Younger??? I'm 35, you? Just for the record, I enjoy this kind of thing, though like many before me I prefer to work before a "live" audience :) later jb

I think they came across as a bit harsh, like the man said, your paying $400 for a program that competes with a $1200 plugin for another even more expensive program. I thought about getting to computer aided character animation about 10 years ago. The software was crap, (by todays standards) but the meshes were 1000's of pounds (not dollars!) per item, and if you wanted a fully textured and posable human figure, then you were looking at a second mortgage :) For what it does, and what it costs, poser is a gem, it's also fairly unique. Have you ever tried to build a human from scratch in a "full" 3D package, I haven't, but I have a friend who does this for a living for games companies, and just looked at me funny and laughed when I suggested he do it. Hell, he even wrote his own IK editor from scratch as his college project rather than try to do it via an existing program, (this was 6 or more years ago) and he'd been playing with 3D stuff for 10 years before that. I don't think you can judge Curious labs by the standards of "other" 3D programs who have massive support budgets and large numbers of staff, it's like comparing a Ferrari to a Ford pinto. Have you ever tried to get luggage into a Ferrari? Or find a qualified mechanic for that matter... :) If you want volumetric lighting try something called wordlbuilder http://www.animatek.com it's bloody amazing... later jb

I'll admit up front that, that poser isn't MAX, but as I found out when I tried to import a MAX figure, this is probably a good thing... :) Poser isn't state of the art 3D software, it's a cheap and chearfull toy capable of suprisingly realistic results, that lets you easily, (by other packages standards) pose and animate a figure. I'd like it if poser contained everything you described, especially decent knee, elbow, hip and shoulder joints, but for what it is, and for the price you pay, (both for it, and for 3rd party meshes) it's a bloody great program. It's quirky, I like quirky :) later jb

I too have downloaded more stuff than I've had chance to integrate. Only last night I spent untill 4:30am tweaking the face of one of the many Lara Crofts I have, I was trying to make her look less lifelike and more like the EIDOS figure... I gave up upon realising that while I could alter the component parts I couldn't really tweak them as desired, (I wanted to position them on X & Y, etc.) then I got into tweaking the breasts and the body colour, I can loose hours playing with a womans breasts... :) All this doodling comes at the expense of playing with Vicky, which I bought, but have yet to really play with. I found loads of morphs at Morph World 2.0 (link at right) and even more stuff is available on a couple of hotline servers. (get the client from www.bigredh.com) then use the search engine at www.hlsearch.com PC & Mac support is provided, you can even get a a Linux client called fidelio (you'll find it at freshmeat.net) Then there is Jaeggers "millie" and all the morphs for that too, also at Morph World 2.0 (But I still say that the base Vicky is ugly :) If I can't tell you where I got the stuff, I can probably ftp them to a site of your choosing, (or up them to a hotline server) mail me and I'll see what I can do. I suppose overall I'm quite happy with the "scene" at the moment, I'd never been to Dendras' web site until now, so I don't really know what I'm missing, and Zygotes stuff is cheap in comparison to what decent 3D models used to cost a few years back. By no means perfect, but it'll do for now.

I think everyone is waiting untill Jack gets the new "free stuff" area up at the new site: http://3d.a1hostco.com Of course it could just be the time of year, or apathy, who knows...

For some reason the thought of a man labouring long into the night to produce perfect pubic hair tickles me somewhat, I can't think why... :) The thing I spend ages on is hands, I can never seem to get them "just so" Oh yeah, I'm typing this from "voyager" on QNX, http://get.qnx.com it's really cool! later jb

Moss... Oh yeah, "I'd buy that for a dollar" :) Nikki is now my default, and doubtless will remain.

Well, this is where it gets interesting :) The beta version of explorer bombs every time I try to save out as an .obj file, it also killed my gfx driver so thoroughly that I had to boot into safe mode and download new drivers from the 'net, (but that's because it's a Microsloth O/S, you have to expect these problems :) I've got the earlier version, and it doesn't bomb, but it has a very comprehensive warning telling me it's not likely to do what I want either :) My other problem is that I don't own 3DS MAX, I just downloaded some meshes I'd like to convert, but as explorer tells me, MAX stores it's meshes as a reference to internal data structures, and doesn't actually contain much data at all :( Ah well, time to fire up poser and see if my earlier experimentation works.