Let me say a word in for displacement maps here. . .a displacement map that's designed in conjunction with a texture map can give you some real depth when you need it, and yet is much more easily modified than physical geometry. Displacement map animation can be very effectively linked to texture map animation as well. . .

Ornlu, having been impressed beyond measure with your work --made me rethink how to use tools-- I'd very much like to see the article the way you intended it; is it online anywhere?

very nice, but too uniformly blue-- the effect should be less noticeable nearer (and higher-- mist this thick sticks to the ground) Also be careful of the low frequency textures on things that are near (the right foreground)

That's exactly what I was trying to do. . .that tip is a keeper!

I can do that-- the trouble is when I want to load an existing texture into the B slot, it pops up in the A slot instead. . .meaning that I can't blend between two textures that already exist in my Mat library. I believe that problem is that I'm confusing textures and Materials. . .loading a material seems to change all the texture slots, even if it only has one texture itself

300,000 polygons is enormous and completely unncessary for the scene that's pictured here. Bryce is quick to navigate because you're looking at a low-poly proxy, not your full scene. I'm not familiar with Truespace, but if its crawling, I'd assume that your poly count is the problem. Go on a polygon diet. The scene you've got above shouldn't be more than 50K polys, and it will both render and setup much faster.

HDRI= "High Dynamic Range illumination" -- the "high dynamic range" means that it supports a wider range of intensities than the 255 levels previously available. This image is beautiful, and shows artful use of what I'd call a "lightmap", but its not an HDR lightmap. Does that make sense?

Grapefruit is the best description. . .Dirk got it! First-- look at the price of applications with a Cloth simulator, hair capabilities and procedural textures. There's a LOT there. Not all of it works, certainly not well enough for production use, but much of it does, and is far less expensive and better integrated than other solutions. For reference Digimation's Cloth plugin for 3D Studio costs as much as Poser I get a little annoyed sometimes with folks who badmouth what CL is delivering, a LOT of capability for not much money. I've also noticed a lot of folks trashing the hair, cloth, or materials applications without taking the trouble to really learn them. These are not trivial tasks, on any system. . .a lot of operator skill is required to get a hairstyle that looks, well, stylish. But the fact is that the capability is there . . .how much energy you choose to invest in using it is up to you.

I'm not sure how Poser's render engine is set up, so I can't say for sure that turning the body to inivisible will improve times Deleting part of the body: I do this as an OBJ export of the selected body parts. Not clear to me if poser will let you save the truncated figure as a *.pz3; it clearly allows you to replace body parts with props and save that way-- but total deletion is escaping me at the moment, maybe someone else will chime in. Poser definitely exports an Alpha, if you save as Tiff. The alpha channel is very useful in compositing. Not dependant on background color-- it reflects the Z-order (distance from the camera) of the objects in the scene.

" i tried that. ended with patches of dull lines and patches of mirror lines.... very interesting but i never own a mirror like that so that patches are kinda moot." This sounds like the raytracer isn't getting enough samples. Try: --Increasing the bucket size --increasing the pixel samples --decrease the shading rate post an example of what you're getting, along with the parameters you're using. Raytrace reflection is, as you know, a very compute expensive proposition. A cheap "fake", when you don't need to simulate reality perfectly is to do a panoramic render of the room, without raytracing on. Then take that image and fisheye distort it in Photoshop (or whatever). . . Now use this distorted image as the environment map for your reflective surface. This will always need a little tweeking, but works well for un-demanding scenarios (if your character is going to reach out and touch the mirror in an animation, obviously this approach won't do. . .but for a still life its fine)

Regarding big eyes-- try making the pupils big, rather than the irises; this changes the look a lot, and its a subtle thing. Facial proportions and attractiveness are interesting. "Big eyes" are attractive (probably because babies have relatively large eyes compared with the size of their heads) . . . but this isn't just the iris, its the eye as a whole. .. see if you can pull her eyelids up a bit on top Experiment!

I'm with Phoenixrising here. . .Wings is perfectly fine, and while I've never made much with ZBrush, those who are good at it do amazing things. I'd cast a vote for Rhino, especially if Nurbs are your thing. . .its very smart and well designed, and much more robust than most Windoze programs (I work in 3D Studio a lot, because I know it and it works for me . . .but it crashes fairly regularly, while Rhino is significantly more stable)

looks beautiful. don't know Zbrush, so I can't comment, but the Relax method in Max is what I use. Is it just me, or do her irises look a trifle large? Also, you might give her just a hint of asymmetry-- a little hint of a wrinkle or the like. . .Poser characters are oftened too "mirrored" -- real faces are both asymettrical in geometry and in expression. this is very nice already. . .

The folder is locked? OK, so OS 9 is there, but perhaps in a folder that belongs to the prior owner? It would help if you'd post your system information. . .upper left hand corner, click the Apple logo, then "About this Mac" then the "Apple System Profiler" then file and save. . .this will produce a text file which will let someone help you. . . There is no personal information or passwords in this file, so its safe to share. . .

Geep that is the best answer to a complex problem I've seen in a long time.