Melanie, I am totally blown away! I wish I could use your character in my story, but it looks too advanced to be a P4 figure so I imagine it is Michael, whom I can't afford. Also you really show the hair off well! I feel embarassed that I couldnt make it look good with my first go. I don't suppose you have any earlier attempts, using the P4 Dork that I could use as my recurring roguish bad guy in my story?

Thanks also from me, I will try more experiments, it certainly is more versatile than anything but I needed some hints as to what to do with it. Thanks! I'll try and find a way to email Kosaburu to thank him for his hair also. Email addy? Melanie, you have male characters? Any hints? cuz I need a quite distinctive male char for my story but its harder to make them not all look the same than female chars.

What am I (was I) doing wrong? I was using Poser, and found it to be good. Cool. Then I found some japanese hair (from japan anyway) um, Reihair, Alicehair etc??? and thought, WOW! This is great! Then I found HMann's Total Hair Complete, with all the everythings etc, and chewed over whether to get it or not, and eventually couldn't resist - you know how much better real hair looks than the solid plastic lumps in Poser 4, and you all know how much better a model looks with hair than bald. So out came my credit card, and zap! Got the whole complete total ultimate hair set thing. However.. it didn't look as good as my previous free ones, and whilst being more 'hairy' with all the bangs and things, unless I wanted the wuthering heights look (or the GI Jane look with the other (of 2) hair included) then there was too much flappy bits everywhere. Also.... it don't fit. Not on SMV Vicky (or SMMV) anyway, so she was a bit like a monk.. but the other hair worked. So I've gone back to using the basic transmapped hair that someone gave away for free. Which is really nice community type stuff. But what went wrong? Do other people find HMann hair better than anything else? Is there some trick that will give me a use for my $30/whatever? At the mo I wish there was some way to get HMann to give half my money to the ppl who made the free hair that I'm using.

This is cool! I will have to try my own when I have time. I gotta ask... one of my best friends is called Tim Willis, but I don't think it's you... is it? Is your brother a pop star?

Try one of the Poser 2 figures supplied in Poser 4. They are much much less detailed but are still ok for most purposes. I don't know what a SWF is but I hope this helps. You might also want to remove unneeded morphs

Wow! Average is 33.3? I am 32.5 so not bad. I've been using Poser for maybe three months now, its been exhausting, but my friends all think I am a weirdo making pictures by laboriously moving arms and legs and trying to make clothing fit. My sister thinks I am a pervert for the interest in clothing - male and female, like I was stripping barbie dolls or something! jeez! Someone (DathWookie?) said about their friends and pics and stuff - my friends just arent interested so what I did which was cool was I went into an IRC channel that seemed to have interested ppl in and asked for requests - I did two pics over the next three hours, to their specifications, and they were extremely impressed! It felt good! But they weren't Poser users. Which brings me to my last. I'm trying to really learn Poser and how to make best use of it using Bryce and 3dsMax, but I have no idea about the other apps, or how to make clothes, and I don't know how people in 'the community' make friends and gather people to critique each others work. I am working on a comic/graphic novel in the superhero genre, and I want to give it an erotic angle because there seems to be very little in this area - and I dont mean really rude and obscene but more hinting. This sort of subtlety is very difficult to get right, also the comic humour element I'm trying for. I have maybe two people who give me feedback now and then, only one of whom uses Poser, and I'm curious (topic title!) about how to put the feelers out for other similar people. corum_anime@yahoo.co.uk

Firestarter? That was Drew Barrymore. No, this is a model of the star of Coyote Ugly, brilliantly captured. I don't know who the photo is but I would like a model of her, I think the eyes would need to be postworked.

Laptop??? perhaps your answer lies there. I've got the most powerful desktop I could build, it laughs in the face of Quake 3 and makes benchmarks crash with divide by zero errors, and yet Poser still struggles. I don't think there is a PC in the world that can run a complex scene with Vicky 2 in it and edit smoothly. Rendering time is unimportant but Poser does slow down and starts misbehaving when there are a few advanced characters in a scene. But... try making your laptop 256mb, and then backup your work, fdisk the drive, and reinstall windows and poser. Every now and then, tell windows not to use any virtual memory, reboot, defrag the drive, tell it to manage its own memory again, reboot again. Say once a month, this will keep windows a little happier. And buy Vicky some new exciting underwear. Maybe shes feeling neglected and causing this crash herself.

It says at the top - Poser 5 wishlist, someone said in here that means they are a LONG way off finishing it.. any more definite info? Cuz at $300 I have to start saving wlel in advance..

