MallenLane, I've said it once, or twice, or three times, but these light sets you're coming up with are just incredible... can I live in your head for a while to see how you're doing it? I'll clean up after myself, I promise... and I don't eat much... :)

Anton Kisiel had a dreadlocks hair prop for sale at Bbay a while back, you could try emailing him to see if he would sell it to you since it's not online anymore... though you'd have to pay for it.

Nance, I just looked at your lighting tutorial thing... http://worldzone.net/art/nance/softlight_tutorial/SoftlightTutorial-Nance00.html In case anyone else wants to look at it. I wish I were at home so that I could try some of that... I already cheat and parent and point my lights to/at props to get them pointing where I want them more easily... I usually use a ball and just make the ball invisible and position it to where I want the lighting to be centered. I'm going to have to try scaling the ball and see what happens.

Oh, one other thing... I always adjust the "Shadow" setting from 1 to somewhere between .125 and .4 at the most.. anything past .4 seems to be too dark for my tastes... unless I'm trying to cast a darker shadow onto something...

LadySilverMage - I find that if I want to change my lighting so that it looks like the characters are in a darker setting, if I backlight them with either a dark green, or a dark blue spot light it helps to keep them from being lost in shadows, I also turn off the "cast shadows" box if I start seeing too many shadows where they probably shouldn't be. I wish I had more to contribute I've been messing around with light settings myself, but Anton's examples are better than what I've come up with so far.

I could be wrong, but it looks like you're trying for the dwarf-ish proportions just by scaling the body parts, right? If that's the case, it's probably because of disproportionate scaling... ie, if you scale the chest by x amount, but you don't scale the collar by the same amount, it can make the mesh whack out... you may want to try applying magnets to the parts that are sticking out and pull them back into the place where they should be. You may end up having to do that to a few body parts... once you've got them all morphed back though you can create a full body morph so that you can apply them all at once... I think you can even create a pose file that'll save the scaling so that you could recreate the dwarflike proportions on any Michael character just by applying the pose... but I'm not exactly sure how you'd do that... I'm sure there's a tutorial out there somewhere...

I think the eyes work really well with that skin tone and coloring, so I wouldn't say that they need to be changed, but including different shades of the same color would probably be a good idea, that way you can match it to the skin tone you're working with... overall I think the character you've used here is excellent, even though that's not what you wanted feedback on. :)

Okay people... I didn't have much time to work on this, and it's past my bedtime, but I wanted to post another picture showing off her body texture a little bit. I took Mehndi's advice and painted on a few more freckle spots, but I'm not that satisfied with them, so I think I'm going to re-do that part, and I plan on adding a few to her face as well, just didn't get that far yet, and I SO need to do something with her fingernails, they're kind of creeping me out with that dead flesh look they have now :) Thanks again everyone for your comments, it's helping to keep me going... :) So, to give me something to work on, how 'bout some suggestions as to what make-up colors you'd like to see for her once I finalize the texture base? (The bronzy-beige-y eyeshadow is on a seperate layer, I just wanted to add some color so it didn't look so plain.) Oooh, and names would be good too, so far I've been calling her Erika, and at one point I had spelled it Aerika... but I dunno... (Sorry about the big-ish picture, but I wanted you to be able to see the detail a bit)

Hmm... I thought that short hair was by Kozaburo...

Oooh... Laurie, that in itself might just push me over the edge to buying her... I'm still sitting on the fence... but I'm starting to lean... ;)

Actually now that I looked at it again, it looks like that's what you've alread done, so ignore me... I'm gonna go back to having my head hurt...

The seams wouldn't bother me at all... the only thing I personally would probably do is make them look more like a seam in fabric... like have the lace end at a point and then it's solid, like if the lace were stitched onto another piece of fabric, that then had the back piece of lace stitched onto it... oh if my head didn't hurt I could probably explain better... but it looks great Eowyn. :)

Feed the cat to the dragon? Oh wait, that only works if you feed the POSER cat to the dragon... hmm... I'm only kidding so no one yell at me.. I LIKE cats...

Mine only says "Best Sellers" and it shows me what I assume is the best sellers of all time... okay I'm shutting up again.

I've got Dina on my "think about it" list... for one, I like how cheap she is... I mean come on, she's only 30 bucks. I'm glad people are starting to put more images up using her, it's helping me decide... http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=89381 Picture by Daffy34, that image alone bumped Dina up a bit higher on my list. I think Mehndi is right though... If Dina (the figure, not the woman) didn't look quite so "horsey" in the face, and weren't quite so broad in the shoulders, more people would probably be singing her praises... she's by no means a perfect figure, but like people have said before, the potential is there... I agree too that claiming she's the "most advanced" figure in existence is, in a way, asking to be bombarded with these types of questions/complaints... but maybe she will prove herself worthy of the praise. :)