DP3D with Texture Weapons might help some, it will let you distort the texture as you paint without remapping (ortho projection). Painter 3D won't help.

use the Optimize mod. Works as well as can be expected.

I thought I would help out a bit. I use Max almost every day and we have Maya at our company. I don't use Maya but I know a bit about it as I have gone to the Alias|Wavefront users group meeting for quite a few years. "Hollywood" likes Maya because it serves as an architecture that you can extend, i.e. add physical simulation code. Character studio is great for setting up a default walk quickly, it has footstep generated walks. You can add any kind of character. You can buy Zygote characters (like the ones in Poser) already to go in CS. Max doesn't do radiosity, but there is a plug in (Luma Object) that gives sort of the same effect without the rendering time. As far as transparency and materials, you can do a lot of very interesting things in Max, for example simulating iridescent materials.

You can do this in 3D Max with falloff. The iridescence is a function of the angle between the surface normal and the line of sight.

http://www.deespona.com/3denciclopedia/models/bat.html

I don't think you could download hair made with it, because the hair is created at render time in Max. It does render individual hairs.

http://www.adobe.com/studio/tipstechniques/phsdigitalhair/main.html

CD recorder We have a full time Mac tech person. About a year ago he researched CD-R and it seemed Yamaha was probably the top machine. The Yamaha is 4x4x16x. I have a lower end P2 266 at it works perfectly at 4x. I don't think there is any learning curve. The first CD I made worked fine. The problem with the drag and drop software (using it like a floppy drive) is that the disk can only be read in the same environment that it was created in. I would definitely not do this. If you are using Windows 95/98 and change to NT you will not be able to read your CD! External and SCSI will cost more than internal and IDE, but the Yamaha ext. SCSI is "only" $265.00 anyway. The advantage of external is that you can move it from machine to machine and also, I was told, they work better out of the computer because they stay cooler. At work we have lots of zip drives and lots of drives and disks fail. They are great for moving data, but don't store anything on them unless you make at least 3 copies. This adds to your cost and storage space. CD's can be ruined if you mistreat them. Zips go bad all by themselves.

My 2 cents Zip disks are very unreliable. The only archival media is optical. I would suggest a Yamaha external SCSI CD-R. It comes with software and you can hook it up to a Mac or PC, and at Buy.com it is only $265.00.

This is really not a Poser topic, but I suppose you have to put that stuff somewhere Regarding CD recorders: you can get an internal or external, an IDE or a SCSI. I was told an external is a good idea because the recorder is sensitive to heat and it is better out of the computer case. SCSI and external also are a big advantage if you have a PC and an older Mac, or 2 PC's, you can move it from one to the other. On the other hand, the internal IDE should work fine. I have had good luck (so far) with buy.com and they have about the lowest prices. A Yamaha internal ? (I think, it doesn't say) IDE is $188.95 and the external SCSI is $298.95. The Yamaha SCSI comes with SW for Mac and PC. Other brands are cheaper. If you want SCSI you have to get an adapter card. These cards are in the $40.00 to $250.00 range. You will also need to buy a cable. The computer end will be different depending on the type of SCSI adapter you get. They (or lots of other places) have all sorts silver CD-R media. I don't know if this is still true, but when I looked into this a while ago, Mitsui gold was the top rated media. You can look at mitsuigold.com to see their pr. I will find out where we get them if you are interested. CD rewritables can not be read in a regular CD reader and CD-R media is so cheap, why bother with CD-rewrite ? I personally would not trust a Jazz or Zip to hold my stuff. I have had numerous disks fail. We use Zips all the time, but only to transfer data. No magnetic media is "archival".

check out the Yamaha 4.4.16 SCSI from buy.com