Chris, I wish you the best with the new product. It looks great. Good luck. Steve

Kenmac said- Strictly for "research" 's sake huh Steve? :o) When I was DLing all those images, Meta was in the midst of trying to control adult content coming in across their servers. The IT department covered for me big time. When I took over the P3 project and introduced female content with two breast morphs versus P2's one, I caugfht a lot of heat- it turned out to be a good choice. What was tougher to justify though, was the Y-rotate on the male genitalia. First, I had to carefully dance around when asking Zygote to build them for me in the first place, and then I had to sort of forget the control was in there when the content shipped. That was a favor granted by the head of Meta's QA. They found the control- was it Grover? and let it slide. Another "hard" but well placed choice. ;-)

You guys are pretty close... good reconstructive effort. At Metacreations, we licensed the base Poser 3 figures from Zygote for $xx,xxx. These were the same figures that Zygote was selling via Acuris as the "18 Perfect People" collection. I had originally seen these figures in a few magazine ads, early CGW, and wanted to include them in the next release of Poser at that time. Some earlier conversations had taken place between Zygote and Meta to provide a few other bits of content, a few animals for testing and some aftermarket 3D parts and props. Larry Weinberg and I met with Zygote in late 1997 to discuss a license deal and show them how to construct characters for use in Poser. This was prior to the figure set-up room, so all early rigging had to be done by hand, Larry doing the lion share of the set-up. By early 1998, Zygote and I structured our deal to include the figures and a few animals in Poser 3. I sent Chad and Chris mark-ups using Poser 3 rendered images of their figures to enable them to modify the faces, some aspects of the figures' shapes, and clothes designs. Some other elements were taken right out of the Zygote catalog, like many of the hair styles. The figures only supported materials and needed to be UV mapped to hold textures. I guided the team at Zygote so they could produce the first projection mapping of the figures. If I recall, Chad was using Flesh to create a modified projection map. At that time, our expectations of the mapping were far lower than they are today, and the UVs were all over the place in terms of skewed proportions, stretched pixels and made it near impossible to draw a straight line on any of the figures. I created the the textures for virtually all the figures and props in Poser 3 (exceptions being the raptor texture by Aaron Begley, horse texture by Heather ???), and once I started trying to create shirt textures with patterns and logos it became apparent that the UVs were problematic, but we were up against a delivery restriction, and the figures went out in that state. Yikes! The magnitude of managing the Poser 3 project proved to be quite a challenge for both Zygote and me. The content development process at Zygote hadn't ever been set-up in an assembly line-like nature, so the content came in pieces and often times was older versions sent by team mates other than the lead. We had content coming in up to the very last minute before we went gold- this drove the QA at Meta crazy. And it didn't make the process any easier on any of the team, inside or out. For Poser 4, we re-licensed the content included with Poser 3 for $xxx,xxx, and had new content created to fill the needs for conforming clothing ~why oh why didn't Larry and I patent that? ;-) ~ and we picked up some new animals and a few other pieces of cool content that Zygote had success with. I again directed Chad to re-cast the UVs for the new versions of the figures. He again used Flesh, but this time we did a much better job of scaling the polygon UV mapping so a lot less distortion occurred. We also stretched the seams joining the front and back texture maps so less blurring and bleeding would occur. I found inspiration from the community when I created all the textures for the Poser 4 figures. In Poser 3, I had used photos of animals for their textures, the dolphin and cat for instance, but had used a noise pattern over a skin-tone solid base color for the humans and hand painted in nipples and all. Prior to P4, a few folks in the community were creating very good human skin textures using photos composited together. I took this technique and downloaded lots of adult content to compose the P4 textures that shipped with the application. And as it should be, once the app was in the hands of artists with more time and skill than mine, great textures came out. At that time, I encouraged community artists to use my base textures to create new ones... My how times have changed. Any way, sometime I'll have to find someone to help me co-write a book on all this stuff. Maybe I can get one of writers in the community to help out... I have one in mind, just need to lure him away from his great blog work. Cheers, Steve Cooper

Carolly, Yes mom... I know mom.... I'm sorry mom... Can I borrow the car tonight mom? - typed with a wicked smirk, hoping you won't hit me next time you see me- ;-)

...and I wonder why I stayed away for so long... :)

I'd like to have an argument, please. OH! Oh, I'm sorry, but this is abuse. ;-)

You'd look funny as my bitch. ...well, you always look funny, but that's another story. ;) I'm around next week. Let's hook-up.

...the only people still buying aluminum foil will be the fringe Linux users of 2003 who fashion it into a hat in a feeble attempt to keep the NSA/Gatesian/alien hordes from probing their cranium...

Congratulations! You guys have worked so hard on this version, it's great to see the release. Steve Cooper

Great pics! I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Tim and Tammy, Clint and crew. Ta and Jenny, it was a pleasure seeing you two again. Spike sorry we missed each other, I was only at the show for Thursday. Got in around 11:30 on Wednseday night- a very long motorcycle ride from Santa Cruz, and upon arrival Josh Reiss had my party hook-ups all scheduled. The next day on the show floor was a bit blurry but fun none the less. Siggraph is like a 3D family reunion, it's great to see you folks join the fold! Steve Cooper

Enjoy. It's great fun. You pretty much can't miss by just walking the streets and allies. There are formal shops that sell fancy packaged products and then a host of small shops and vendors that specialize in every subcomponent for virtually any gadget you can think of.

My favorite spot in Tokyo? I found a neighborhood of shops that sell the plastic display sushi found in Japanese restaurants world-wide. There were many different grades of plastic sushi, from poorly colored artificial in appearance, to nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. At one of the shops specialing in the very best plastic sushi, my traveling partner purchased a frosty cold mug of Asahi, with beads of moisture on the outside of the glass, a few droplets of trickling down the side, with a perfect just-poured head as well, all in plastic.

I love Japan. Prepare to be amazed.

I've got some bootleg copies of Anthony's book on PDF for sale. How much is it worth to you? ;)

Brian, Don't make me get all sniffly again. ;) Cooper

No problem Anton. I agree with you on that last point, it's not the fault of the naysayers. It hasn't helped, but it's not their fault.

...the community is a segment (XX%) of the users, sorry for the second note, too tired...