the only reason i want to try and do it this way rather than using an avi mat on the background, is that i thought just the figure would render faster than the 500 frame animation....Ive seen lots of posts about exporting to photoshop but thats a luxury i havent yet been able to afford......

I have successfully exported an image than in paint shop pro shows up with a transparent bg, but the moment i try to import it into any video editing proggy, it reverts to a grey bg........... hmmmmmmmmm

You can always get Gimp and a photoshop UI, Which is free and can do alot of the things that PS can. 

but i would assume that paint shop pro could export transparent BG. However you might have to click some option telling it to do so.

Havent worked a lot with animation and transparency, but the reason you would use png is because it have transparency build into it. So you should create your animation with no background objects (like a plane with a background image, dome or whatever). And in the output window choose image files -> png format.

And then you need to combine the images in somekind of program, that allow you to work in layers.

Use winrar or winzip to pack the files, and send them by email(s) :)

It kinda depend on how the prop is going to be seen in your animation i think. If you know that its something that you will never see up close, you dont really have to create a high res map for it. However if you use a low res map like 512x512 and shoot it up close it wont look very good.

So would suggest making fairly big maps, maybe 2048x2048 and then you can always resize it to your needs.

Seems it might be your smoothing groups in max that you need to fix. As far as i know it can happen if you export back and forth or cut in the mesh after you have already applied smoothing groups.

Anyway not sure if thats your problem but you might wont to try to select all the polygons that make of the cloth and then simply hit the auto assign smoothing groups or what its called :)

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For instance, it takes practically no skill at all just to move a light so it actually shines somewhere near the product being offered...  If the producers and marketers have such low expectations of their user base then they needn't worry about selling quality products at all - their customers would have no use for them.  But, I think both are intimately concerned with providing those types of products.  They just need to get on the same page as to decide how best to do that.

Ok think i understand you, however find it rather hard to actually discuss as what you refer to as bad renders might not be the same as me and so on.

However just to comment on your mac donalds example, I agree that they most likely wouldnt sell a lot of burgers if they showed half eaten ones. However when you see a commercial from mac donalds, they always try to show how nice and perfect there burgers are, but as comsumer you also know that what you see on tv is not exactly what you get when you buy one :). And personally i dont eat mac donalds that much, but when i do, i almost always end up being a little bit disappointed to be honest :D

If you cant get your hand on mocap :) you have to animate it in hand. One way would be to start by adding all the key frames, and then fine tune the in-betweens to fit your needs, and for the muscles you could make a morph to control the vibrating, and maybe add a noise filter/controller of some sort, if thats possible in poser(not sure if it is).

Anyway doesnt do a lot of animation so might not be the best way, but guess its one way to do it :D

Just want to add that there are rules for vendors when posting there promo images, not sure if thats what the OP is referring to, but vendors cant simply advertise there products as they want.

But personally i would prefer to see products in a basic setup, and if it looks good or just decent there, you know as user that if you spend some time setting up a decent scene with nice lighting etc, the product will most likely also follow along. As you dont really know how long time have been spend on a "super" render, and then you might be very disappointed when you actually try the product and cant even come close to getting the same result.

Thats perfect congrats :)

Btw you can put drape to zero to save some time when calculating, and in my experience using drape can cause a lot of unwanted problems. So would suggest just keeping it on zero.

If the skirt you are using is a freebie you can try to send it to me and i would like to have a closer look at it.

Regarding the dynamic settings, not sure if you have seen my reply to your other post regarding the same problem?.But you could try some of those settings found on there website. And its still a bit strange to me that they havent made the default settings one of those instead. Not sure if it have any effect on you particular problem but guess its worth a try.

In the image with 4 frames in it, you have to either exclude the hands, fingers etc, and the forarm from colliding with the skirt, or you have to manual go in and make sure that the hands doesnt go through the cloth, first of all it will increase the time it takes to calculate as it will try to simulate the hands going through the cloth, and secondly it will screw up the simulation of the cloth as it react to the movement of the legs and hip.

When you work with dynamic cloth you have to pay attention to what collisions might occur as each object or body part that is going to collide with the cloth will affect it somehow, and each mistake will show in the cloth. So you should treat the cloth as it being in a reallife enviroment. Meaning that the hands cant go through cloth or the body it self etc. Then you will get the best results.

About the first images it might be the actually cloth that aint really modeled well for doing dynamic simulations. Dont know where you got it from, but if possible try to post a wireframe image of the skirt and a wireframe image of when its gone wrong.

Also try to post you simulation settings, collide against settings and the dynamic control settings.

try to reduce the collision depth and offset to around 0.2, check all 3 collision options in the simulation settings. if you havent already, maybe that helps.

If you use ambient light on max setting  there shouldnt be any shadows as far as i know. Think it will be easier for people to help you if you post a close up image of the face and the material room settings.

I think you can increase the kink delay, as kink strength determine the "waves" going on in the hair and the kink delay is how far from the hair growth start that the waves will start happening. And since you have (think you have) max setting for the kink strength and a very low kink delay the waving will start almost instantly and therefore you get the haywire on the top.

Anyway not really that much into the hair room, but guess its worth a try  :D

You might want to check out this page at MySmithMicro, it explain each setting in the cloth room, and also show some predefined settings for different types of cloth. As i couldnt help notice that your settings seems rather extreme compared to there settings. And think you might risk getting a very stiff looking skirt if you plan to use it for an animation.

Anyway hope you fine it useful. I sure does as guessing the setting for each type of cloth can be rather hard i think, so you can at least use them as a starting point if you dont like there settings :D

http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/2313.html