you need to set up a constrained group on the cloth that corosponds to the spot you want to stick to the hand. alternately if you want it to do a controlled slide over the hand you can create a choriographed group which you can animate like any other object that group will rigidly follow the path you set for it while the rest of the cloth flows around it.

Bryce and View are great landscape programs, easy to learn and fairly inexpensive you can get great results in both building exteriors and interiors alike but if you are looking for a modeler you'll have to look elseware. If you can find a back issue of Digit#46 april it comes with Amapi 5.15 free it is strictly a modeler but not too difficult to learn. as was said before blender is also free but frankly I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Anim8or is not difficult but I've never been able to get the results that Geralday does. though i have found it useful for morph modeling. most of the others are well out of my budget. it really comes down to what you want to do with it.

the Judy joints are definately better then Vicky but not by tons. I personaly love Vicky and will still use her at least as much as Judy. the unending morphs alone were worth the purchase price to me. but saying that I'm sure that talented modelers will be coming out with Judy morphs in no time. from clues dropped V#3 is due out in the not too distant future so if you like judy you might want to hold out a little longer for vicky.

no software company takes returns on opened software, it would be too easy to load it onto your computer register it and then return it using some excuse, leaving the full version on your computer for you to use, as well as burning copys. of course it never hurts to ask perhaps they would take into account your dissapointment with the software, but I wouldn't count on it.

drop your transparency falloff to 0 for some reason it's set automaticly to .06

As I said before Mat poses still work so if you want the simplest world possable, all you have to do is avoid textures that don't come with mat poses. I have mostly Daz and steffyz textures loaded and I have yet to load a tex map by hand for any of my figures, though I've played with the material room for other textures.

I think the answer is quite simple, if you want or need all the new features and don't mind a bit of a learning curve to get them go for P5 (if you realy count the individuals who are posting major instability problems you'll find the number is not that large, it just seems so becouse the same people post regularly of their problems. thats not to say that there arent real hardware compatability issues with this program, just that it does'nt seem to affect most people, I for one have not yet had one crash or major usability issue.)if you don't need the new features and like the simplisity of P4 by all means stick with it it is a great program. and so many new features can slow a system down some. I compare it to the difference between photoshop and paint shop pro, photoshop is so much more versitile and complex. it loads slower and many of the features work slower but if you need those features you deal with it. for my use paint shop pro does the job, I use Photoshop at work but Ill never put it on my home computer.

yes there is an extra step, but thats the price you pay for the amazing versatility of the material room, and when you learn to use this powerful new tool you won't be dissapointed, adding real reflection and depth to the eyes adding translucency to the skin, displacement maps, all sorts of effects that were impossable in P4, attaching a node to the diffuse channel doesn't seem that difficult to me. once they get used to the system many people will wonder how they did without it. and mat files still work.

Looking very cool so far Jerr. good work :)

Vicky doesn't load with her textures you generaly have to add a mat file. you can load the textures manuly by adding the proper shader node but loading the mat files will work as well

I heard CL put floride in our water to enslave our minds!!! Oh wait that was the russians, nevermind.

There is actualy a way to export it by modifying the .Obj file but it's not worth the effort as the resulting hair is a jagged single block, of little or no use in bryce. best to stick with transmapped hair for exporting. the eye situation is the same as mike and vicky and can be fixed as noted above.

conforming clothing is designed to conform to the body so close fitting clothing will overlap each other in the manner pictured. they won't conform to the cat suit they weren't designed to do that. you can fiddle with the scale dials or you can try making the other clothing into dynamic cloth and do collisions against the catsuit with them.

to answer your other questions, yes strand based hair works fine for other parts of the body especialy as they do not have to be as dense as head hair. I've done some experiments and it works fine, though I have not had the time to do a finished piece to illustrate yet. I also tried growing hair on the poser cat(Yes, I wanted to do a hairy pussy;)), it is possable assuming enough ram to do it. but styling that much hair is time consuming to the extreme, consider fur patterns on animals. the directions change depending on where on the animal you are growing the hair and to make it look realistic those directions have to change gradualy. the grain of the fur has to curve organicly. not the easyest thing to do with the strands. Doable but time consumeing, I spent several hours mapping and sculpting the hair on the head of the cat alone and finally gave up for the time being as my eyes were going cross with the effort. I'll go back to it one of these days.

Really Marque? which version? too bad I don't get tech TV. there were actually two series the british one was about a half a dozen shows then an american version which the first half dozen were done from the exact same scripts with many of the same actors with some american actors taking the place of british ones though the main actors stayed the same (my favorits were syd and reg who ran a pirate telivision station) Jeffrey Tambor was in the american version. Frewer played dual charicters, Edison Carter, (freelance news/camera man) and Max Headroom. the whole show had a gritty Bladerunner feel and ran for a dozen or so shows. the thing is that though the show was interesting and rather well written, Max got amazingly annoying after a while and you just wanted to get back to edison carter. I know, way more then anyone wanted to know about it but in my opinion this was a show that could have run several seasons if it wasn't for the title charicter.