Unfortunately, I'm probably atypical in what I buy, but here's what I look for: Ethnic characters. Xie's face is a good start, but I'd like to see a little more tint to it. Right now, without the face morphs, I'd think it was a standard, though pretty, Caucasian face. (Yes, I know that some Asian complexions don't have a slight yellow or olive tint to them, but I already have enough Caucasian skins to put onto morphed meshes.) I'd like to see a little more realism by way of flaws. Instead of getting 18 make-up options, I'd rather have 2 faces - idealized and very flawed - bags under eyes, a few veins visible, a few scars on face, etc. I'd love to get a set like that so I can blend the face textures together to get a variety of real-world looks. If the package doesn't have a no-makeup option, I won't buy it. End of matter. I like doing fantasy renders and when you're in the equivalent of the 1200s, there isn't much Maybelline around. (And some no-makeup textures look good on the guys, esp. since my people are usually clothed so little differences in male/female body textures wouldn't be noticeable.) Xie's lips are borderline to me. I hate the over-puffed lip look that so many merchants are using. I've gotten to the point where if I see the lips, I ignore the product, regardless of how the texture itself looks. If the upper lip was thinned a bit, I think it would look better. Otherwise the face and body shape look very nice. I just took a look at Dhara, and I think a part of the problem is that you rendered her on a black background for your promo shots. I just assumed it was a dark render instead of a darker skinned female, especially with the blue eyes and brown hair. Hope this helps, Cres

I still hang around here. It's just that DAZ is keeping me pretty busy, so it's a little more lurking than posting here. Nice to see you, too, :) Cres

Thanks! That was one of the last places I'd ever have expected to find that. Have a great night, Cres

I usually parent clothing to the Hip of the figure - unless it's something like a scarf, in which case I'll parent it to the Head. The Hip is the central part of each figure, so if you parent the Hip, you can more easily work up and down the figure to get the clothing to fit. Hope this helps, Cres

I'm guessing that Morph Manager is showing the internal name of the morph instead of the name you see on the dials. If you open up the Smile Delight INJ file in a text editing program (like Notepad), you should see some lines similar to: readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:StephPetite:EthnicHeads:ChanVis:Unhide.African1.pz2" Look at the name of what's being unhidden (in this case African2) and see if that shows up in Morph Manager. It may have a name like PBMDC_01 or PBMCC_01. (For the life of me, I can't remember what the difference is between those.) If you see that, then that's what needs to be moved over in Morph Manager. Hope this helps, Cres

I'm not familiar with the Smile Delight morph. I'm assuming that it uses one of the empty morph channels in V3. Try this: Load V3 SR2 in Poser. Inject the Smiles Delight morph that you want. Save the character to the library as V3-Smiley. In Morph Manager, load V3-Smiley on one side, and David in the other. Go to the V3 head morphs and find the smile morph that you'd injected early. Copy that morph to David. Save David as David-Smiley. Open up David-Smiley in Poser. The morph and morph info should be there for you so all you need to do is turn the morph dial. Hope this helps, Cres

From what I've read, the Drudge Report has ripped off other people as well - posting pictures taken by a columnist with minor Photoshop changes, for example.

Pantone has a few hardware monitor calibration kits. I just got one the other day. It helped some, but I have 2 different monitors and even after the calibration I played with one screen a bit so it better matched the other. One problem is that even if your monitor is spot-on, perfectly calibrated, very few other people's monitors are. And MAC vs. PC monitors are also different in how they display things. In other words, ya can't win. ;-) Cheers!

Anytime you see a grouping of dots, it means the item has a transparency map applied to it, so it won't show up until you render the image. You'll see a lot of clothing items load invisible, or turn invisible with MAT files, because of transparency maps. I don't know which texture package you have, so here's some general pointers. With some texture packages, there's a base texture file that you apply first, then apply the makeup texture afterwards. That could be what's happening in this case. Other packages will apply all the textures each time, even if it's just a difference in the head textures. You will need to render the image to see what the final result looks like. As well, some texture packages contain "skin tones" which only modify the underlying color of the mesh. You'd need to apply the full texture, then use the skin tones to add more color to the mesh - it's like the difference between your normal skin color and after sun bathing for a while. (That's probably not what's happening in this case, but I figured I'd hit that one before you stumbled on it. I've been thrown by that a few times and I've been doing this for years.) Hope this helps, Cres

You might want to look at DAZ's 3D Starter Content bundle. It has V3 Reduced Resolution and M3 Reduced Resolution included, and they do have morphs. The figures aren't as finely detailed as V3 and M3 (they're still better than Posette and Dork by a long shot!), but they will fit into the V3/M3 clothing and use the texture maps, plus you get some other goodies in the pack as well. It's only $30, so I think it's a good way to start off. http://secure.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=2635 Cheers!

