Have they no decency? First they suckered me in with the monthly PC Club and sale last year. Next thing I know, there's a great bonus pack with the annual renewal and I buy that. Then there were 50% off sales and free products that conned me into buying things for the Freak and She-Freak and other products. The evil DAZ empire must be stopped--but let's wait till I finish buying other cool stuff I want. Admittedly, it wasn't till I got into the PC Club that I started buying from other Poser sites, like Rendo, RDNA, Sixus1, PoserWorld, and PoserStyle. There is something to be said for getting customers to make that first purchase. On the good side, it's also convinced me to start doing images with the products I've been getting.

"The first two images are an example of an effect that was achieved through postwork that probably also could have been achieved in the render itself by working with the lighting of the renderer." Yes and no. I can't be more definitive because I haven't tried and won't try. Part of the problem with the "before" image is that it didn't look that bad on my laptop. It takes about a half hour to render an image on my laptop, where I do most of my Poser work. I do anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen renders to get the lighting and composition right in an image. Due to the long rendering times, I hit a point where things are about right rather than perfect. "About right" means I'm getting the light, color, and shadows where I want them. The exact intensity is of less interest and minor color tints can be corrected more efficiently in Photoshop than Poser. The color correction I made took less than ten minutes to achieve. Every variation I make is instantly visible in Photoshop. Every variation in Poser lighting is unknown until a production render is made. I can very efficiently tweak colors in Photoshop. Trying to do the same thing in Poser is impossible without wasting weeks of time. It's not a matter of mastering a program, but becoming proficient in all the tools and knowing which are best at what. We've all had to make do with the tools available to us, but it still makes more sense to use the right tool for the right job. I've had to use the back end of a fork when I didn't have a screwdrive or pliers instead of a wrench when I didn't have a wrench. Nobody would tell me that I should practice more of removing screws with these alternate devices. When a new version of Poser or a DAZ Studio can give me accurate real time views of what happens when I change a light, I'll do more experimentation in the application. Till then, I'd rather punch up an image in Photoshop because it's the most efficient means to do so. It would still be nice to see more "before and after" examples. It's nice to see now far each artist takes Poser and how much of the artistic wizardry comes after the Poser render.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=gagnonrich

You can use mine and try to figure out which of your poses were used in the illustrations. A couple have only minor tweaks, but many, such as the SWAT officer, only retained a small amount of the original pose (the SWAT officer's holding of the gun is about the only recognizable thing kept).

Thanks for the tips. It won't be till the weekend that I can try them out. I wanted to take some time to find a tutorial on the subject because too many queries are about things that are very fundamental and not hard to find information on. This question fell into that category. That's why the subject line is about the manual--in hopes that somebody wull bring the subject to CL's atention. There's something very wrong when a person cannot use the manual to apply a new feature to its most common application.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=625887

This is my favorite image so far. I'm not even sure why because it started as something just to put in a star background for a tutorial. It's a nice simple thoughtful image of a girl staring out into space. I got a few complaints in another forum that the head seemed the wrong shape, but I'm wondering if the shadows caused that perception. One surprise was that nobody had a problem with a balloon aboard a spaceship. It turned out to be a nice bridge between the present and the future even though it was a last minute addition to the image.

"the tone of your second post was insulting and argumentative" Well, I got what I thought were flippant responses and replied in kind and should not have. Sometimes flippant comes across funny, sometimes it doesn't. There's one aspect of this forum that I find frustrating and it's this sense of being second class artists. I've seen so many queries treated with suspicion and posters trying to guess at angles behind questions. I don't think that anybody here ever ought to be ashamed of what they're doing if they make the effort to do it well. Maybe I should have been clearer in my original query that I was simply looking for artists whose work best exemplify how Poser can be used as an artistic tool and that genre doesn't matter. Opinions are expected and one size doesn't fit all. There is so much artwork on this site that it boggles the mind. I posted something at midnight one day and twelve hours later there were more than 200 other images posted after mine. Given that there is only so much time in a day and there are so many works of art being posted, where are the good starting points to finding the best images here? If somebody thinks that so-and-so does awesome HouseMouse renders, it's probably still worth a look.

