So, there's a very ugly workaround (load obj., morph, re-split via script) but they can't get it to work inside Poser?  It reminds me of a post in another forum where a blenderdefender told me that swapping blender's Y and Z axes to be like most other programs would require too much recoding of blender.  (Hmmm...  change "y" to "z" in GUI, check if object is native blender or import and reorient if necessary? Maybe change a hot key or something?)  I'm sure if it were more important to them they could find a way to do it.  I noticed a few people's answers in the survey (as discussed here) were quite different that mine.  I'm sure if "make morph tool work across seams" was one of those 1-to-5 questions it would get a few high rankings. 

I'd do something like export the body, minus hands and feet into tattoo or use UVmapper to make a UV you can paint on.  Then just create a mask to modulate the strength of the granite effect.  That could be done with colour math, right?  I'm thinking a mostly grey texture, with some soft airbrush white areas around the areas that would sweat the most, like the forehead. 

Truespace's preview is as close to what I want that I know of.  It can do displacements, subsurface scattering, soft shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections and projection lights in the realtime preview.  I'm just too old to wait hours for things to render.

Heh heh... Wait... How'd you know they were molars!!??

I was surprised, for the sheer number of modeling tools and just about everything else, by the things missing from TS currently.  Dynamic cloth and hair need addressed immediately, but even blender can do advanced fluids now.  I'd hate to have to make something like an apocalyptic flood or lava flow in TS from the tools I'm seeing.  Then again, it was the car hitting the ragdoll that made me buy it :)

I like conforming because once fit you can spawn a prop and clothify it.  It's much harder to convert dynamic to conforming ;)

Yeah, that's just one polygon.

My head a splode...

Well, I haven't messed with the noodles enough to get to that anyway.  I've played with bump, and displacements (Damn, every material that looks good has values in the <.2 range...  Shouldn't they recalibrate those?) environments and ambient...  Pretty much mastered those, and moving to math functions and procedurals next.  It wouldn't cause me too much trouble to put fresnel (how's that pronounced anyway?) on the lights, though I'd never have thought of that by my lonesome.  Things is, originally I had some crazy fantasy of foregoing rendering altogether and just running some filters over the preview output. Now I'm wondering if the enhanced hardware preview will render the corrected lights properly? (I've temporarily  given up on that partly because I like bumps and displacements, but mainly everything looks too floaty w/out shadows.  I'm seriously hoping for GLSL bump and parallax displacements with shadow mapping in P8's preview)  

While I'm on that topic allow me to post my first ever image to the forum:

When I got my teeth pulled a few weeks ago, the dentist told me to stay home and (I assume because I said I was a designer and was going to be on the computer while recovering) asked if I was going to play with Photoshop CS3.  Well, I don't really use Photoshop (Ultimate Paint and Satori Photo) but I think they (ef) are aware of the "buzz" around it.  Poser/Photoshop integration would be really sweet, and would sell alot of copies (to new users even); it's just not what I need, so I made other choices.  (Yes, it does seem like something most people wouldn't use, as cool as it sounds)

I can see where the inverse square thing is something I should keep in mind.  I'm really concerned about the diffuse lighting acting like specular lighting, though.  This just has to be a bug, and needs to be fixed.  I'll venture that it is the singular reason Poser renders can be so easy to spot to a trained eye!  Certainly I've fought against it without ever realising just what was amiss.

The new version is based on a brand new architecture, and it seems pretty solid.  They just don't have all of the tools ported, so now you kind of have to switch between old and new workspaces.  When they get that fixed and make it play nice with Poser I'll be much happier with it.  The two coolest new features are the near photorealistic preview and mixing dynamic and keyframed animations.  So, yeah, I hope they can work something out with ef.  Is this a rumour or just wishful thinking?

It wouldn't be any more work than just relabling it, and reorienting things at load/save time.  Nothing "under the hood" would have to change, really.  I've seen alot of programs have things like that be selectable, units of measurement for example.  It's just one of those blender quirks that turn people off when they are coming from another program.

That doesn't seem like it would work for animations.  I want to put alot of little billboards on the ground, move over them, but have them always face the camera,

This is exactly the type of thing that should be selectable.  It's a pain to flip every import and export that blender is involved in given that most every other program does it the normal way.