1. Collision Detection - YES! Glad someone else noticed this. And no, they cant have $1500, they can learn to program. Doom does it. It would run slower. 2) This aint a problem because they should not release Poser 5 until they have got the bugs out and rewritten it totally, ideally in machine code like UnrealTournament. But the slowness - by the time they have it working properly we all have PCs 10 times as fast as now. 3) Download? From the CD? I don't know what you mean but it sounds like theres a forum that I havent seen where this is discussed. They better not limit the CD installs, because as policy I like to reinstall ALL my software, starting with Windows, because Windows is so bad at getting messed up I need to. And I'll use P5 for more than 18 months and when I buy it I'm paying for more than use of it for 18 months.

Its nice that these things can be tweaked, and I am still rather stunned that having bought Victoria 2, I find that she's detailed but rather ugly and unpleasant to look at. So I will have to buy some characters for her as well as clothes, and the bill is climbing rapidly. I think Posette, unaltered, default character, looks nicer. So I will try and change things. On that note, I was impressed that zygote got a real model and scanned her nude to get a perfect female texture, and so I parted with more good money, but the only tex map I can find, looks like someone painted it quickly with a pink airbrush. Photorealism? Unless the real texture is hidden and if so, then how can I put a mole or tattoo on her? Hopefully not connected to the model hired, the 3d geometry of Vicky leans towards her being rather wider in the middle than previous versions. In fact I can't make her look slim and athletic using any dials I find, which I was really hoping to do - most realistic model ever made etc - unless this means she secretly eats chocolates too! There's a 'look' for a character I need V2 for, that has a very very toned tummy. I saw a girl who would be more than adequate jogging the other day. Yet Victoria's tummy doesnt seem to want the tight toned, stretched look with the hint of eight hens eggs poking slightly up, that an athletic look gives. It looks rather angular when you hit the dials that way. I am really hoping this is my incompetence and its not that Im expecting too much. Thanks! flames welcomed. I know what I paid for and I think we all want the realism and flexibility. Maybe I need SMV? Dunno. SMV (if ok on V2) + Zoe? = $50 more? ... nb/ whilst I'm here, is zygote big enough to have the tech to make characters based on real people accurately? Like, if they got the money to get Anna Kournikova or Britney to pose nude for their guyz for a week whilst they spun their parameters, and lie on the scanner or whatever, then could zygote offer really accurate models of those people? If not, ok. If its possible, and if you're saying too much cash, then why not someone not famous but nontheless real, so you could see from comparative photos just how real the model was, and so I couldn't say that Vicky default doesn't really look like anyone, and thats why I need to buy a character for her (but does Zoe look really real either??)

In the menus, there is one that says, create magnet. under it it says Create Wave. the third I think is Light or something. Try that. Have you got 4.0.3.0?

The dials, if you point at one, hold the left mouse button, and move slowly left or right, tweak the parameter. It pops up and asks just what you want the number to be, when you double click on the actual number up and right of the dial and not drag the dial itself. Hence you have the choice. What I would like to know is how to delete some of the parameter dials themselves, for example if I dont need most of them (which I dont) and have to scroll thru 50 silly ones to get to 'bend'. Answers on a postcard please.

So, PPP is a)slower and b)buggy oh and c)an extra $150? hmmm. As for Poser 5, I am hoping for renderfarm support since Poser 4 is damn slow when editing never mind rendering, and there are two very very wrong things: 1) Clothes ripping off. By now, Poser should understand that clothes arent inside the body and at least at render time, for every skin pixel drawn, it should check in case that pixel has clothing in front of it. QED. It really spoils some good stuff, and has taken up many hours of my time avoiding and fixing this, and making entire body parts invisible is a bit drastic when its a bra that dont work! The great opportunity also with this bug fix - and it is a bug, even if morphs cause it - is that people could fit clothing nice and snugly as it was designed. The number of pictures of bikinis made from one inch thick carpet underlay and dress straps that hover an inch away form the body - even over the shoulders - is insane. Things would look much nicer if people didnt have to play so safe. Conforming clothing should shrink to fit too. Otherwise its not really confirming much. 2) Clothing. The great new technology. Again would be better if you didnt have to make half of it 110% size to work ok, but... and this is the idea which would make Poser a better product... if it understood, that as well as the clothing draping over the figure, clothing doesnt usually stretch, and to some extent the figure conforms to the clothing. Hence 3d art cannot yet properly convey, a) a bra which shapes breasts - normal looking cleavage b) tight blue jeans - ALWAYS make a womans figure look different (and great) than it would nude. I am looking forward to buying Poser 5 when (and IF) it has these features, and fixes the bugs.

The poser manual itself states that it is not possible to delete body parts. So I would try CR2Edit. If anyone can recommend a tutorial for this then I would be interested in that also. Finally, my own pet hate is I bought Victoria 2 but I don't want half the parameter dials, and it is VERY annoying to scroll thru 100 things to find Twist. How please can I delete unwanted dials / morphs?