It worked! Thank you SamTherapy, Armorbeast, and ernyoka1! I used Nerd's and Rbtwhiz's crosstalk fixers! Thank you all for your time and consideration!

Yeah it's the old Steph, no INJ and how it messes up the M2 figure is he ends up reposed, after I have posed the Steph character. I haven't rendered yet, but I usually use the Firefly. I will try with Vickie, thank you all for the quick response!

the Frank Miller catwoman was a hooker, the "Original" Catwoman from the 40's Golden Age was a thief who stole to keep the attention of Batman.

I got it somewhat figured out, I had a light under the lava to help illuminate the cavern. I applied a gel to the light with the glowing lava texture, and must have messed around with the settings and flare enough to cause this problem, or maybe not enough lights. I added more, erased the one I had and started over, and it seems to have worked. I need to figure out how to use the directional light, it just revolves around a point that I can't seem to find, in oredr to use it effectively. Thanks for your time, Polax, I like the art on your page!

I believe the program that works from photos to build a model is called Dsculptor, I just saw somebody mention it on another thread, I can't remember which. Do a search for it, you'll find it. I bet there's some Maya guys in New York, ask on the Maya thread.

I'll be honest and say that I've only been learning 3d for about the last three years and there is still so much to learn. But I when I first started I had many of the same questions you did, with the same way of thinking. Since the figure is 3d, wouldn't it make sense to build the figure like a real body? with bones and every muscle group all working together under the skin? The problem with that is it would hog all your resources and take forever to move your figure, much less animate. How it works is like this: a figures skin, muscles, etc. are a mesh that is built in a 3d app. It's just one surface that covers the whole body. It is hollow on the inside, like the hollow chocolate bunnies you got as a kid. You can use several different methods to make this mesh. Nurbs is kind of like clay, I believe. You start with an object and push it, pull it, and stretch until you get the shape you want. I don't have a lot of experience with nurbs so I may only have the jist of it. Then there's low polygonal modeling, where you take say a square, extrude a surface (pull it out so it forms a limb) and do this several times until you have a squarish looking figure, like a transformer, and add a smooth modifier to it, to smooth it out. A modifier is like a helper, you push the button and all the corners are smooth. Then there's the process I tend to like, and that's build a spline cage. You draw a line from the side view, another from the front view, you connect them until it builds a cage. Then you add a surface modifier to it and you have your mesh. All these ways I described to you are just basic overviews, there is a lot more that goes into it. The next step is to add a skeleton. This is not a skeleton as you know it, the bones are simple shapes that represent the bones, and are meant to establish what is stiff and what moves. The bones themselves are stiff, they communicate to the mesh that this part stays still, the joints tell the part of the mesh where they are positioned that this part will bend. If your going to use your figure in Poser, than Poser 5 or Poser Pro Pack are what you want to use to bone your figure and then do the tedious task of joint parameters. A joint parameter is an x that lies where you positioned the joint. One half of the X is red, the other half is green. Everything on the red half doesn't move. Everything on the Green half does move, or bend, twist, etc. Everything in between these two angles blends, that is where you'd want the tendons to stretch or the elbow to pop out. This system is limited as to how natural the body moves, since the human body has all the muscles within a limb that contract and stretch every time it moves, but if you try to make the blend zone go from the elbow half way up the bicep you're not goimg to get the result you want as it will bow or stretch in a weird way. So another step in poser is Morph targets, dials that are aimed at specific body parts to make them behave, say to make the Bicep flex when the elbow bends. You'd have to do it manually, it won't do it automatically for you. But from what I understand there is something called remote controlled morphs which I believe do it automatically, but I don't know enough about those yet. Morphs are also handy for changing the appearance of your figue, into a creature or resembling someone you know. Many of the figures available to Poser have a lot of Morphs. You can also use your 3d app to make custom morphs. I've been using these methods for awhile now, but I'm starting to wander back into 3ds max territory because they have a plug-in available called Character Studio, which uses the skeleton setup to bone the figure and some other tools which may be more advanced than the ones in Poser, I'm still learning so I don't know enough yet to comment on that. I've yet to use Maya, but most of the great movie figures like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars etc. use Maya. I don't have a lot of experience in these apps so anybody is free to correct me or give more info. There are several great tutorials out there that will at least give you an idea of what you're getting yourself into. There is a Joan of Arc figure creation tutorial out there that is great, very detailed. For Joint parameters and how they affect the mesh I'd check out Dr. Geep, I beleive that's how you spell his name, he's real good. Also go to the sites of the 3d apps, they have tutorials to explain there products. discreet, alias/wavefront, curious labs, rhino, lightwave, etc.