Sonia - its the bones that do all the "posing" in poser, the model you import from 3DS will become the skin on the bones, move the bone and the skin follows. The tutoral on your pro-pack disk gives a very good walk through of the procedure. Good luck!

Your on the right track. She can import the figure, then go to the "set-up room". From there she can import the bones from any poser figure, and tie them into the poser parts. If she doesn't have Pro pack, have her download the advanced poser manual. There is a rather drawn out, time consumeing but not very difficult method for editing the text files to define the parent/child relationships for your models.

I'm doing a fair amount of animation for video. I use Poser propack with LipSynch for the character animation, then import to MAX for the scenery and objects, render to AVi and do the video post with Sonic Foundry's Vegas Video.

Copyright is a legal concept, and it has exceptions. First, most art work (including photos) is not automatically copyrighted (its why you see all those notices)and publishing a photo in an anonymous(sp?) public forum (like a usenet group) without such notice certainly clouds that issue. Further, under the "fair use" doctrine limited use of copyrighted material for certain critical, satirical or artistic purposes is permitted (hence looping in the hip hop world). There is probably not much of an issue if you construct your textures from a true montage (a nipple here, eyeball there...) so long as you don't take a significant percentage of the overall work from any one photo. (Or so my lawyer explained it to me)

I have mimic (it works very well - am using it to finish a sci - fi piece myself, hopefully for sale to cable). Whats your time frame? I expect to be finished my current project by Jan 01, and would have time thereafter to help. Tell me more about the project.

Thanks...I'll check out both!