The palm can be bent, either through a morph or (I think) via JCM or whatever they call it now. It's a matter of linking through the wrist to the first finger joint somehow. However, the problem being that you can only move it very small increments as the top of the hand tends to warp too. A carefull and clever morph target would probably be the best but I have tried and failed dismally to make anything that works even remotely well. To be honest I'm rather surprised that nobody has done one yet, though I guess most people just don't get that close to their model's hands to worry about such a small thing. :)

The grasp and thumb dials give you a basic hand movement that closes the fingers, but for some weapons, like firearms you still need to get in with the hand camera and manually tweak the fingers using the dials. There's currently no collision detection in Poser so it doesn't know when something solid is encountered, in this case you have to judge where best to stop. If you change the tracking option to full you'll see the figure rather than the bounding boxes which will help a lot to judging when the fingers encounter an object. Don't worry about some collision because the fingers will naturally crush and appear thinner when grasping an item. All in all, I tend to use the dials almost exclusively for hand poses and will spend more time on the hands than the rest of the pose. But I've always found that full tracking when posing hands with/on/around an item is essential as it's all but impossible to judge by having the default setting active. That is only useful for broad movements where finesse isn't needed but speed and smoothness is.

I have to confess that I've always assumed that there is a difference to the way Mac writes and handles files - hence the need for a converter. Anything I do is done on a PC and I've noticed OS problems arising between Win98 and NT/2K, rare but sometimes compatibility issues are raised. As for sit/zip yes, either machine can open them, but surely there is some information added/stripped by the MacConverter program? Isn't it better to know that the file is purely Mac/PC based so that you know it needs to be fiddled with before it will work the way the author intended? Or am I way off base here?

As far as detail goes, your best bet is to find a high res photo in a magazine and scan that, applying it to a bump map. I've created most of my bump maps for eyes and lips this way. Skin can be done in a couple of different ways depending on what you want from it. For medium distance adding "noise" to the image in your graphics app will give the skin a texture, for close images again a high res Close photo of the section you want detailed should be sufficient. With judicious scaling, positioning and some brush work to spread and clone the texture you can create some interesting bump maps. I've recently been using medical photo's of wounds and surgery to create scars and while it takes a bit of work they come out quite nicely, it just takes a strong stomach and not doing it while dinner is being made. :) Blemishes like moles, freckles and beauty spots can be added to the initial skin texture itself by using a soft edged or feathered brush with the opacity/density turned down. There are all sorts of little things like that. It's a matter really of looking at something you want to do, then analysing how it looks on the skin and trying to replicate that. I've found it surprisingly helpful to lurk around some of the online medical advice and encyclopeadia sites as they will occassionally have pictures at a higher resolution and closer to the subject matter than many fashion magazines.

Attached Link: http://www.3dcomiccollective.com/3dhome.asp

There's a "Kung Fu" suit available at Poser Factory I think... I'm pretty sure it was there I saw one http://www.interq.or.jp/red/pandt21/ Many moons ago I downloaded a set of Tae Kwon Do poses, but not motions from a forgotten website. The read me only has the author's email in it (bagman@dave-world.net) you could try mailing him and asking for it. If that fails as there's no redistribution clause in the read me I could perhaps e-mail them to you. I don't know if there are any motion files available, someone else might know though. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

I seem to recall that the author of the clothing pack was hoping for next week, or was it early next month? Anyway, he's very busy on it at the moment and it should be finished relatively soon. :)

I don't mean any offence but the image looks more like a military or prison issue cot than a seat. I think I need to get new glasses. Whatever it's interpreted as, I have a feeling this item will get quite a bit of use. ;)

I bought the creeper quite some time back and though I've not used it for much so far it's fun to muck around with. It's quite a nice figure but I think it really depends on what you want to do with it and how much you are going to use it. I bought it on impulse and it was not wisely spent money. Also, there are a variety of other "monster" style critters out there in free land. Have you looked around for any? I'm not sure what you mean by "misleading way", as Ghost says, it's clearly mentioned on the relevant web pages. In respect of that also remember that unlike some people on this and other communities DAZ/Zygote are a business, they are there specifically to make money in order to pay salaries/overheads/etc and to make profit. When in that sort of situation you make profit as best as possible, if that means selling tex maps seperately, well, it's not like DAZ are unique in that method. :)

Not that I create characters or even have the skill to begin creating such things, but I would like to take a moment to say thank you very much Chad. Your post has made things much clearer even to a lunkhead like me. Ta muchly.

They haven't put the breaks on releasing character morphs by character creators. As I read it they're saying you can still do that, but ONLY as a PZ2 file. No morphs, no obj, no cr2, just pz2. So character creators can if they want, release character morphs using the pz2 file to save their dial presets. How you lock that down to prevent reverse engineering I don't know, but it looks like the pz2 files are more functional than many thought before. It may be possible therefore to combine dial character sets into a single morph, add that as a pz2, then edit the pose file to strip out all other information, creating a unique character morph pose. But then, who'd "buy" it? Hrrm, the only problem I see is that people won't be able to make money on Vickie2. Not a problem though. Vic1 is still freely distributable as a cr2 so it's not like the character creators are losing out. :)

Costume Shop is the title of the DAZ clothing cd.

Well said Willdial, I couldn't agree with you more.

The only veil that I know of is part of the Daz Clothing cd. I don't honestly remember seeing another one anywhere else.

That's pretty much platform independant. Windows uses a swap file but Win98 has a different way to increase it to WinME/2K Mac is a whole different ball game again. A bit more detail please and someone here can help you.