I use radiosity whenever I want VERY realistic lighting. In Vue 5 it works well together with the HDRI, giving a very natural look to the result. The downside of that is long render times. The first rule is to use only standard terrains unless you absolutely MUST use a procedural one. Those eat up render time faster than Carter makes little liver pills. The other thing is to tone down the quality to the lowest point that gives reasonable results. If you have a render farm and Vue Pro or Infinite, then by all means turn it up. My render farm is only gonna consist of two computers for quite a while though, and I only have Esprit anyway... But I've been tinkering with renderers since DKB and Vue's is certainly one of the best I've seen!

Yes! Mailwasher will generally flag them! I forgot to mention that.

Using web based email will not really protect you. Malicious Java script or VBS is quite easy to put on an HTML message and if the email software at the web-based host does not scan for it, it can do as much damage as an executable trojan. I use a number of lines of defense. A good virus checker helps. Never execute anything you didn't actually ask for and check it for viruses first with an up-to-date checker. Install and use a good firewall. I use two of them and what one doesn't lock out, the other catches. Use a good TEXT-based email client that does not auto-display HTML in messages and that segregates attachments without running them. Personally, I keep a working copy of Outlook Express on my system at all times. It's worm bait. If a worm tries to hijack OE, it will succeed. But OE is not permitted internet privileges by my firewalls, thus any attempt by it to send something raises an alarm. Mind you, the only worm I have ever actually caught was an executable that I ran without thinking one day when I was groggy. And that was before I put these measures in place. Took me two days to run down all its pieces and rub it out.

There's a bit of a tut in the readme (which you can read without buying the program).

Argh! Why didn't I think of that. Turned off the cookie cutter and referall cutter and the ad blocker on my firewall and bingo! Thanks, Wolf!

Tried that....got a tiny GIF file, all grey.

Looks nice but the link doesn't work for me.

Here's a notion. It won't satisfy everyone, but it is easy to implement and won't bother too many people. Just put a link to the showcase on the header to this forum?!? There is none there now, so you have to go and hunt it up.

As a NEW merchant, I can see where there is some problem just getting my product known to the community.... Maybe if the staff (or some member who was willing to contribute the time) could do a survey of what's available in the different categories, there would be more interest. The other thing is, if I see someone directly asking about the very problem that my product solves, can't I tell them about it in a reply, or should I have to go to IM for that? I mean the reply might easily be useful to other members who have the same question.

Looks like inverted polygon normals. I'm not sure what tool you'd use to fix it on a mac, though.

Awesome hair, Koz, works beautifully on Eve V4 using the P4 Fem MAT.

Don't get me wrong. There are things about P5 that I love and I generally run P5 rather than P4. But some aspects are frustrating. Probably, for me, the MOST frustrating is the slowness of hair draping and collision detection in general and the way it locks everything else out until it's good and ready to give up a few CPU cycles. But even that aspect of the program is actually working well, if it would just do it in the background instead of hogging everything. Hey, maybe if I got a 6ghz P6 machine with 4Gb of RAM...do you think???

What SR3 DID fix for me was pretty much all of the remaining issues with the dynamic hair that I had (I don't animate dynamic hair so I can't speak to those issues). What SR3 did NOT fix was the problem with the program's priorization of tasks. It puts rendering and draping at the top of the food chaing and dumps user inputs and OS inputs to the bottom, making it SEEM as if the program locks up, especially on slower machines. This also makes it impossible to tell if it HAS locked up or not because there is no way to know if it's just ignoring messages from the OS and mouse or is locked in a tight loop where it will never see them. Generally, it DOES respond to the high priority EXIT NOW message from the OS, so it's probably still running. But there's no way to see progress because the display of progress is not updated until the high priority draping/rendering task lets a few cycles loose. When I braced them on this, CL claimed that Poser is "not written for multitasking." They're right about that!!! The trouble is, our OPERATING systems ARE and if you ignore that in a program it looks really clunky, as P5 does. Like many others here, I'm waiting for two things. An SR4 that deals with the real issues and streamlines the code as much as possible and DAZ Studio which will provide a basis for comparison of functions.

In my experience, even the simplest Poser hair can gobble huge amounts of RAM. I use a memory manager to help clean up fragmented and unused allocations whenever memory gets too low (Free Ram XP Pro) and that helps, but with only 384Mb in my system, even the simplest scene with one figure and dynamic hair can run up a huge block of RAM. Another thing that does this a lot is reflecting surfaces that are parallel (or nearly so) to the camera's line of view. Try the render with the P4 renderer and see how it looks.... What OS are you using? How much RAM do you have? I'm using Win2K Pro.

Maclean, You didn't notice. I said "unit cost." More properly, MARGIN cost. This has nothing to do with how much work you put into creating the product, it's the cost of delivering and supporting it in the marketplace. The entire software industry entertains illusions in this respect (with the possible exception of Microsoft and we all know how badly THEY are doing in the marketplace!). The margin cost is how much more it costs you to deliver and support one more copy this month than you did last month, which is why I stated that it can be approximated with zero in this discussion. Profit is not affected by fixed costs, including the capital cost of product creation. But margin cost IS accrued when you take time out to do the taxes on income derived from selling the product, and when you take time out to support users. Your time is worth money, though it may be a bit difficult to estimate how MUCH money. Like I said, probably the only real way to determine the actual PED (and whether it's constant or non-linear) is to experiment with pricing a bit.