Attached Link: Vote Devil!

I'd add to that: render as little as possible/necessary to tell your story and comp the renders in AfterEffects!

Attached Link: Vote Devil!

I paid 129$ plus shipping, which seems like a good deal considering the cost of dynamic cloth & face modeling from image plug-ins for other apps. much more than that!

Attached Link: Poser/Mimic/Max animation: Vote Devil! (o but is it art, let me wail...)

"Where is the Render Button... is something new in Poser 5?" It's next to the Make Art button. I think what has Tisa's p's in a w is that so many posers are pushing that Render Button before they push the Make Art button. Of course, a photographer like Tisa would never have this problem, having only one button to push...

"I think the link that kupa posted answers almost everything that people have been concerned about regarding the security measures." I liked this one best: "If you do not have a connection to the Internet, you can contact Curious Labs via email" :-). First draft maybe read "Surely you know someone you can mail your key to and have them send it by email":-). That said, the protection scheme seems pretty much par for the course nowadays with all the warez copying going on between the China Sea and the Volga (folks who have traveled a bit & seen a retail stores full of American and European software for pennies an app know what this system is an attempt to curb), & I'll be ordering P5 tonight:-).

"He is coming out with a 2 hour Poser 5 video tape tutorial (3-AXIS)" Thanks for the report! Do you have a link for the folks making the tape tutorial your mentioned? Thanks! Michael

Attached Link: Poser 5 Academic

Try Creation Engine ($199). Generally, they require something like a photocopy or fax of a current school ID, but the folks there are real helpful in explaining what they need.

whoopee another of the infamous poo-ware ornamental ->doesn't do a thing for most of us Curious Labs Product. What it does is open a whole new market for Poser & CL. Currently the only other character animation tool for Director3D is 3D Max/Character Studio, which not only costs several grand, but doesn't work very well. And with a whole new market, CL might make enough $ to afford to make Poser better & (unless you are getting paid more than enough to make still images & AVIs with Poser) it opens a whole new commercial market for Poser animators as well..

Attached Link: http://www.web3d.org/fs_membersonly.htm

While it's sounding better, it's nowhwere near as nice as the new Web3D offerings from Adobe (Atmosphere), Macromedia (Shockwave3D) and Virtools. I can't tell you if it's looking better, as the "Gallery" at http://www.web3d.org/fs_membersonly.htm is "members only". So I have to pay $100 just to see if the stuff played in this standard looks any good!?!? Frankly, these folks at web3d.org don't know how to 'sell', aka get artists to use, a standard. What killed VRML wasn't just file size, after all, it was also, and perhaps mostly, the inability of the programmers to get artists to create compelling content in VRML. It looks to me like the web3d group is repeating that mistake again. Meanwhile, Adobe and Macromedia know how to make tools artists will use and distribute the plug-ins users will require. File size: No matter how you cut, compelling 3D content is big, and a 3D web will not arrive for general users until broadbanc arrives for general users, making the 2.5MB file sizes of the players not much of an issue. Note that the X3D article says that the "smallest" component of the standard is 300k. I'll bet that to get the same functionality you can get from Shockwave3D (gravity, physics, game programming, multiuser play & chat, etc.) you will have to download at least as much code as the Shockwave plug-in. Finally, relying on 'standards' means relying on Microsoft to support and implement them, while Adobe and Macromedia have more ability to work out partnerships with M$ (and sue M$ if it doesn't live up to them). While X3D might (someday) be an ok way to demonstrate rotating product models, I think that for the complex kinds of animations Poser makes, CL would be better to focus on working with Adobe and Macromedia (not to mention collision detection and gravity!).

"I'm hoping for CL's sake that they'll get this all scrubbed up tidy and out onto the market soon 'cos, I don't think there'll be an easier way to make animated figures and that's got huge potential for the gaming market." Especially when you use the nice, lo-poly figures from the Avatar studio, take them into Poser, export them to SW3D. Walla, instant game characters!

Attached Link: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/index.html

Hey Saxon, thanks for the link! I was just about to write another nasty email to CL asking what the ell was going on with the long ago promised SW3D exporter! Good to see it is coming along! I've been working with SW3D for a bit from Max, and while the excellent havoc engine has been most fun, the ability of the Max exporter to handle complex animation (such as character & walking) is limited. Does the Poser exporter handle morphs? Parent child linked objects? Since Max's bone's are currently poorly supported, if CL can get the exporter out the door soon here, Poser will be a serious contender for SW3D character anims! Woo hoo! O and for the folks who wanted more information on Director, the best site has a terrible URL, but tons of info, free code, and links to lists where the folks do actually respond pretty nicely, link below: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/index.html Don't be put off by the url, it is the place!

Attached Link: http://www.adobe.com/atmosphere

Yeah, they have a new version out any day now. Guess they are cleaning up all the old demos. Meanwhile, have you seen Adobe Atmosphere yet? It is more of a virtual world environment than a gaming one, though check the forum as folks are already pushing the envelope of the programming language (which is javascript). Plus, you can export animated characters straight out of Poser, there is a tutorial at curiouslabs.com on how.

Attached Link: http://www.bigtimeweb.com/comic/comic.html

Whups! The Devil made me do it!

I've always had problems with long renders to AVI on both Win98/2k, using both PP and just Poser4. Don't know why, now I just render to bmp sequence and import into Premiere. You can also use QuickTime Pro or other video making SW. Nice thing is that if something goes wrong (Win2k a couple times has just given up rebooted itself) you can re-start the render at the last frame rendered.

Are you asking how to get sound in to the iMac or how to convert an Mac sound (AIFF) to .wav? I don't know how to do the first one (my BeigeG3 has a sound in port for recording), but to convert a aiff to wav, you can use QuickTime Pro, export sound as .wav.

Yeah, best thing about QuickTime (IMHO) for demonstrating animations is the ability to step forward/back frame by frame, and jump precisely to a particular frame. While I think that both Real8 and WMP7 codecs have surpassed QuickTime (even with the very expensive and slow to compress SorensonPro) for quality, neither can step through an animation to see just what happens where. Hopefully, QT will soon get the long promised Mpeg-4 codec already available with WMP, and still have this unmatched frame-by-frame control.