Many thanks!  Normals forward worked!  :)

Quote - Your helmet came out real nice.  Sharen

Many thanks Sharen! I did a little more with the chin strap on this one and used the "intrude" function in Wings3D to create some thickness around the edge of the inside. pjz99 suggested I try giving a little thickness to my helmets. So I sort of compromised and intruded about half way up and then used a "hole" material for the rest of the inside. I'm trying to keep the poly count as low as I dare. This one is 1905 polygons. Not too bad compared to other helmets out there I think.

Thanks!

For instance, to highlight my own latest helmet I used Michael 4 wearing a shirt from PoserWorld. The helmet takes up almost the entire pic but there is a little of the shirt you can see and of course Michael's head is in there.

Is it OK to use these things just in a preveiw picture of my own freebie? Or do I need to get permission from the other artists first?

Many thanks.

I'm currently using the Osprey "Men-at-arms" series of books for picture references of my subject matter. I don't think I could afford buying real objects to work off of, unfortunately. However, by looking at some stuff that has already been created on Rednerosity, and created well, I've figured out a little better how to do some things. 

I may post my "copy" of the prop, just because it seems a shame to me to devote so much energy in something and not share it in some fashion. I mean I haven't used a shred of material from the original. It is entirely my own work. I just used the original to get ideas on how to do some things. And it is a British helmet which is pretty basic, universal, head wear. Probably every military modeler and their brother has done a British helmet at some time.Although there seem to be relatively few posted on Renderosity.

Overall my approach to things is to make things I am interested in seeing in the market. I've done a lot of animating, making things for Civilization III which I'm interested in and have found that some things I want to use in my animating are just not available anywhere out there. So I want to make things that I personally would like to see on the market. So for instance my Fallschirmjager helmet and Italian Desert Helmet are things I don't see out there much. I think I've seen a good Fallschirmjager helmet on Turbosquid but it was horrendously expensive for one object. I've seen a few reasonably priced Falschirmjager helmets but I actually like the shape of mine better (except for the chin strap which I need to work more on).

As far as copying another vendor's stuff. I bought an item here a few months back. I paid for it and it is a good quality item and money well spent IMO. So I've been looking it over in my modeling program and sort of getting ideas of technique and stuff from it. The item is a nicely done helmet and I've been busy making my own copy of it from scratch. I haven't used a shred of the vendor's own work in my copy but have been more or less trying to mimick his creation as best I can. It's sort of good practice. When I get through with my copy I would like to put it out in the freebie section but I sort of feel that it wouldn't be right. I mean it's just a helmet, one piece out of the whole package I bought but I'm just afraid the vendor might feel slighted by my giving away a "replica" of his item.

So far I find the hardest part of modeling is creating and formatting textures. Man is it hard to get things to come out just the way I want. So far I've been keeping to simple items with simple textures. In fact my last couple helmets I've made don't even come with textures. I figure the biggest hurdle I have to creating something worth selling is getting textures down. There are other hurdles but textures seems like a big one to me right now.

I tried doing the grouping manually but still got the little spike. :(

Ideally I would like to use auto group because it is so convenient. There must be some little tweak I can make or something that will get rid of it.

This is a serious glitch in Poser 7 I think. It just doesn't make any sense why the program would do this.

Thank you Adom!! I just tried your method and it seems to be working!!  :)

Basically I load the prop into Poser and save as an OBJ from Poser, then load the morph target into Poser and save it as an OBJ, then reload both items.

When I go to export the object in Wings3d as an OBJ file it just goes straight to the file save location. It doesn't prompt me for anything else. :(

Please help!