Some of those arent "human creators" though....

Absolute Character Tools (cgcharacter)
cg Character (cgcharacter)
cg Skin (cgcharacter)
Character Studio (autodesk)
Kaydara's Human IK

are rigging solutions, they dont create any geometry and you can use them for anything, not just humans.

Mirai (izware)

is a modeller, one of the first box modelling apps, now sadly defunct.

Also there is a bunch of more stuff that goes into creating virtual humans. Various skin shaders, texturing apps, hair systems, cloth systems, rendering systems and modellers are all used to simulate human appearence, musculature and motion. And a compositor like shake, AE or fusion to combine all this together to a final work.

You should get the IETab addon, which will let you spawn an instance of IE right in a firefox Tab. You can even switch between IE and mozilla on the fly by rt clicking on a tab and choosing IE.

I keep it around as a fallback for the few sites that dont support mozilla or insist on IE.

Quote - But will it do the animation in same quality? Like Final fantasy movie?  Or Do I need another program to animate it? (Like Maya..)  I tried the animation in poser but.. it just does not look good.

Depends on what you mean by animation. Simple walk cycles/camera work/lip sync can be done in Poser and done well. As can walkthrough style work where its the camera doing most of the work and not the characters. Anything more complex and you will need a proper rig and a proper software to animate the rig. Current price/performance leader for this is XSI foundation, with Lightwave a close second. Maya you should stay away from till you are much more experienced in 3D.

FF quality work (or anything from SquareEnix or Blizzard) you cannot do, no matter what software you get. That takes years of dedicated study and experience and a whole team of talent.

A normal map can work but it will only be an illusion. So the UV-mesh will look like a human if you look at it head on, but as soon as you rotate it, you will see the flatness. It wont actually affect the mesh geometry.

There is an advanced form of diplacement which can do this, but very few apps support it. It's called vector displacement, and AFAIK only mentalray has it.

Quote - I'm thinking of a displacement map to rebuild/shape the mesh, not to extract model info from.

Wont work, cause disp maps use the mesh info itself to do their mojo... Usually a disp map 'bumps' the mesh only along its normal. If the mesh is flat, like it would be in a UVmap-mesh, then all you would get is a mountain like result, not a sphere or a barrel.

Since no one has mentioned it, my choice would be the Discworld series. I don't care if it's CG, live or done with sock puppets, but seeing that amazingly rich (and funny) world brought to life would definitely make my century...

Quote - Or the only reason why ice cream is so popular is because a lot of companies manufacture ice cream.  So -- according to this line of reasoning -- if only more companies would produce brussel sprouts -- THEN brussel sprouts would suddenly drastically increase in popularity over chocolate and ice cream.

I never said it happens overnight, but it is the sort of cycle that you drift into and then it becomes self sustaining. To use your brussel sprout analogy, if they started hyping and pushing brussel sprouts everyday, you can bet they could sell them like chocolate. I mean if they can sell worthless people like Paris Hilton to the public, brussel sprouts are a much easier subject :)

Quote - But even granting all of that -- Disney is a much, much bigger company than either Playboy, Inc. or Larry Flynt's outfit.

Except that disney has not made a hit CG animated movie in decades. The only profit they have made from animation is by releasing Pixar movies and their theme parks. Which is why they recently handed large parts of their animation section to pixar hotshots to rebuild.

Also note i wasn't talking about porn here. Not being family friendly doesn't automatically make something pornographic you know. There are plenty of mature subjects you can tackle, without ever showing a boob or a butt. Look at Miyazaki's amazing animations like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or Nausicaa to see brilliant examples. Or Iron giant or Grave of the Fireflies. They are anime, but none of them have any sexual content. Not even a kiss. But they deal with loss and war and love and pain. Subjects which you cant always share with kids, but which even non horny adults can enjoy.

Of course i don't really expect the hollywood which is making this:

(Clicky...)

...to change it's mind, but as long as we have our japanese brethren to produce whatever wonderful (and yes even perverted) stuff they want, we can at least have a wide variety to choose from.

Quote - If the goal is to SELL -- then you give the people what they want.  Not what your ideology informs you that they should want.  That's a perception problem which a lot of people have trouble with.

Unfortunately, some of it is pretty self fulfilling. Studios think that the audience wants kiddy G movies, so they produce them and promote them up the wazoo. People go see such movies because there isnt anything else on tap and they dont even realise you can have anything else. So of course the movie does well and the studios think the audience wants... and so on.

It is changing though as several hyped movies of this sort have flopped recently. Ant Bully was one big one that fell. Also polar express and that haunted house one. Happy feet got awards but it also barely did a profit. Flushed away, open season, also did mediocre business. The only one doing well consistently have been of course Pixar, but they produce the least kiddy fare of them all. Or if it is kiddy, the quality of their work makes up for it cause they rely more on deeply moving stories then snap talking animals doused in pop culture.

