i accutally find them easy to use, the only improvement I would suggest would be a snap to feature that would reduce mouse juggle a bit and perhaps a stepping feature to make big leaps (like by whole numbers, or even 10s) I use the dials for everything I find the 'click and drag' method goes haywire to easily.

yea I kind of thought of the cyclical thing as well, but it's fun to think up of these conspericyish type things [think Mcfarlane is in on it too ;) ] I guess everything kinda goes in cycles like that, next season it'll be space guys or something. It just takes one forward thinker to get the cycle started and to the rest it's just good business to ride the wave.

I've always had good luck with hyperreal, and see very good pics with anything from morris. My suggestion, get hyperreal and an additional very hires skin or 2 from morris and experiment with switching out the default hyperreal texture with the additional ones from morris. You can almost have an infinate number of very good quaility textures with little cost that way.

Message edited on: 03/17/2005 13:31

wonder if this has anything to do with the Animal Planet Dragons special? I mean it wouldn't be unheard of for Discovery to dump a bucket of $$ onto Daz's lap to update their dragon and use it, and it's known that Disc/TLC has used poser figures in the past. Or not, It could just be good business sense to coordinate the realse to 'catch the new hype' so to speak.

Ok the first thing is that if you're turning the transparency to 0 then the trans maps wont 'shade out' the transparent parts of the object. If you're doing this before your renders this alone could be why your hair is looking like strips of cloth. Don't worry if your hair looks transparent in the preview, the trans map will take care of whats supposed to be what. If this isn't then case, then humm, any other takers

Message edited on: 03/17/2005 12:10

Ohh the one in the background is already (you can't see them, but there are acctually 3 one top one, and 2 sides. In that case then I probably should go with a spot light even if it's low intensity to 'bring forward' the curtain from the back.

try using the darkest hair mat, and adjusting the diffuse color and amount. Essentally what you'd be doing is darkening an already dark color. That should get you close to what you want.

well it's been resently deturmined in another thread here, if you want hundreds of people to see it, include nude breasts in the thumbnail or make one that has over 1000 characters each with it's own custom hires texture and is photorealistic to perfection and depicts a perfect repersentation of a flowering meadow. This way it'll never be complete and you'll always atleast have something to live for. "I want to die, but I must live on to complete my 'master peice'" Don't knock it until you try it, this accutally worked for a few friends of mine, got them through rough times.

personally I look for both good and bad, perhaps as a common practice we could indicate what kind of feedback we're looking for. BTW I second the multiple excellent rates as stated above. Can we get a vote on this ;)

Are you using dynamic hair or trans mapped? If you could post a pic of what's going on that would help alot.

"(because you bite off larger chunks each time) ... ... because your sys can't digest the 'chunk.' " I love that anology BTW, I guess the system then poops out your pic? lol.

fyi, The readmes are stored in a folder under the poser one (I think just in the main poser folder, but I don't have poser in front of me ATM so I can't be sure) the only reason I mention this is that I used Poser for like 2 years and didn't know that the product readmes got stored there. I thought it was just for Poser's main program's readmes. DOH. I reinstalled the Daz stuff everytime I wanted to re-read the readme. Like I said DOH on my part.

ok, mine used to do this all the time as well. It seems that sometimes FireFly runs out of memory even if your computer does not. The fix from CL: When rendering complex, highly detailed scenes, the Firefly rendering engine can get overwhelmed when the textures being used are too large. This will often present itself as a render progressing to the "Loading Textures" stage and then stalling, with CPU usage and disk swap usage dropping off to zero, although this effect can happen at other points in the render (during the "Adding Objects" stage, for example, or even during the actual "Rendering".) The cure is surprisingly simple. In the Render Options palette, set a fairly low maximum texture size (around 1024, perhaps even lower depending on your available RAM.) Firefly will subsample the textures down to that level before beginning the render, saving memory and preventing lockup (although you may have to try several maximum size settings to get it to work right.) Setting the maximum texture size higher actually risks runing Firefly out of RAM as it loads the textures at full size. Turning Texture Filtering on may improve the appearance of some textures, especially repeating textures that are prone to causing moirpatterns, but it uses considerable extra RAM and should be avoided except when necessary. This technique generally won't impact your image quality, as very few renders actually make use of the full high-resolution texture (exceptions would be extreme closeups of faces, etc., rendered at or close to Poser's maximum resolution of 4095x4095 pixels; renders such as these would fully utilize detailed textures on the items they were depicting.) Realistically, when your rendered image is 2400x1800, a 4000x4000 pixel texture map on a single figure in the scene is massive overkill- the detail will be lost anyway, so setting Firefly to subsample the texture is not going to affect the quality a bit. http://www.curiouslabs.com/article/articleview/1230/1/345/ This worked for me. I put mine on 2000px when doing 1000px images if I experence freezing/render stoping on the first run.

Also with Poser 5 try using the hi-res (cloth) square. It's bigger so you won't have to scale it up as much and it doesn't seem to do the 'block' effect as much.