Playing around with her a bit more my initial impression still stands; this is a nice figure with some nice  features, but I'm honestly a little disappointed; I really haven't seen anything in her that I can't do with V3 at this point. I guess a lot of it has to do with expectations; since she was named "Victoria" I expected a lot more compatibility with the old figure. If she had a different name,  it wouldn't be such a big deal; but with no real backward compatibility with V3 (sorry, but that lame V4-V3 figure doesn't count) V4 is kind of a disappointment to me.
V3 is for me, and I'm sure with a lot of other people, my universal female base figure. I actually like the fact that she's pretty "bland" out of the box (I never leave her in "factory spec" anyway); she can be anything from a buxom super babe (rumor has it, she likes to hang out naked in temples wielding swords), to a fat grandmother to even a guy! Since she is a base figure, I don't want her to be too highly stylized one way or another. There are hundreds, if not thousands of morphs, characters, textures, and clothing items for her, and she can be pretty much anything you want. Given that V4 is only a day old and V3 has been out for years, I know that this is not a fair comparison, but I really question Daz's decision to take the clean slate approach to V4. From what I can tell, the improvements in the mesh don't really seem to justify changing her body form so much.
If she was compatible with V3 content, it V4 a no-brainer purchase for everyone, but as she is,  she's more  like Jessie, Miki, TY2, or S3...while all nice on their own, they all require a substantial investment in supporting materials, and they still don't have the flexibility of V3. I know WW can help, but it is not perfect - it's great for what it does, but nothing beats "native" clothing. I guess the market will decide how well she's going to do, but with so much invested in V3, I don't think I'll be loading up on any more V4 content anytime soon.

Sorry to ramble, but in sum,  I think my major disappointment is more about expectations (fairly or not) because she carries the "Victoria" name...I just don't see V4 taking over V3's slot in my runtime anytime soon. For now, I guess she'll just be another naked, sword-wielding temple dweller with a bobble head who needs to eat a hamburger. ;-)

*" you may just think she has a big head because youve been staring at vicky 2-3 for the last 5 years. trust me youll come to see the light :)"

*Like I said, personal opinion...I've never really liked the super skinny, huge bobble head look. (COUGH Nicole Ritchie COUGH)  ;-)

Well, in my opinion (and that’s all it is), Poser is just an application or tool, just like anything else. It is neither bad or nor good. I think there is an inherent fallacy in linking the mode or method of creation with any sort of artistic merit, as a lot of these kinds of arguments seem to say to me.

** A creative artist can make good art in any medium; true art transcends the medium used to create it.**

To me, arguing if Poser art is “real” art or not vs another 3D package (or if something that is hand drawn is more valid artistically than a photograph) is missing the whole point. How something was made doesn’t make it art. If a piece (in whatever medium) speaks to you, then its art.

I think, Penguinisto, you are right to encourage creativity in composition, but I think you’re confusing the technical with the artistic. If everything has to be “originally” created  in order for it to be valid; then according to that logic why should anyone even bother with using any pre-made content (including base figures) at all? Where would it end or begin?

If someone makes an interesting work, I don’t really care if I can pick out where everything came from or how it was created if it speaks to me.

** As a way of analogy, would you enjoy a meal at a fine restaurant any more or less if you had known that the chef had personally grown all the ingredients? If the point is to get a good meal; why would it matter? Would a song be any more or less enjoyable if you learned that the musician took 10 minutes to write it and used a band and a producer, or took 10 years to compose it and played every instrument themselves? Again, if the merits of the piece are in the end result, who cares about the process of getting there?**

My old Epson Stylus Photo 1280 did actually have a problem with the Kodak paper; the black ink didn't ever seem to absorb properly and would pool on the surface. In addition, from what I've read (there was a long article at PCWorld last year), a lot of the off brands of paper don't last nearly as long as the manufacturer's.

I had my new Athlon 64 X2 4600 box shipped with Windows x64; I've been running on it for over six months now with no problems. Since all of the components are from larger manufactuers, I haven't had any driver issues...I've found that on the whole, I haven't reallly noticed anything different from Windows XP (which, I suppose, is actually a good thing). Poser 6 behaves (as well as it ever does, I guess), but I think until they rewrite the program for 64 bits that there will be much of an advantage over running it on Windows XP.

Off the top of my head, I believe that the ATI video is actually an integrated chipset and not a stand alone video card. It's not bad as far as integrated graphics go, but pretty much any dedicated video card would be better.

Thanks for the replies...the problem with the leotard was the black wasn't "total" in PS..253 instead of 255 and neededing to plug into the specular map. The second issue was solved when I hit "set up ambient occulsion". Weird...

Thanks for all the suggestions.

From my experience, Poser is extremely memory intensive and likes lots of high speed memory. What's the bus speed/revision of your P4?

There is not much fundamental difference between Win2k and WinXP - they share the same core. MS just announced that they are not supporting 2k anymore, if that makes any difference. Going to a newer OS should help a bit because of better memory management, but they only thing that is going really speed FF up is a newer processor or more memory.

I've had problems in the past with the Norton Internet Security suit slowing everything down; it is so dialed up, it practically stops any network traffic and drags the computer to it's knees. P6 occasionally will check to see if any other computers are using it's serial number, so it could be hitting the firewall and cause it to slow way down.

Because Poser is one of those wonderful tools that let people with no "traditional" artistic talent whatsoever (like well, ME!) actually able to make something that looks haveway decent!

HT is not much use unless an application has been written for it; and most don't (kind of like MMX years ago when it came out). It really is a stop gap measure to get around some of the performance penalties inherent in the P4 design; I wouldn't make a buying choice based on that. I would hold out for a dual-cored chip or get more memory. From my own experience, I've just upgraded to an Athlon 64 x2 4600 (2GB ram, GF 6800 256MB), and the performance is amazing! Just to see who much I could push it, I had Poser render an animation while I ran Doom3 at full quality at the same time; it didn't drop a frame or crash at all! That's what I call multitasking!

I knew it! Britney Spears really is just a CGI creation!

The Athlon 64 has much better raw floating point performance and an integrated memory controller. Most benchmarks I've seen has it destroying the P4 in rendering.