Those are beautiful ... and they offer a 50% discount for academic users ! (The fact that I'm an academic has nothing whatsoever to do with my interest in modeling, but you get it where you can ... )

If he doesn't actually have enough memory to hold all of his scene in memory at once, and is thus having to do disk accesses for each render, that'll be slowing him down like crazy. I had that problem, and stuffed my computer with memory, and it had a strong effect. Processor times certainly speed you up, but it's just proportional. If you have insufficient memory and have to use disk accesses, it'll slow you down by orders of magnitude.

The manufacturers have a whole page of links to tutorials; I downloaded one of them and have been working through it, and am quite impressed. http://www.tgs.com/media_div/support/Tutorial/Amapi/main.html

One more nice feature in amorphium - you can increase or decrease polygon count on imported models with it, and even increase and decrease polygon count selectively on different parts of a model. There are other programs that do this, but they probably cost more than amorphium's $50. Very nice if you want to use some of your complicated models for background without eating your memory

I meant, less than overnight, not less than an hour.

I'll bet it's a memory problem; I've got gobs of memory, but only a 300 MHz processor and I get quite acceptable render speeds (~5 minutes for an 800x600 picture with a fair amount of detail, textures, etc.) That'd be (5 minutes/frame * 30 frames/second * 30 seconds) = about 3 days for a 30 second movie at full screen resolution, which ain't that bad. If you're doing substantially smaller it'll be proportionally faster (for instance, if you cut the dimensions by a factor of three each way, that cuts render time by a factor of ten or so, which cuts you down to less than an hour.)

Thanks - it looks like a good program. Since the company e-mails you a serial #, I guess it's a legitimate copy ... - James

You can also leave the figure in the scene, but make it completely transparent, but with an index of refraction greater than 1 for interesting shadow effects, or you could just render it twice, once with the figure in the scene and one without, and combine the scenes in photoshop and erase the character.

Hmmn - I'm on a mac as well, and I'm pretty sure they read 3DMF - you may just have a problem with the fact that it seems that EVERY BLEEDING PROGRAM uses mild variations on these, which are frequently unreadable by other programs, even if it's the same format technically. Just pass it through another program that'll read 3DMFs.

I've occasionally drooled over it, but the price is a little rich for my tastes. Hopefully, they'll decide it's not gold at some point and drop the price to something reasonable.

Looks good ! Nice likeness. Actually, it looks kind of like a cross between Patrick Stewart and John McCain - something about the jaw.

That's a very nice character, BTW: a very macho looking woman, but still good looking. (I'm on a mac, and converting PC format stuff to mac when I download it is so routine I don't even notice I'm doing it anymore. It's just one more step, like unzipping it.)

Thanks a lot !

I haven't but I've downloaded some hair and beards that people have made with it. The problem is that you can't possibly have a mesh for each individual strand, so this tends to make very coarse hair. It looks OK once you texture it, though ...

This is another vote for you to put them all in one zip, so they can be downloaded en masse (it'd also be easier to remember who to give credit to ... )