...and rendering! I think a paltform-independent skills forum would be fantastic. As the above example shows, ayone can benefit from knowing proper human proportions. I think there are many basisc skills which can be addressed, independent of a specific program. For instance, I just finished an excellent book called "Digital Lighting and Rendering" by Jeremy Birn. Magnificent. It gives information on the "basic" skills of lighting, shadows, composition, use of color, staging, compositing, texturing, and animation. It explains things I never knew, such as determining the "temperature" of light for an animation based on the type of film the studio will use, or proper studio 3-point lighting, or what specular and phong REALLY mean, or why ambient light can be very bad. Just the kind of info I'd like to share! Lots of beginners like me would appreciate that sort of thing, I think. These are

I see what you mean about joints- I'm used to working with a program that has numeric input- instead of grab and drag, you say x25, y56, z44 to... sort of thing. Curiosity can be educational, though! I was surfing around, and found a page for an up-and-coming (release in fall) program called Reflex-Drama, which seems to be based on biomechanical principles. And yes, there will be demos! (It claims that it will be compatible with major apps.) Here's the url if you're curious. www.reflex3d.com/drama.html

I suppose I would just like the program to be a bit "smarter"- to know what a leg is, and have some idea of what it's composed of, and how it's supposed to move. No, I don't want the program to do it all for me, but if I were to design a charachter creation program, I'd want to make life easy for my customers. I don't like the fact that with each manipulation, there's probably a 90-10 proportion of inaccurate-accurate motions! I hate wasting time- I don't want to have to spend months learning to do what the program should do for itself. Sorry, didn't mean to turn this into a rant! ;) I'm just one of those awful people who uses the word "efficient" too much!

There! Had to fix both links- never try to write links first thing in the morning!

Attached Link: http://www.biologicinc.com/ShapeMaker/download.html

Attached Link: http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/schafermeyer/

Get Shape maker here: ww.biologic.com/ShapeMaker/download.html TreeMagic homepage, Shapemaker and Shapemagic (new) here: members.aol.com/_ht_a/schafermayer/

I love textures. I have more fun doing that- I am just barely a newbie at poser, but I have a whole library of textures I've made with Moray's texture editor and Coreldraw's Texture. (I spent about 6 hours working on a "wedding" texture that would look like matte lace over that irridescent crinoline. Unfortunately, it got lost in my last crash- backup time! I'm re-doing it.) Once I understand a bit more about how textures import and act in Poser, I'll put some up in freestuff. :)

I subscribe to a magazine called 3D World- issue 11 has a fabulous tutoral on realistic skin textures. (Not photo textures- I would think those would be much more difficult to manipulate and control.) The tutoral is by Bill Fleming, Komodo Studio. at www.komodostudio.com .

"use the objaction mover and encode them to .pcf using the p4vicki's obj as the seed file??" Huh?

Thanks for the heads up! I was able to rename it after I cleared the attributes, and I renamed it as .old just in case- so far everything is working fine, though. And my Propack is working now, a huge relief. The CL tech told me to replace it, but the page he sent me to didn't have the file, so I had to go hunting.

Since the computer is likely smarter than the man in the pic, does it have to give consent?

Wow! Great model. If you are going for realism, though- roughen up some of the textures, especially on the box and monitor. And grey out the colors a little to get rid of the cartoony effect. A shadow under the monitor and around the foot would help, too.

I'm not a Carrera user, but I do alot of glass- the interior is important, with a fairly high IOR and caustics. I've found colors are more effective at medium to low intensity- greyed down. I tend to keep the reflection fairly low, and rely more on interior refraction- it's glass, not a mirror! ;)

Oh ps- I don't think you can edit posts here, can you? -one thing that REALLY helps in CG is imperfection. People spot perfection, and say "oh, it's a computer pic". Add some randomness to the quilt squares, as well as reducng the size along the y-axis. Give the wall panels some irregularity, and of course the window wall will have narrower panels at the corner, widening on approach. Also, why not throw a few dust motes in that sunbeam with a light fog?