Well to put a little of the negitive here. I too have the 4x5 Wacom with pen and mouse. I'm on a MAC and it is great to have a 2 button mouse and scroll wheel. But as for using the pen ... I have to say it has always been far too small for me to use effectivly. You have to scale down any sweeping motion to a very small space, making it diffucult to do something as simple as a signature. I don't know why I have problems because I have a Palm and a Pocket PC which are tiny and I have no problem with the stylus input on those. I highly recommend a tablet and for the price, the Graphire is a good way to go. But get ready for a frustrating learning curve for a month or so, but you'll get the hang of it eventually. Another good rule of thumb, is to find someone who has one and go over and use theirs and see how you like it. Or if possible, find a store that has a working model that you can play with. James

Sydney, don't be put off by that too much. I still think the upgrade was well worth it. But I've always been upset that trying to do a volumetric render has always been excruceatingly slow. And I'm on a Mac G4 Cube at 450 Mhz (comprable to a 900 Mhz PC) with 320 mb RAM and a Dell 850 Mhz PC (which is slower). Here is a render that took all night and i forgot to turn on the sun. Without the sun on, you won't get shadows. :( But even so, I think this is far superior a rendering than Bryce 4 can do. this has no post work except the hair around the hat. James

Well I haven't delved into it just yet ( I just installed 5 on my PC today). I'm going to attempt to do a Network render from a Mac with a PC. I hope it will work because in 5 things have greatly slowed down. With the higest setting on, a simple rendering can take up to 12 hours to complete. Hmmm I don't like it but it does make a better render. But to answer your question. A network render allows 2 or more machines to render 1 image, delegating different parts of the render to different machines. In essence you're getting a duel processor render with 2 machines. So rendering will in theory take less time. This is how the large animation studios get their jobs done. You have several machines running and rendering parts and pieces of the same image to speed things up. I hope that clears up at least a little bit of the process. James

I have to say that I knew about this and was on the perspective interview list. Though I didn't make the cut I am so proud of those who were included and the many others who were also considered. I know that the level of images morphs, texture maps and models from this and the other Poser forums have always been far beyond anyone's expectations. I'm equally as proud to be part of this cutting edge community. From the very first time I became a member of these forums I knew I was in for the ride of my life. And what a great ride it is. You ALL should feel a sense of pride, because the Poser community is one of the best in the world! And congratulations to DAZ and Curious Labs for making the tools (at an affordable price) so we can go for our dreams. James

How does it actualy render? Are the splotches still there in a final render? There may be a "normals" problem. Try a couple of different save options in UVMapper, and try the "Fix" seams also in UVM. A weld verticies might also help. I've had this problem in other programs, and in older versions of Poser. And it was due to normals screwing up and over smoothing or under smoothing. It just may be the obj file itself. Though I've recently run into problems with PPP not reading objs correctly. Let's hope Poser 5 comes out soon and fixes many bugs in the recent PPP. James

And here I was trying to keep this all a secret. :-) I got the chance to do the textures for the release, which I am also told will be very soon. DAZ is just once again trying to get everything just right before the final release. Isn't it nice to have so many options. I remember Poser 1 figures. Gag! We've come a long way. I never dreamed that we'd have this quality of figures at (IMHO) affordable prices. I also remember the days of yore when I was on an old Amiga trying to create a human on my own. Luckily for us all I opted to leave that up to the professionals (yes many people here are included in that Proffessional statement ;-)) Thanks DAZ! (Zygote orig.) James

I also stress that saving it as a obj file retains all groups too and it's a much simpler solution. But be warned once as a single object though it still retains the UV mapping you may have to run it through UVMapper (or other mapping program) to place ALL the new groups in a single texture map. 1:Make sure it's the only figure/prop in the window/stage. Size everything to exactly what you want it. 2:Export as "WaveFront Obj" 3:When the hierarchy window pops up just click yes/ok since this is the only thing there, it is fine to proceed (if there is anything in this requester that you don't want placed in the NEW obj deselect them NOW. 4:Now just load the NEW obj in Poser and ta da! No need to select a "scale" factor since you've done that already. James

