That model is HORRIBLE! They are touting their knowledge of human anatomy yet the model demonstrates otherwise. In one image the right biceps actually has a huge concave unnaturally rounded area! That model is really pretty grotesque! LOL

Body Paint is really good about file formats. It works smoothly with Photoshop files, Lightwave files, OBJ, 3DS and lot's more. It is also the only one of the two that will run on both Mac and PC. The interactive mapping in Body Paint is absolutly kick butt and really speeds up the mapping process. And the bottom line, Body Paint is half to one-third the cost of Deep Paint depending upon the configuration. Another bonus of Body Paint is that you get the C4D rendering engine with it, which is really nice. So that gives you yet another option for rendering out images, the abillity to "surface bake" procedural shaders into texture maps, abillity to render out tileable material maps from painted textures, and so much more. Both are fantastic programs with more painting and UV mapping tools than you could get tired of. But they both offer a significanlty different workflow and set of features beyond the primary "mapping and painting" functions, so do look into those opportunities from each program as well. Best of luck!

FWIW, I hope the Renderosity folks don't read my suggestions as bitching! ; ) Having been a web developer myself I understand the great challenge of Information Architechture, which is an ongoing issue for any web site.

Hecate, you're right. This isn't the biggest deal in the >world, but to expect us to catagorize our works is absurd. I agree with this! And I will build on it. I recently posted a 3D comic I created and had to choose between the two programs I used to create it. Was it a "Poser" image or a "Vue" image? And for that matter, I used Photoshop and Illustrator as well! What I really wanted was to post it under "3D Comic" or "Fantasy worlds" or "Stories" or something like that. 1 - The categories should be based on the final product, NOT the program used to create them. 2 - A user should be able to use several categories at one time. The way the system is now, it would be like searching for a television program by looking under "beta cam", "high def" or "public broadcast through a relay station"! Or selecting a movie to go see by categories like "filmed in New Zealand" or "Stars people you will recognize". LOL

So we can expect to see P5 for free on a Magazine CD by June, right? LOL!

First, I will say that I fell that ANY book by Mortier is not worth it, and the 3D Comix one is no exception! I would echo a post above by saying that you should look into books about creating traditional comics and then simply apply those principles using 3D programs. I don't think there are any books on 3D comics, but I could be wrong. The best book in the world, IMHO, is called "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. Not only is will you learn a lot about how comics work but you will also get a great history of comics and art in general, and the book is an invaluable reference to graphic design in general. ANY artist would benefit greatly from reading this book. Next I would suggest looking up books on drawing, such as "how to draw comics the Marvel way" and other similar titles. This will give you insight into how traditional comics are constructed from step 1 to final coloring and they usually include info on perspectives, staging, composition, frames, page layout, etc. Great stuff. And finally I would recommend a book called "The Writers Journey" by Christopher Vogler. This book gives the story teller a great set of tools to use for creating complete stories of any kind that really move an audience. The book is a fairly easy read and the information in it is possibly more valuable to you than any of the other books on comics themselves. Best of luck! It's easier than it sounds to make 3D comics and fun as can be! I recently made my first ever 3D comic and now I'm hooked! I made this using Poser characters rendered in Vue, with some Lightwave models thrown in for sets and props.

Cool new additions. Well done! I would like to see a feature that allowed me to exclude certain categories rather than include them. For instance, search everything but exclude "beginner" and also exclude "Seasonal". I'm sure there are others who would appreciate the option to sort out nudity, etc. That sort of search would be great!

I've experienced an issue like this in the past and came up with a solution that works for me. First off, even though OSX is supposed to be dynamically allocating ram even for classic applications I find it best to always allocate what you want those classic apps to have anyway or there will be low memory error issues arising. That being said, I found it possible to allocate too much ram! I have 1.1 gig of ram on a dual 800/G4 and setting Poser to 800MB will create a slow and unstable program that gives me memory errors when loading figures. But reducing the ram allocation to 500mb lets poser run as smooth as it ever has with no memory or speed issues whatsoever. Go figure! FWIW, Poser runs better for me in classic under OSX 10.2.4 than is ever has before, even under OS9 native.

An even easier way to do this is to open your rendered animation in a video editing or compositing program and just key out the background color. Done. Then you don't have to fiddle with it frame by frame. It's often better to render using a green or blue, but you can have good results with many different colors, all depending upon what colors are in your "safe" area. There are many programs that can do this. Premier, Final Cut Pro, After FX, just to name a few.

Just to remind PC folk that Mac filenames cannot be longer >than 31 characters or MAT poses Yeah, this is the biggest issue. A point of clarification, this is only an issue on OS9. OSX does not have this limitation, but since Poser works through classic the OS9 issue still applies. It is easy to get confused though if a mac user downloads and instals the package in OSX then tries to use it. Also try to avoid spaces and special characters in your naming. Mac's are specific about these where Windows tends to be a bit more lax. As mentioned above, never use an EXE file. ZIP will do just fine. And I second the motion to put a link to MartinC's utility in the readme file. It sounds like you have plenty of Mac testers, but if you need yet another one I would be happy to help. I render all my Poser stuff in Vue.

