When you buy figures from DAZ, they come already setup for Poser. Aside from having to rig the figure from scratch, you also won't be able to use any of the morph targets that come with the figure, so you'll have to make those from scratch. too. Also, some of the characters here or at DAZ are simply modifications of the existing figure (so and so for Vicki, so-and-so for mike, etc.) You won't be able to use them without Poser, even if you have the original figure. You also won't be ale to conform clothing to the figures. The advantages of Poser extend beyond dynamic hair and dynamic cloth.

Yes, I will admit I was a bit dissapointed when I upgraded to Carrara 3 only to find that they wanted to sell me a different program for modelling.

I'm quite happy with carrara's vertex modeler. (But then I've had almost ten years of ray dream 5's vertex modeler as my only experience.....) The only thing I would like is nurbs, but even that isn't really necessary, since the real-time subdivision is almost the same. I haven't had a need to fillet anything yet, but I can do that with a boolean operation. I can't really think of anything else I'd need.... Modeling is more about trying to figure out how to do what you need with the tools you have, rather than trying to find new tools to do what you want. Would you rather have an impressive collection of models, or an impressive collection of tools?

Not true, Mark. If you have Poser 5, or Pro Pack, you can easily apply bones to a figure, and if you make it to the specifications of one of the existing figures, (P4 male & female, Don or Judy etc) and apply that skeleton to your figure, you can use the walk designer. You can also create walk designer files for other figures, but it involves animating the walk cycle at least once. (i think Mike & Vicki can use the walk designer too.) If you're planning on doing character animation, and you already use carrara, poser is the way to go. There are many things you can do with your characters using poser that carrara can't do on it's own. Aside from morph targets (which Carrara 4 can do) Poser also does morphs that affect more than one body part, you can save poses, or partial posessave and re-use animation for all or some body parts, create conforming clothing, and posable props. There's also Poser's own magnet and wave deformers, which are extremely useful for modifying and animating organics and cloth. (There's also the hope that transposer will be updated to include dynamic hair and cloth...) You can also get DAZ's Mimic, and use automated lip synching for your characters....

Are you gonna give him a body?

I actually haven't tried it yet with the trees. With other things though, it can take quite a while to export the textures (it has to render them...) but it's worth the wait. Not to dicourage anyone from Carrara, but if you're only looking for a tree generator, why not try Tree Pro? http://www.onyxtree.com/suite.html

I've gotten trees to export as obj's but Vue won't open them. I've also exported as a 3ds, and vue will open them, but there's no material groups. I'll admit I haven't really experimented all that much, an afternoon or two... but to answer your question, yes, carrara will [i] allow[/i] you to export trees....

Thom, To get a map like the one shown above, go to the projection tab on the UV mapper, and pick Planar from the little pull down menu. Then pick the axis you want, and split by orientation will split it based on which way the normals face, but split by position will let you choose where the split line is. Most times, split by orientation will do it for ya....

mmm, hadn't even thought of that. I'm on PC......

"I wish Carrara could derive groups from the sub-D cage, tho -- I hate having to convert to verts then go through everything assigning groups poly by poly." I think it will.... I'll try it again tomorrow, but I think that if you have groups in the control cage when you export to .obj and re-open, those groups will still be there in the new denser mesh. I'm not sure which version of poser your using, nomuse, but when I save the obj with shading domains, Poser 5 will recognoze them. It just assigns a weird name to them. (like objectname.obj8 instead of teeth)

The export/import is really just to take multiple polymeshes and put them into one. And, of course, to permanently subdivide the mesh, which needs to be done before uv mapping if you're going to output to Poser.

Attached Link: http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk/3d/3d.htm

Judging from the control cage, I'n going to guess that you've got the real-time subdivision set on 1, right? that mesh looks dense enough to smooth out on 1.... Some more tips for the UV mapper: (these work very well if you're exporting to Poser) While building your mesh, make sure you name any hard to reach polygons like teeth or tongue or the eyes, Stuff that's difficult to select in the UV mapper, because it's behind or inside something. (Selection:Name:Polygons [not polymesh.]) When you are done, export the model as an.obj file. Then open the .obj file, (you may want to run it through detriang first. Detriang can be found at the link above.)when you re-open it, check the following settings: Create Carrara Objects as: Vertex Primitives Create a single polymesh(needed for Morph Targets) Grouping: Create only one object Now, when you jump into the vertex modeler, select one of those hard to reach groups, like the teeth, (Selection:Select By: Name:Polygons) and create a new shading domain for it. (The shading domains will also carry over into poser as material groups). Now, when you go into the UV mapper, every part of the model will be accessable so you can make just one map, thanks to the settings we picked when we re-opened, and you can easily select the teeth(or whatever) under the Edition tab of the UV mapper, because we named them as a shading domain. you can edit each shading domain individually by selecting it under the edition tab, or, if you want to see the big picture, check off the "show all" box.

The horns somehow remind me of the devil-dogs from Ghostbusters. I like it, he's really cool!

Cool! I had been wondering about this myself... Now I can start modeling poser hair!

ok, here's a quick pic of the final mesh after converting to an obj.