For those of us that do a lot of comercial and non comercial 3d, poser is so close to being the all around tool,as for driving up the price for editing , truespace is very affordable and ray tracing is a must for high end work, when you do closeups and serious scene work , shadow maps just dont do it.Poser can be the best program out there, affordable( even at say,500.00) when you consider that studiomax is up in the 10,000 dollar range. you do need to be able to edit and animate on the fly, this is a must in complicated scenes....poser has made its place as a serious 3d charactor tool, I like it better than studiomax charactor studio,... knight

Ghost effects did an incredible job with poser I love it...but, if you want to talk 3d lets look at this, poser would be perfect if: 1 it used ray tracing as an option 2 mesh could be edited directly 3 improved mapping (like Live video) basicly a combination of truespace 4 and poser would be incredible with mimic thrown in for audio..... these are some things I have yet to see, except through other plugins and they are soooo important... knight

when you install the 4.03 update it gives a list in the accept agreement section and it shows what parts of the program was enhanced or corrected, mostly it seems some fine tuning was done,,with the crap job metacreations has done and the pathetic way they just dumped on us all, it would be safer to update to the curious labs version, at least they support and seem like a great company...

Mimic contacted me and they are taking suggestions for improvements, looks like they have some good ones in the mix, like emotion buttons, singing, animals audio editing maybe, sounds like they want to go for it in the next upgrade..

sometimes you have to drag the link into the browser upper address window, depending on the host...dont know if this helps but oh well...

I got the promo price, billed correct with no problem...and even at 195.00 mimic is worth it...lip sync by hand is tedious...

Light dials.. once your new spot is created you have dials for angle start,angle end, distance start,distance end,SHADOW,MAP SIZE,x rotate,y rotate, ect. hope this helps you oarman. by the way I am dumping poser 4.3, im going back to the ghost effects version, here is a list of problems.. BVH motion does not work correctly SAVE STATE doesnt work and is too annoying LIPSYNC software im using doesnt like the curious labs update JUST ALL AROUND not comfortable with the new software maybe in newer versions curious labs will do a better job but for right now ghost effects version is the best, ive used all versions extensivly and this is my opinion. no trouble with the previous versions. good animating everyone..

Sorry, Oarman ...the lights that come up with the standard settings wont go past 1024 for shadow mapping, you have to create lights and get rid of the ones that normally come up. once you have your new lights they have more controls than the standard, shadow maps can go to 8000 and more if you have enough ram, ive got 64 meg and the maps top off at about 9500, yes this does take a lot of memory but poser isnt a ray tracer and uses mapping, you have to boost the maps to get superior results, I am looking into the poser to truespace plugin so I can render my poser anims in truespace wich is a raytracer and has bigtime render output. hope this helps... later

The New 403 does not save the menu positions on exit, I called curious labs, it is a glitch and they are aware of it, also if your doing animations create your own lights and boost the shadow map resolution to about 80000, this will give smooth shadow edges, poser uses maps verses raytraced and you have to boost the maps past 1024 to get non choppy shadow edges, also turn the shadow darkness down a bit, keep in mind the the exaggeration poser puts in the keyframes for natural movement, sometimes you have to change the keyframe to linear to stop the overcompensation.