You know... I hear a lot of BS here, heartfelt or not, but I can't help but notice that only one of you bothered to actually help this guy out by posting a link to a prop! LOL!

I recently used Poser 4 and Vue to produce a 2 page comic (my first ever!) and I the process worked FLAWLESSLY! I was very impressed at how easily Vue imported the pz3 files. They remained quick and easy to work with once imported as well. I highly recommend Vue to anyone looking to work with pz3 charactes in interesting environments.

Hiya Josh! Thanks for the pushback. ; ) While it is true that I had a financial relationship with DAZ it did not involve DAZ Studio in any way so there is no influence at all in my product preferences. My feelings about Poser and Poser 5 pre-existed my relationship with DAZ and in fact were a major factor in my decision to do the business I did with DAZ, so there is nothing new due to influence. In my postings on this thread about Poser 5 I have not once mentioned DAZ Studio, rather expressed my dissatisfaction with Poser as a product and CL's strategies. The primary reason behind my move to Maya was to access things that I'm positive neither Poser 5 nor DAZ Studio will make available to me so I really dont have a specific interest in seeing a victory by one over the other. And since we are on the topic, I should also be very clear that I really dont know anything more about Poser 5 or DAZ Studio as products than anyone else does. I have never seen the code for either, nor have I seen any screenshots or printed information that hasn't been publicly posted, and I have never worked with running alpha or beta software for either (no matter how hard I have tried to!). Most of my speculation around these products comes from my experience working in various roles in professional software development ventures, my experience as a 3D animator, and my own estimation about what the publicly offered information really means. Also to be fair, like many people here I am under NDA with both DAZ and CL, not to mention a couple of other entities, so I dont say a lot of things I know to a lot of people. That leaves me with not much other than emotional speculations to use when conversing about these topics. Since I really dont use Poser anymore and dont have any plans to I suppose I should stop any negative postings about the entire issue. Not because I owe anything to anyone but because it simply doesn't gain me anything and there is enough negativity in the world already. I also wish success and well being for both CL and DAZ (and the rest of you) and since you made an issue out of my relationships with both of them then it would be easy for someone else to do so as well, but worse it could be taken out of context as things so often are in this community and end up damaging someone who doesnt deserve it. If any of you have read any of my previous posts about Poser 5 you know how I feel about it, and nothing short of a rock solid super fast release of Poser for OSX and Windows with yet unannounced features and a new GUI will change my mind. Nuff said, and with that I will leave the issue alone from now on. So since we are at it, perhaps you have a financial relationship with DAZ also? ; ) >PS. For those interested in the Macintosh, we just released >BodyStudio (the Maya Poser plugin... for Macintosh!) Now that is good news! I'm on my way to check it out. Maybe there will be a use for Poser 4 again after all!

Uh, Poser was written for the Apple (don't know which one) NOT the Mac. Sorry, but actually Poser was written for the "Mac". The "Macintosh" first appeared in 1984 and every Apple computer since then has been a "Mac". There were a few questionable naming variations along the way, like the "Performa" but overall every Apple computer since 1984 has been a "Mac". I still have the original 3 disk instal of Poser 1. It's a pretty funny thing to see! ; )

If that is you at your positive best, I feel sorry for you. Don't ever feel sorry for me, but thanks anyway. ; ) >If dynamic cloth, atmospheric effects, and wonderful texture tricks >such as displacement mapping don't attract you, then surely the library Those features are exciting to me, but I already have them in Maya and Lightwave where they are more advanced, and currently available on OSX I might add. What I really loved about Poser was the abillity to quickly set up a character and then blow it out into another program to work with. Poser 5 offers me nothing in the way of workflow improvements, and CL will probably charge more for the "pro pack" when and if that ever arrives. And it;'s been said before but new "features" in the same crummy interface with the same crummy lighting system, the same wonky character set up process, no open GL previews, etc. is not "exciting" to me. So for me personally, Poser 5 looks like waiting a long time to spend a lot of money for something I really dont ever need, and then probably having it run poorly to boot. >As for a lack of experience with OSX, you ought to remember that >Poser was originally a Mac product. I don't think Poser 1 ever came out >for the PC. These guys were Mac programmers first. The Unix kernel > would be different, but the Mac way of doing things would be familiar. There isn't really a "Mac way" of doing things. Programming for OSX is very different than programming for OS9. Even if a programmer used the same language there are still a whole lot of new things to learn about how the system works. No one is at fault for not having experience with OSX because it is very new, but that learning curve should be kept in mind when considering product purchases. I also just dont take any company seriously who doesn't commit to a launch date and stick to it. "We are banging away at it..." is not indicitive of a company who is serious about getting a product to market. And they certainly can't exite me about thier product with behaviour like that. If they are stuggling to get the product out at all they cant be innovating, optimizing code, improving workflow or anything else so important to me in a graphics application. Project management? Resource allocation? This should be really basic stuff to a software company but CL exibits none of this. I'm not mad at them. I just dont take them seriously. ; )