morph any time you want if you decide you need it. You don't have to keep them all loaded into her all the time." Hmmm.. i see your point. Right now i'm getting a feel for the morfs and what each does so i tend to load everything. When i become more familiar, i'll try doing it that way.