I re-visited rpublishing.com and e-mailed their contact, Jennifer.  Hopefully I'll have more success with her.

I re-enabled that last month, but have yet to receive anything.  If memory serves, they used to send stuff out at least once a week.

I'm talking about the mailing list they maintain through Bondware.  When I tried updating my e-mail options with Bondware, I got a notice reminding me my e-mail address was on a permanent "Do Not E-Mail" list, and to contact Rendo to have it removed.

Quote -
I don't believe I've used Internet Exploder since Windows 95 and Netscape was born. LOL.

I posted from work earlier.  My company uses IE 8.

My browser of choice is Chrome, with Firefox as a backup.  I use IE 10 if I can't get a site to work in either of the first two.

Quote -
Web masters really need to learn that less can be more.  There is way too much clutter...

Could.  Not.  Agree.  More.

Interesting.  I see several lines of blank space at the top of every post when using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, and IE.  I'm currently using IE 8 on another PC, and all the posts look fine.

Thanks for clarifying.  I'll stay out of the Material Room and focus on the editor.

So,  the bottom line is that I would be wasting my time learning how nodes work in Poser since Reality only converts what it needs for Lux anyway.  If I want to use Reality - and I really do want to use Reality - I'll be better off learning how to just use the editor.

Quote - Reality has its own material editor exactly to allow you to customize and adjust the materials. Poser's materials can have considerable complexity. Some of them convert without need of any change. Others mightr require adjustments.

Right.  It's knowing when adjustments need to be made and how to make them that I want to learn.

Quote - The good news is that the Reality material editor is a lot simpler than the Poser's one. You just need to become a bit familair with it and for that I'll gladly help you.

Thanks, Paolo.  I appreciate that.

I do have one question you may be able to answer without screenshots (I don't have access to my PC at the moment):

Why is it that, regardless of whatever content I have in my scenes, every material but those for M4 and V4 always converts to Glossy in Reality?  It's like Glossy is the default shader type that Reality treats anything that isn't skin, leaving the user to figure out what to manually convert it to.  I thought Reality was supposed to be smarter than that while still allowing us the flexibility to further tweak the materials ourselves?

Quote - And btw, Reality doesn't do the rendering, Luxrender does ;).  Just sayin. LOL

Oh, I know, Laurie.  While my experience with it was brief (three renders two years ago), I worked with it long enough when it was still a DS-exclusive plugin to understand the difference.  ;)

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and you guys thought MS was big brother?

That's why I'm staying with the devil I know.  ;)

If the Mac wasn't so prohibitively expensive, I might be inclined to switch, myself, especially since MS seems convinced that Metro is the wave of the future.  But, as it stands, I can build a new desktop PC that's more powerful than their cheapest Mac Pro for a fraction of the cost, so I'm staying with Windows.

Last December, I bought a new Lenovo Ideapad G580.  It came with Windows 8.  I recently spent most of the day replacing it with Windows 7.  Windows 8 fought hard to stick around, but I won in the end.

hehehe

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Wow, $168 is a lot more.  This is $23.50.  I'm not sure about how many videos, it says 10 hours.

According to Dream-Light's web site, the course alone is $47.  Based on your quote, it sounds like Rendo is currently offering half off.

Those 10 hours are covered in the 27 videos I mentioned.

Quote - Would you say it's worth it for $23.50?

No.

You would be much better off, and doing yourself a huge favor spending an extra $40 on the book.  The book is $65 on Amazon.com, or $40 if you have Amazone Prime.

Quote - Off of one of the adverts here was this guy selling a tutorial "Light Master"... Is it worth it?

In a word, no.

The "Light Master" course was created by a company called Dream-Light, which is really just one guy named Waldemar Belwon.  He creates light sets for DAZ 3D.

In June, 2011, Rendo was offering 15% off of Light Master.  The ad claimed that the lessons taught could be applied to any 3D app, not just DAZ Studio or Poser.  Dream-Light sent me a free e-Book that discussed 5 steps to stunning 3D lighting.  It touched on a lot of issues I was struggling with at the time, so I signed up for the course.

Here's what I got for $168 with my Rendo coupon:

• $397 worth of training via 27 videos 
• $249 worth of access to the Dreamlight Club for one year
• $200 worth of access to Live Group Coaching for one year

The videos proved surprisingly informative.  Of the handful I remember watching, he used a virtual whiteboard to sketch out various points of theory behind different lighting techniques.  He used Lightwave to demonstrate them, and DAZ to render a sample scene he had already set up using its built-in lights. As I watched, I found myself thinking of ways I could put those same techniques to use in Poser.  I watched one Live Group Coaching session which I enjoyed, but didn't participate in.  I never took advantage of my Dreamlight Club membership.

The following Christmas, on the advice of another artist, I picked up a book that has a wealth of information and insight that far* *exceeds any topic covered by Dream-Light:

Digital Lighting & Rendering (2nd Edition) by Jeremy Birns, a Lighting and Technical Director for Pixar.

In retrospect, I wish I had known about that book before I'd ever heard of Dream-Light.  Their "Light Master" course is a massive rip-off by comparison.

Quote - PZ2 files do not need to be converted, thumbnail RSR files do. Its the old thumbnail RSR files that current versions of Poser do not recognize that need to be converted to PNG format.

Thanks for clarifying.

Weird.. there aren't any RSR files for this character anywhere.  I wonder where it's trying to read the thumbnails from?

Quote - Also suggest that you click the Recursive option so that the utility converts files in the sub-folders.

Tried that.  No dice.

Quote - Also make sure that you have permission to make changes to the folder.

This is my home computer.  I'm the only one who uses it.

Ah, yes, thank you.