I simply can't wait! I hope the eyes can be scaled, in contrast to the original Poser eyes.

I'm also looking for such gloves and never found them. My Posette can't wait to wear them!

Very very close. It's hard to get any better than this. Great job!

I wouldn't have recognized my own creation if you didn't mention it! As we all can see again, hair and makeup can make a totally different person (both Poser and real life ;-).

Very nice work and a major improvement!! Maybe just increase the X-Scale of the head to make it look more like her? I'd love to see her in the free stuff!

As I created the SMG character, I would be interested in the result of the morphing and texturing. Could you post an image of her new look?

Still some way to go... The nose should be wider, her mouth too, eyebrows should bend and the chin looks too bold. I'm curious what you make of it!

I never knew that a single picture could start such a discussion... obviously it wasn't boring, eh? ;-) Bloodsong: I rendered the head of the Poser skeleton, then adjusted graduation in Photoshop to get rid of the 3d look. After that, I applied a wave filter to make it look more blurred. I created a new blank image, applied the "clouds" filter and defined it as a pattern. Then, with a pressure sensitive tablet, I applied the smoke to the skull using the pattern stamp tool. A little blurring here and there, a bit of darkening the upper left part of the skull, and finally making the smoke layer a bit transparent.

Diane, I agree with you. Maybe I should have named the image "The pleasures of smoking" ;-) BTW: I'm from Germany, and we don't have such strict laws against smoking as in the USA. Class action suits against tobacco companies are not possible here the way it was done in the States. There surely are a lot of national differences concerning this topic.

I agree with the statements above that the result is what counts. I browsed through your images and I saw that some of the heads look too "glued on" to convey a feeling of reality. It's very hard to match a face with the lighting of the environment. But that's not a question of art. I would always use a scan, e.g. when the background needs some atmosphere, but is not so important to a scene that it would justify to model it in 3d. Maybe some critics are not pleased with your pictures because the face is still the most important part of the human body (well, mostly ;-) Some people put lots of work to sculpt their own characters out of Poser's default dollface, and they may not be satisfied with just avoiding that problem by using scans instead. I must object to your opinion that you always see the digital origin of the Poser figures. There are some characters out there - only to mention Kozaburo's Nene - that look damn real when the lighting is properly used. Step by step, all the obstacles in the way to photorealism are being cleared by this community: eyes, hair, skin texture. It's getting better every week, and Poser4 hasn't been out for so long! But photorealism is not the only goal that Poser art tries to achieve, although it's a great challenge. Some images are post-processed to match the style of paintings in various techniques, some to look like photos of a certain period. Finally, I want to encourage you to go your own way to express your imaginations. Try different techniques before sticking to only one. And keep sharing your works with us.

Jack, I know about this "misfeature" in Win98 concerning the scrolling menues. There's no way around it. But compared to Win95, Win98 has a lot of nice features that 95 should've had. A better name for it would be "Win95 Advanced". I recommend to stay with Win98 (I use it myself) unless there may be a service pack 3(!) of Win2000. I read about 63000 bugs in Win2000, 28000 of them serious.

My Posettes will love this! :-)

I always wondered what the phrase "Verdie Ingram" in the gallery comments meant... I'm enlightened, at last!! Greetings to you both!

I see the rating system as a way to compare my own work against the others. Of course, some smartass might spoil the rating just for fun, but I can easily ignore this when the comments are not serious or missing. Comments of honourable members are more important than the rating. If I just want comments, I disable the rating. So I think, the mechanism is perfect as it is. I, too, rarely give a 5. I think it belongs only to absolutely stunning pictures which immediately jump at my eye, for whatever reason there may be. I'm always glad when somebody gives my work a 4. If it's a 5, I feel very honoured. But it's not my goal to get a clean 5.0 average for an image. As tlaubach stated, there's a lot of crap in the "best ratings", so that's not the criterium for me. What's a bit more important to me is the number of viewings, though I don't quite get the strange schemes behind the viewer's behaviour... Sometimes a quick render gets over 300 viewings, whereas a hard work masterpiece doesn't make it over 100. I wonder if this depends on the weekday when you post it, the amount of flesh in the thumbnail ;-) or the phase of the moon, or whatever? Strange...

I go for the body and hair textures! Definitely!