Sigh...it's not a trick question. Whose work do you look forward to seeing? Who does stuff you wish you could do? Who would you show to people who think all Poser is garbage. "Genre?" - don't care "Define best" - get a dictionary - if I didn't expect a wide cross-section of opinions, I wouldn't have asked "No such thing as best" - who's real good, then? "The one's that have the most friends; OK what I win?" - An award for sarcasm? "Me" - Sorry, but you're good "It might help if you defined what you are looking for." - I did - if you want to give me one in every category, that's okay. Here's a few of my faves; show me yours: Flak http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Flak Yamoto http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Yamato Fatale http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Fatale As I'm looking at David Ho's thumbnails, I think I've got a new favorite.

Attached Link: Woodland playset with monster

The playsets are great. I've used them for a couple images already.

Here's an example of how I'm doing the indexing. There's multiple lines for one DAZ item because a sort on the third column, Category, will put all the hairs together, all the poses together, etc.

For the curious, the last column is Yes or No if there is a texture. Additional columns, not shown, are for image usage restrictions: None (commercial or personal use allowed), Unstated (has a readme, but doesn't specifically identify usage), no readme, or personal use only; Disk # (so I can find it); and notes if there's something worth saying about the item that's not evident in the thumbnail. There are some things I'd already do differently since I indexed this item last year. Clothing textures should be moved to the clothing item; same with hair and hair textures. The index keeps evolving as it gets bigger. New subcategories get created when there's too many items in it. At least it's providing me a lot of utility.

I've used Excel a bit with graphics at work and it seems more difficult than Word. Does anybody have experience with using a lot of graphics in Access? I'm not in the market for buying an expensive commercial database program because this is just a hobby. I like the idea of unzipping everything and using a thumbnail program to catch all the .png's. I wanted something more complete even though it's taking considerably more work. I've been creating thumbnails for .3ds and other files that Poser has to import. Word searches don't catch everything, so I'm putting up with the manual effort to thoroughly index everything. A word search won't find every sword if "sword" isn't in the name ("dragonslayer" is a sword, but a search wouldn't find that). A lot of zips contain items in multiple categories. A fancy package might include a character, hair, various clothing items, props, poses, lights, and all kinds of goodies. It's kind of silly trying to index everything, but it's finally becoming useful.

He kept telling everyone that attention to detail and working out every aspect of the story/novel/screenplay had to be done before a single line could be written. That's for people who have very rigid organized ways of doing things. Does anybody know a successful writer or artist like that? I've often heard writers say that their books were changed as they started writing what the characters were doing and thinking. It wasn't a planned direction for the book, but it took writing it to more fully flesh out the characters. If somebody took the time to fully write down all the details of a work before starting it, they'd probably never start it. It would seem that it's far more productive to tackle the project and get as much of it done as possible because it's often necessary to start walking down the path to see where it leads. Spending too much time preparing to walk will only delay starting. I know, when I write, that I can build the framework of what I want to say in my mind, but until I start putting words down, I tend to get stuck on refining the same things. Once the words come out on paper or the screen or whatever, my mind starts processing what should be said next. Just getting the words out starts forming new thoughts and connections that didn't exist till I got that far. I cannot imagine not doing anything till everything has been laid out in exhausting detail. That's how to build a house, not a work of art.

Attached Link: Fatale's We Will Rust

It's better to make a comparison to something like the above link. Personally, I can tell it's 3D, but I doubt anybody could say it's Poser versus Max or Maya. 3D is more limiting than 2D art because the control is in the program versus the artist to some degree. That's not a bad thing. The renderer in a 3D program controls the final result of the render whereas an artist has to paint all the lighting and can make it do things for artistic effect that a computer program isn't designed to do. Add postwork and the differences begin to shrink.

