Rena of Fairywoods is Greek, I believe.

Greetings, Your shadows on figure and ground are black, which is the default. This is a convention from dungeon-games which are very dark to hide the minimal polygons. If you have an outdoors setting, you should make your ambient color a bit brighter because of all the bounced light. (I use reddish-mauve, about 10-20% in value for skin, other materials treated similarly.) This way you won't need an extra spotlight on his backside unless you have a nearby source (rock?) to do the reflecting. I like your basic concept. Bloodsong and others have done horse tack, and I believe that Greylight has created western clothes, so if you like the "cowboy" genre, you can get more props to fill out your scenes. :) Have fun! Poser is a great tool, and you'll find that the community of users is very helpful Carolly

I give Poser 200 Megs, and it is happy. If you are working with several texture/transparency maps, a highly-detailed prop, or with Vicki/Michael, you will need to allocate lots of memory. Most of my problems ended once I fed the beast. Carolly

The fastest way is to make anything totally hidden (such as toes inside of boots) totally invisible. I believe that if you dress a character and then go in and make the covered body parts invisible it also saves on rendering time.

Most excellent. too. :)

And the important thing is to not only create and load the transparency maps, but to adjust the slider bars for the relevant pieces of your figure or object.

I was talking to the Lipsinc folks at the Game Developer's Conference about moving Mimic to the Mac. They couldn't really say anything but the necessary tools are in the necessary hands... so I'm patient. It shouldn't even take that much longer. Carolly

Great! and someone could do a samisen prop for her... and she'd right into that tearoom interior I found ages ago. :) She's elegant.

She really is lovely.

The creator of a work may not have time to check every site for rip-off artists. Even the corporations which make nice packaged software and ship it globally can't watch everywhere. It hurts when someone hands you a shrinked-wrapped copy of a game you made, pirated and produced overseas, and you didn't a get a nickle's royalties for the time and blood... but at least you know who the pirate was. It hurts when you see your art in print with someone else's name as the originator... but you know who "signed" it, and who published it. We rely upon friends and colleagues to spot these things for us and bring them to our attention. Knowing hurts, but not knowing hurts even more. If you see a CD at ebay labed Pozer4, let CuriousLabs know. If you see a compilation of models ripped off the Freestuff, put out the word in the community. You may not have time to do more than that... but that at least reveals the scope of the problem. And, most important, don't buy from pirates. Carolly

Excuse me, but copyright "similarities" are not based upon absolute percentages, but upon recognition. We recognize faces most readily, so taking someone's face and putting it on another body, even if it is less than 10% of the final pixel count, is still theft. How much do you have to change so that it isn't recognizable? If an average person (what is known as a rational man) can't recognize it, you have probably changed enough... if it still looks like your source or inspiration, you need to spend more time on it. I'm not a lawyer, but I've had to sue to protect my copyrights. Carolly

Ghostofmacmeth, I realize that you guys probably had to severely scale the standard-sized clothes to get them to fit on elves, dwarves, and gnomes... but we are capable of following directions. If you say to "use the wizard robe from the Costume CD, but scale it x,y,z in the chest", I'm sure that we'd look at all the other robes available if we didn't have quite that one, and get them dressed before the snows fall again in The Pass. I think we all have too much respect for Tolkien to let them go naked for long. Carolly

I'm pretty sure Cal has a red child's wagon, as a freebie. Search for Wayne Grindberg or WG Illustrations. He has linked from Lannie's site. Someone else may have one, too, because I seem to remember finding an abundance of kid's toys, especially right before Christmas!

She's obviously a woman, not a girl. Besides that, try shading the eyeballs so that they are not flat white. I'd also wear a bit of blush on my upper cheekbones if I was wearing mascara. Carolly

Hmmm... how odd. I've seen at least 3-4 requests for snowboard props for a school project, all under different names. I can imagine 30 students all stuck in hip-deep snow! I ahven't seen snowboards or skiis, but already-built snowshoes do exist... can you use another vehicle? Carolly