If you select the face, you should see morphs there, which may or may not include nose morphs. (Morphs are not in alphabetical order most of the time, so scroll through the list.) If you don't see any, or can't get the morph you want, you can create your own. www.morphworld30.com has some excellent magnet tutorials. (Magnets pull/push parts of the mesh to create morphs.) Make sure the clothing you put on a character is made for that character. Vicki clothing will not fit Judy, etc. (Imagine being a size 12 and trying to fit into your size 4 friend's clothing. It usually doesn't work.) You're probably getting what's called poke-through. Make sure you've picked clothing that fits the character and conformed it. In some poses, you may get pokethrough. If the clothing should cover that body part completely, such as pants covering the thighs, you can select the thigh and turn it invisible. (Object: Properties.) You can also play with the scaling of the body part and/or the clothing piece. (Sometimes I can fix pokethrough with breasts by scaling the clothing up on the ZScale.) Also, check the clothing to see if it has morphs to cover up problem areas. It's hard to go into all the possibilities, but hopefully this will get you started. For makeup - look at tutorials that talk about creating your own texture. Those might make it easier for you to understand what I mean since they usually have lots of pictures to show how it works. Cheers!

Making clothing - that's an advanced concept and not for newbies to 3D. You can't make clothing in Poser - you'll need 3D modelling programs for that. Get comfortable in Poser first then try making simple props, etc., and branch out from there. Morphs - change the shape of a model. Yep, breast size is probably the most popular type of morph. Imagine that the mesh is made from clay. A morph pushes the clay in, or pulls it out in an area. You can spin dials or set the values directly. Morphs are made to look good from 0 to 1. A lot of times, the morph will also look good down to -1 as well. Anything below -1 or above 1 may or may not look good - it depends on the morph. Usually morphs work well when combined with other morphs, but not always. Make-up - this is a function of creating texture maps. A very rough analogy is a paint-by-numbers set or a world map that you color in. You can put whatever color you want on anywhere you want on the map, but if you run a yellow stripe down the 0 degree longitude line, you'll have a yellow stripe going down England. If you want to color the U.S., you'd have to go to the proper coordinates. Snow Sultan has some wonderful seam guides to help you figure out how to color in templates. Different meshes have different templates, just like a globe has to be colored differently than a flat map. Pixelation - I always recommend that you save as .tif or .psd. .jpg is a lossy compression scheme, so everytime you make changes to it and save it again, you lose a little bit of detail. I save as .tif, take things into PS and save that as .psd (that way I still have the original as .tif) and save my final result as .psd (to keep all my changes) then Save for Web as .jpg. I hope this pulls some stuff together for you, Cres

Use anything but the P5 default lighting. ;-) RuntimeDNA has the best free light sets. If you're a DAZ Platinum Club member, there's some nice light sets for $1.99 each as well. Hope this helps, Cres

Is there any place to provide a link to pictures made with the Anime Doll so people can wander around and see all the other party-goers? Thanks, Cres

Overall, it is safe to buy from merchants at the various sites. There have been a few cases of copyright violations, but unfortunately there's a bad apple or two in every group. Different sites have different procedures if there is a problem. (Again, it's pretty rare.) When you purchase an item, either your credit card or PayPal account is charged. At Rendie, there's a delay with your first order as they verify your credit card. After verification, your account will have links to download the purchase(s). Every purchase after that goes through normally and you will have access right away. You can use the purchases to create whatever type of images you want, even sell the images you produce using the products. (Obviously making images that are illegal in your area, such as kiddie porn, is a BAD idea.) You can modify anything you purchase, but can not redistribute the items - no matter how much you modify them - without the explicit written permission of the person you purchased the item from. Hope this helps, Cres