Very Nice!

FYI, Citibank (I know, I know ... but they are still providing services as a ward of the US govt) has an internet fraud protection scheme that works well.  If you have a credit card with them, they provide you with an application which sits in your tray.  When you want to charge something, you fire it up, provide your password, and it provides a one-time credit card number, including the CV code.  Interestingly, the card always expires in the next month.  The number can only be used once and then is rendered invalid.  I have used this for several years.  The charge always works and it appears on my regular statement just as if I had used my card.

Obviously this won't work if you want to leave your card info on a site for repeated use.  It does, however, eliminate the ability of a thief to use your number if they should get hold of the one-time number, code and exp. date.

Klebnor

When rebuilding, consider RAID.  Raid 5 provides data security without the cost of mirroring.  The space available under this protocol is N-1.  In other words, if you put in three drives of 250GB each, you get 500GB of space with full data redundancy.  4 drives of 100 GB each yields 300 GB.

If one of the drives goes bad, you plug in a new drive (same spec) an the array will rebuild itself without data loss.  Other than constant backup or a home server, this is one of the cheapest and simplest methods of achieving data redundancy.

Being and engineer (and German), I use both plus an external USB HD for off-site backup of critical data.

Klebnor

At the end of the installation, did the installer suggest that you allow it to initialize the figure?  And did you answer yes?  If so, the figure should be fine.

Did you install to your Poser Runtime (the one with the executable in it)?  Assuming you may have external runtimes, this figure wants to be in the base runtime (as do V4 and M4).

When you get the weird result (girl head, V4 body) can you see the Girl morph in the list when selecting the body?  If so, is it adjusted to 1.0?  If not, turn it up and see if the morph works.  If the morph isn't present, find the injection morph and apply it.

Hope one of these helps.

Klebnor

Action Hair is gone.  Apparently someone trademarked the pony-tail.

Klebnor

Although all these products (from several vendors, when you include texture sets) are now gone, I would note for those who owned the original products (TH and TH expansion pack) that they were both updated on 1/22/09 by Pretty3D.  I believe this was to add morphs for various V4 characters.  As of a few minutes ago, the updates could still be downloaded via ones account ... haste may be in order.

Klebnor

When did imitation cease to be the sincerest form of flattery?

Put another way, does the owner of the Raider of Tombs franchise really feel that images similar to their character, created by hobbyists for their own enjoyment, threatens their economic opportunities?

Seems odd to me.

Klebnor

If you want a similar background, did you look at age of fantasy - currently in the pot of gold sale?

Klebnor

That should certainly help.

Thanks, Mark.

Klebnor

Mark:

Is there any way to copy and paste shader changes?  In other words, if I make a few tweaks (say to shininess, highlight color, bump strength) can I copy these and paste them into other shaders?  Or, alternately, open multiple shaders and change them concurently?  Frequently these settings are all set to the same values for various skin zone shaders and it gets tedious to make all the changes, from a workflow standpoint.

Regards,

Klebnor

Mark - take your time.  Any help will be appreciated whenever you can get to it.

Thanks again,

Klebnor

Do you add sub-surface scattering to the skin?

Any chance you could post an example screen shot?

Thanks in advance,

Klebnor

If you want Porsche performance

             wait for it ...

get Carrara!

Mark - I agree on all points.  I also generally massage the shaders until I'm happy, then save as an object in Carrara.  I have the same experience - don't open Poser unless I absolutely have to.  Since this is a recurring problem, I thought I'd solicit input from others - I'm sure all Carrara users have developed some methodology for fixing shaders.  I was afraid I might have missed some simple shortcut.

For example, when fixing skin, I go into it seems like a dozen shaders (skin face, skin torso, skin hips, skin legs - well, you get the idea) and make identical changes to each (change highlight color, change highlight %).  Does anyone know a way to cascade or copy the changes to multiple shaders?

I will look into the Carrara Lounge tut this evening.

Klebnor