Hi, Diane! I'm not too hard to find... fauve@fauve.com is at www.fauve.com ;-> (Actually, the 3D stuff is at http://www.fauve.com/digitalwork .) -Nemo

NURBs and splines both have a much softer look than meshes using polygonal vertices, because they're based on geometric curves or patches instead of little sharp polygons... :-> Organic metaball-type modeling can get you the same rounded, soft kind of look (like in Amorphium or Nendo, or using the Blubble plugin with Ray Dream Studio, to cite three fairly cheap applications.) -Nemo (not a modeler. Don't even play one on TV.)

Whoops.... my bad. Animation Master is spline-based, not NURBs-based, and the home page is http://www.hash.com. Rhino3D is a NURBS-based package that doesn't cost the earth (but still runs a couple thousand dollars, instead of the two hundred Hash will set you back.) -Nemo

What's the difference between Alias and Poser? About twenty grand... <> Seriously, it reallly is the NURBS that make the figures look so much softer and more realistic than polygon meshes like Poser uses. If you really want to get into this, then buy a copy of Martin Hash's Animation Master... a NURBS-based modeler that doesn't require a Silicon Graphics workstation to run. It's only about $200.00 and the results you get are incredible. (However it has, to put it kindly, a steep learning curve.) You can find out more about it at http://www.martinhash.com (and the Alias home page is at http://www.aw.sgi.com ) -Nemo

Hi Lorraine! You can get the Adam texture at John Johnsen's site... it's at http://www.graphicheaven.com/Poser/JJ.html . Turning down the "highlight" setting in the materials also helps to get rid of the plastic look (real skin isn't that shiny.) -Nemo

The hair looks great! The eyes do too. And the lighting and canvas texture really add to the image. Maybe try some gradient in the skin tone? The color is a bit too uniform right now. (Real skin has so many different shades and tones in varying places on the body.) Are you using a texture on him? The "Adam" texture is probably the most realistic I've seen for the Poser guy. -Nemo

Nice work, Tim! I don't necessarily think that this is "cheating", either. After all, I used photographs of hairstyles from various angles to make the transparency-mapped hair. You just used one photograph of one hairstyle for this image, and did the work in post instead of in Poser. The purist approach to CG says that everything must be modeled (preferably from scratch!) by the artist. I've seen pictures done by 3DMax artists that were meticulously detailed and modeled and where the creator was obsessing endlessly about something being a tiny bit off in the refraction algorithm of the raytracing, never seeming to notice that the picture itself was dead. No composition, no aesthetic appeal, no interest. Just cold, plastic technical near-perfection that screams "computer-generated." I love using existing images, elements of images and combinations of images -- stock photos, paintings, whatever -- as backgrounds and props in Poser. And I never feel like I'm cheating because I didn't spend three days modeling every detail of that third tree from the left in the picture's background. Admittedly, it's an approach that can make for just as much bad "art" as the CG-purist stuff (boring, unoriginal pastiche is no better than boring, unoriginal exercises in raytracing.) But it's at least a different approach to the paradigm of digital art, and one that can allow for much originality. -Nemo (who must have had too much coffee this morning)

I think so! You got her cheekbones, her wide, quirky mouth and her strong chin just right. Even if you hadn't posted the name of the actress you were using as a figure model, I'd have guessed this was supposed to be her. -Nemo

Ahh, laddie, the secret be in the transparency map... ;-> The values I'm using are min trans 10%, max trans 100%, falloff set midway between the two. But on your transparency map, use the black of the background to color between individual strands and locks of hair at the ends of the hairstyle... that gets the ends to fade gently. Unfortunately, the mesh will still show as an outline, which is why I'm working with this particular hairstyle in Amorphium right now to try and make that razor-sharp bottom edge a bit softer and more irregular. Now, care to share how you got those box maps working? :-> -Nemo

Cripes, and to think I posted the picture out of total disgust after three all-nighters and still not getting any results I'm satisfied with... :-> Pretty soon I'll be able to make a custom texture just by scanning all of the hair I've been ripping out of my own head over this project. Thanks very much for the nice comments! However, I still think there's a long way to go before these maps are really in good shape. I'll post the hair texture, bump and trans maps on Fun Stuff if you guys would like to have them for use now, but they're still very much in beta. If anyone downloads and uses them, I'd really, really appreciate input on how to improve them. -Nemo