There are definite cross-cultural elements in this, and I'm not going to argue against the thesis that the Japanese are weird. But a part of this whole sorry business is the idea that comics are just for kids. That's not something the Japanese believe, or the French, or... Well, it would be a very long list of countries and cultures. And the whole thing depends on the problem of just what "appears to be a minor". Which means under-18, if I understand right. I doubt that even big tits are a guarantee of a person's age being over-18. Not these days.

According to the Poser 7 manual, when I look up Gradient Bump, I'm told it's for using P4 bump maps when rendering in the P4 render engine. Gradient Bump: Previous versions of Poser used a proprietary file format for bump maps (.BUM). If you want to use these older file types in Poser 7, connect an image map node to the Gradient_Bump attribute and load your desired *.BUM file into that node (see “Image Map” on page 335 for information on loading images). Then, select Poser 4 Renderer in the Render Settings window and check the Ignore Shader Trees checkbox. Please refer to Chapter 37: “Using the Poser 4 Render Engine” on page 364 for more information on the Poser 4 renderer. You cannot use .BUM files with the FireFly renderer. Is the manual wrong again?

Frankly, I can't escape the feeling that the DAZ support for V4/A4 tends to the sluttish in clothing styles. That's not a new problem, I'm not even sure it can be properly called a problem. I'm not averse to such things as Poser Porn--you can get the precise perversity you desire--but DAZ seem to be seeing the world through the eyes of a pornographer.

Back when the V4 MFD came out, DAZ were emphasising that it was the same as the V3 MFD, for texture-mapping at least, and there is a lot of stuff that can be used.

It's worth checking on campaign dress as well. There's likely to be a cover over the shako, which hides a lot of detail. Go for grey pants, rather than white. Add greatcoats and there's not much to distinguish one army from another.

Link to a picture showing the differences I mentioned The Osprey books are good, but there can be a lot buried in the text that isn't shown in the colour plates. The Light and Grenadier companies had the big epaulettes, known as "wings", the rest just had the little tufts at the end of the shoulder-straps.

From what I recall, that's a soldier of a "flank" company, and the epaulettes would need to be smaller for a soldier from the rest of the Battalion. It's a long time since I did any reading on the subject (Sean Bean as "Sharpe"--excuse me whele I de-drool my keyboard), but apart from that option it looks pretty good. I wonder if the tails of the tunic are a little over-simplified.

To be honest, the whole idea of a V4 Male seems a bit broken. The underlying skeletal structure of real men is a bit different to that of women. OK, these head morphs can still be useful, but DAZ just isn't the first place I'd look for male characters. They have a lot of useful old stuff, which I mostly already have, but thye seem to have gotten fixated on the T&A market since V4 came out. Not really what I'm looking for.

I'm not enough of a designer to do justice to this. It's not the same as being an artist. (I'm also doing writing.) It does sound a bit odd, in that it's unusual for a publisher, even a tiny publisher, to apparently abandon control of the cover design. Of course, print-on-demand is changing things a lot. It's much easier to self-publish, without risking a garage filled with unsold books, and it's much easier for somebody to be a tiny publisher. Folks: general warning. It's a very bad sign if you have to pay the publisher. Helgard, I hope it works out for you.

I know coflek-gnorg has some nicely-made gun models in the 3DS/3DS-MAX section of freestuff here, but there can be some conversion glitches, and I don't think the dates fit.

I understand it comes mostly from deer-stalking, getting close enough in fairly open terrain, for a good shot. Which, at least in the British Army, fed a lot into the basic idea of the sniper. Did anyone ever try using Poser dynamic hair to get the look?

I posted on the same general idea, quite a long while back. You can set tiles to give stripes, and use a variation of the basic trick to make the stripes diagonal. Or to rotate an image...

Poser has two long-tunning ptoblems, and no new owner has ever fixed them. 1] Poor Documentation: go look at the section in the manual describing materials nodes. If your're not educated as a computer graphics professional, it's almost useless. That's only one example. 2] User interface preferences: Poser ignores Windows settings for colours and font sizes, except for its idiosyncratic use of standard Windows windows. I'd like to be able to set a slightly bigger font, and use background/font colours which give better contrast for my vision. You shouldn't need to hack at XML files to do this. Though I suspect we'd have to rip out pretty well all of the existing code for the UI. There are some things which appear to be unalterable parts of graphics files. This inability to tweak the system may even be illegal under current disability laws.

I don't know if they're still available in the RDNA freestuff, but they depended on how older versions of Poser handled partial MAT poses. That is, a MAT pose which just contained some elements of a material. I'm not even sure if they worked with Poser 5. What they do is change (variously) diffuse and ambient color settings for the standard skin materials, without removing the texturemaps. They were an OK way of getting some variation in skin tone. It's a useful idea, but limited. This is the one-click solution, and that was useful while it worked.

You bastards!