What is really weird is that the character's hands are not doing the same thing. Each of them also have an IK terminator on them. Unless... the IK terminators are parented to another bone like the root bone. The feet wouldn't normally be parented to anything to allow you to move the feet without the body and to move the body while still locking the feet in position. Yet the character's bones may be grouped with the IK terminators. Hmmmm... On the right side panel, the name "MajorAmerican1" is highlighted in yellow(ish). There is a little triangle next to the name. Can you expand (and each triangle this model also has) that so I can see the heirarchy of the character? Andrew www.awbenson.com

Well, it looks like Carrara also set up IK terminators for you. This is what the light blue square you see under the figure. This is how you would "root" the foot to the floor as you make a walk cycle. If you moved the root bone without moving the foot's terminator, you would get the exact same effect as in your picture. Try hiding the other character first. This will help you see if the foot's IK terminator is in the same position as the other character's terminator, so you can select it and move it. Andrew Benson www.awbenson.com

I've found Carrara's render to be pretty stable. I've put it through an 8,000 by 8,000 pixel render and it handled it. Also, people have pushed the latest version C5 with thousands of polygon modelled trees (each tree can be upwards of 10,000 polygons) without Carrara croaking, although it can take alot of time depending on settings, but that's true with any app. I think you'll be happy with it and C5 supports Poser figures natively yet also includes TransPoser 2 to give you access to Poser's Dynamic hair and clothes. Andrew www.awbenson.com

I guess both would technically be called shader controlled displacements. But Carrara's own doesn't give you an option to convert to a full geometery figure. Anything Grooves as a modifier allows you to collapse the modifier stack or export, thus making it a "high density" model. Not sure what this does to the UV unwrapping on a low polygon figure, but I'll assume it'll destory it until I learn more about this myself. Simple things like flat planes with displacement would be the easiest way to test out a working procedure. Before devoting huge amounts of time into research.

Not with the native C5 displacement. :-( If you have Anything Grooves, you can create high polygon count objects that can be converted/exported into actual high polygon models. Confusing isn't it? It's because Carrara 5's internal displacement is driven by a shader that is triggered only at render time, or at least it doesn't give you the option to collapse the geometery result. AGrooves is affective when you turn it on regardless of the point of modeling progress. UV unwrapping becomes REALLY important for this stuff of work as you are thinking. I agree that this is a great tutorial idea, but it is also a biggie one to write and test. Andrew www.awbenson.com

I managed to get the next UV Tutorial (#4) up just before bedtime last night. It was a tutorial that I've been working on a little at a time for the last month. It's about unwrapping a low-polygon barrel model. It uses shading domains with different unwrapping projection settings applied to each. You also learn how to combine multiple objects onto a single texture map... this is useful if you were to model a robot and had alot of different pieces but you want to paint it all at once to ensue color/highlight/bump/etc acturacy. The UV series is designed that you start at #1 and work your way up because I do not re-teach the basic skills taught in prior lessions. Andrew www.awbenson.com

The whole website is actually a HUGE WIP. I could take more time to spell check it and fix it's grammer issues by re-writing the tutorials or I can put it up and fix it later. I believe the later would be the best interest for me because working on your own personal site between work, freelance and other tasks (I'm also married so that cuts into alot of free time :-) severely limits how fast the website can be near 100% ready. :-P I also believe later serves the community better. It gets the tutorials out there now instead of much later. I was informed of some differculty with Step 5 of the Anything Goos tutorial which I'll be looking into soon. (That tutorial got posted today :-) Other things that got posted today was the small gallery and WIP sections. So, it's coming along slowly but it's getting there :-). Thanks for viewing my website, Andrew