Also here's an interesting look at the whole thing... When you compare the largest online message boards:

Largest Online Boards

The largest one, a 7.5 million strong forum, is an anime themed board. There is nothing even close for all hollywood animated movies combined. Makes you wonder why some hollywood type isn't going after this market.

$999 for CS3 extended + $149 for rendition.

While, LW alone is $795, and XSI foundation is $499. You could get Photoshop 7/CS/CS2 and either one of those and not only get great renderers, but also awesome modelling and anim apps, plus most of the tools of CS3.

Maybe one of these :

Urgent Floating T Rem Poses

Rule 34

I invoke rule 34 :p

It's not just shrek, most CG movies of this sort are kid movies. Everything from pixar, disney, dreamworks and so on are all for kids, with some adult laughs thrown in for good measure. This is just how the western industry sees CG.

If you want more adult themes then there is always anime, which deals with much more varied stuff.

And we the audience get to enjopy both kinds of work, so it's all good...

Quote - but if i were looking to hire someone i can say i'd pick the person who doesn't reinvent the wheel and uses the easiest, quickest, cheapest and most effective way possible to achieve spec.  frankly, that's a skill in itself, and if you only know the long way, it's a more expensive hole in one's knowledge than the other way around.  i consider my propensity to build rather than customize a great, great weakness of mine.

This works both ways. A person who only knows the short cut will be in a fix the first time they encounter something that is outside of what the short cuts handle. Someone who knows only the long way usually has a deeper understanding of the work and can often cobble together what they need from scratch, while the other guy is standing around scratching his head. Which is more expensive depends on how badly your system is screwed LOL

Quote - i mean, i looked at every page of the preview of the "essence: the face" book by ballistic.  every single piece looks so much like v3 i can't see the point.

You are not alone, other people were also complaining about the book at CGTalk. But the publisher donates part of the money from sales to run that site, so it can be somewhat excused i think.

Quote - i shouldn't get mad because i spent ages trying to get a  material and lighting correct, because i could do the same thing they did and chose to make my life harder.  that's not something i feel i should be proud of

I understand that you want every work to be judged solely on what it is and not where it came from But IMO in CG, the process is just as, if not more, important then the result. Because it's only the combination of process + result that lets us judge a work fairly. If we only use the result, then how do we discount the powerful hardware and software that is helping the artist, and get to the artist's skill itself ?

Or do we really want the richest artist with the largest runtime and the most expensive apps be the one with the most accolades ? Or the one most capable of deceiving people ?

Quote - ghonna - thanks very much for the links.  i actually find them quite heartening.  in response to "running back to poser sites," how many different ways can i say this isn't about  a review i've received?  frankly, i don't think it would matter what program i use- my first post to cgsociety will get slammed (if i ever make one).  because first everything sucks.  i'm guessing that the best tactic will be to gnash my teeth and beat my breast  or wail and moan in the privacy of  my computer room, internalize what i find helpful, throw out the rest, and thank everyone for their responses.   seeing the reaction isn't just,  "model your own figure," and "don't use poser," is very, very heartening.   i have seen people say precisely that.

I wasn't singling you (or anyone else) out... I'm just saying that, that is what many people seem to do when they get negative crits for their poser work. I'm sure you have seen the regular posts about this that are created here right ?

Quote - i'm searching through cgsociety now, and i'm not seeing nearly as much positive as you did.  i'm seeing lots of, "it's better to model your own figures."  and people being outed for using daz content.  and even one person saying that calling anime uncreative is as bad as comparing it to Poser.  and that's just in the choice area.  but one statement was interesting: that functionality like poser would become the norm in 3d programs when we had completed a codification of the biped, and that those who slammed premade customizable content  as from poser (which many members mentioned) would become as out of date as the people who once slammed cg art altogether.  though now i can't seem to find that post again, so i should get some sleep.

CGtalk has more then a 100k members, and out of those barely a few thousand are the 'pros' The rest are the wannabes and the hangers on who have posts full of fanboyism and silliness. So of course every post should be taken with a grain of salt. But in general, the poser opposition is not as bad as most of us think it is. And it will keep becoming friendlier, the more people post there. That's how Vue, Wings and Blender got their own forums at CGTalk after all.

Also this : "and people being outed for using daz content."

This is something I would like to address. Note that in all the links i posted, the artist has clearly and in the first post stated that have used poser. And because they have been honest about what they have used and where, almost no one is jumping on them for using it.

It's the liars and cheats that get the bashing, and have gotten poser the reputation it has at such places. Not that poser is bad, or it's users are not artists, but that some of them like to make fake claims.

Heck you can even see this in our own galleries where we have some rather suspicious photo manips being passed off as poser work...