Attached Link: http://www.jnjgraphics.net/poser/dance.swf

Hmmm, Are you talking about the seemingly blurryness around the edges and in the movement? If so this is not a fault of Poser per se. Flash is trying to create as smooth a transition as possible between frames. And since your figures are somewhat blocky ( I don't know why exactly--I'd have to know your exact settings), this is a daunting task for the movie/swf. The frame rate may be the problem. With any movie, if you have more frames per second the better the quality but of course the larger the file. Here are 2 examples with the presets for swf export. 1: The attached link at the top. This is the "dance.swf". You'll notice that it has a funny line around it. Ignore this, this can be resolved by unchecking the "Draw outer lines" checkbox. the only difference from this file and the "run.swf" file is when exporting I used the "Current RENDER settings" on this and used the "Current DISPLAY settings" on the run.swf. 2: This is a bit easier to see. http://www.jnjgraphics.net/poser/run.swf (copy the above URL to the location bar in your browser) To me these are also a little "blurry". But this is just inherent of low frame rates. Settings: Poser 4 Lo female Texture set to "Black" Highlight set to "Black" Render settings -- all but "Antialising" OFF -- 30 fps Flash Export settings: (Default) Number of Colors = 4 Quantization = Specified Frame Quantisize Frame = 1 Overlap Colors = yes Draw Outer Lines = Yes Draw Inner Lines = No Line Width = 1.000000 So I guess try 60 fps (Frames per second) and see if that helps. Anyway I know this doesn't help too much but we'll keep trying until we get you the answer you need. James

This has not happened on the MAC, except a very long time ago. And I have not had this in Win ME at all. James

Unfortunatly there has been a problem with T maps in Carrara for a long time. Go to the Carrara forum here and you'll see along with my posts, other posts having the same problem. I still can't get a render without black eyewhites and T map shadows. I even have the latest "Studio" upgrade. One reason for problems is te extra "cornea" on Vicky's and Mike's eyes. And Poser doesn't allow you to export the figure without these. And removing them in Carrara is quite diffucult. but that defeats the wonderful addition of these extra features anyway. I've only got the eyelashes to work with transparency in Carrara. I really don't understand why Carrara has such a problem. Your best bet for an explination is again on the Carrara forum here, but I've never got an answer. I'll also point out that Carrara makes it nearly impossible to understand transparency to begin with. Let's hope that Carrara 2 will address this. James

Well then, I'm stumpped. As a last resort you might try contacting Curious Labs directly on this one. http://www.curiouslabs.com James

Well since you only gat a little hint to what may be the problem I'll take a stab at tring to answer it also. Note: Do not take any of this as an insult, I'm just suggesting basics and has no reflection on how much you know or don't know. First: Make sure that your exporting as an "WaveFront" obj. Different exports have different options and sometimes things will be unselectable. Second: May be a corrupt export plugin; I don't know if this is possible but here goes... Remove the plugins (SAVE IT SOMEWHERE SAFE!) from the folder. Re-install the plugins from the Poser Disk. It's been a long time since I had to do this but I remember that I was able to install just the plugins on my MAC once. I may have had to re-install everything but I don't remember. But this problem came up awhile back and that was the fix. Hope this helps. James

This may sound silly and I do not want to offend, but are you "Import Object" importing the obj file or just trying to "Open" open it? If that's not the problem then I don't know what might be happening. I've never had a problem in importing any obj file into Bryce. No matter what options were checked and not checked when exporting from Poser (any version) James

One tip: When you export the figure in Poser, export it into a new folder and place all the textures/maps associeated with the figure including all the clothes textures/maps in that same folder. Bryce 4 will automatically import all the textures/maps except the transparency and bump maps. This way you have all the main textures already there and then you only have to import the bump and trans maps, saving you a lot of time. Hope this helps. James

Hey Twillis, I just had to say thanks. Even though I have PPro, it was very informative to know that UVMapper can be used to split/divide up an obj. I had no idea. Albeit I use UVM mostly on my MAC (I do have it on a PC also), and I don't think the assign is available on the MAC version. I may be wrong so don't quote me on that because I never dreamed to do this via UVM. Great bit of knowledge! These kinds of tips are the backbone of getting the most out of the tools we all seem to have. Again thanks. I think that so many people want this knowledge and this will help immensily. James