Attached Link: The image that pissed off a Poser bigot

I know how you feel. My second ever bit of Poser art got trounced by somebody who took offense to my not having created any of the models. My reaction was initially, What the F? I credited where I got the models. I entered the drawing under Poser. It's not as if I was taking credit for what I didn't create. At that point, I hadn't encountered the prejudice against Poser. The Poser community is nice and helpful, so I wasn't prepared to get slammed for using the program. I think it was Anton who dismissed the guy as being jealous. Initially, I didn't think that was the case, but the more I thought about, the more I realized that was probably behind the reaction I got. The guy gave me a zero rating--which is more an angry response than anything else. Why should somebody get upset over a piece of artwork just because it was done in Poser and it's probably because he didn't like comparing the work he was modeling against an artwork created by somebody using better models. As everybody is saying, Poser is a tool. So is a pencil. A pencil is a very unsophisticated, completely low-tech tool. Yet, works of art can and have been created with a pencil. Not everybody can do that, but it's not the fault of the pencil. The same with Poser, Maya, or whatever. Neither software or art materials make an artist. They are just the means to an artistic end. Is Boris Vallejo less of an artist because he uses photos as reference? How about Grant Wood and his famous painting "American Gothic". The couple in the painting are based on photos taken of his sister and dentist. Leonardo DaVinci's paintings used live models as reference. Are these painters less painters because their work doesn't spring totally from their heads? Is Poser art? I don't know. Is Maya art?--No more so than Poser. The traditional art world isn't any more enamored with one program or another. Is a circle in a square really symbolizing man's place in the universe? Not to me, it's just a circle and a square and a huckster pretending to be an artist because he's thought for weeks about a concept and spent a couple minutes creating what is no more sophisticated than what a child could do. Is that art? According some critics, it is. Me, and most of the people in the world, don't think so. Remember last year's news story about a midwestern woman, Teri Horton, who found a newly discovered Jackson Pollock painting potentially worth millions of dollars? She bought it at an antique shop for a few bucks as a joke for her sister. She thought it was something scribbled by a child. To the art world, it might be a lost masterpiece. If you want to know how fickle "Art" is, the painting is either worth millions or nothing. Isn't that just as ridiculous about arguing whether Poser is art? The painting doesn't change if the art world validates it as a Pollock painting. Just perceptions change. The painting either has merits on its own or it doesn't. Otherwise, aren't we just talking about the Emperor's New Clothes? It's an indication of how meaningless it is to judge what art is. Anybody who thinks one program or tool makes them better than somebody using another is a fool. It's an irrational conceit. The tool doesn't make the artist.

I've got no complaints about the human form. I am using Poser, aren't I? I bought the 1 1/2" thick Digital Beauties Japanese pin-up book of 3D art because of the variety of artwork it contained. Ive got a ton of Playboys all photos magazines. I love looking at the female form. More often than not, Id rather look at the real thing. I guess I could ask myself the question of why I don't do more pinups. The quick and fast answer is because I don't want to. There's not a lot of conscious thought behind it. Ive never done much pinup stuff. I learned how to draw from tracing comic books and I find, whenever I do a drawing, that I tend to be illustrating an action or event rather than a doing a figure study. I suppose part of the reason, for not doing pinups, is that I can more readily hire an attractive model and photograph a far greater variety of real live images in a few hours than I could achieve in months of Poser work. Poser does provide a greater variety of costuming than I could readily find, but would be less real than photographing a professional model and a whole lot less fun. Im drawing what I like and others are drawing what they like. Its just interesting how the stats are skewed here. I dont think its kids that are skewing the results because theyd have a hard time finding Renderosity if they werent looking for Poser--its much easier finding photos of real nude women on the net. The bulk of better looking Poser images are being created by adults because it takes a certain amount of time and experience to do it well. Besides, not many people even know that Poser exists. A computer expert, at work, was amazed that there was a program to do something like Poser and Bryce and helped me order a few copies of each because he could see how it could be used for charts and advertisements. The times that Ive shown Poser to kids, they seem less interested in the unclothed figures than in dressing them up and producing images with knights and dragons and princesses.

It still doesn't quite answer why Poser pinups over the real thing? Maybe some guys are looking for gravity defying artillery shells instead of normal breasts. Even the most massively artificially chested porn stars still deal with gravity--even if it has a hard time acting on a giant saline plastic bag implanted chest. I can understand fantasy being the largest gallery category because it represents images that don't otherwise exist. There's no shortage of pinup images of real women on the net, so it's less a question of why do people want to look at women as why they want to look at digital women.