could someone give me a crash course in the legalities of distributing characters created in Poser using Poser's people???? i have a few in the works, but i've kept them locked up for the simple fact that i'm unclear on just what makes a character legal for download and distribution.......any and all help is appreciated.....

Distributing characters is quite easy. You can either supply them as a PZ3 file or as a CR2 file. If you've made major modifications to a Zygote OBJ file (basically any of the clothing or male/female/animal figures) that came with Poser, you can use OBJAction Mover to encode the OBJ file into a PCF file. OAM is available from the free stuff section here. However, you are explicity forbidden to use OAM for commercial purposes. Hope this helps Paul

Anything that includes the Zygote/Metacreations original mesh must be encrypted before distribution. Use the ObjAction Mover program by Maz. Its available in the Free Stuff/Utilities. It uses the original Poser file to lock/unlock. If both parties have the program, then each will have the key. In this way there will be no infringement of copyright. Hope this helps, Regards PhilC www.philc.net

thanks a bunch....now to be sure i completely understand, i can, for example, create a character using the P4 Nude Woman, do all the morphing and texturing i'm gonna do to the clothing, face, etc, then encode the P4 woman using Mover, pack it all together in a handy-dandy zip file, and distribute it as my own character, so long as it's for free........which is cool with me, by all means........free is good......(((now if i could just find some really good long female hair and textures for free, that'd be good too...hehehe)))

If you are morphing the P4NF and including the morph files as part of the character (and not as seperate OBJ files), and including a texture map for the figure and attached clothing, you can distribute the whole thing as either a CR2 or a PZ3 without using Mover. If you are distributing morphs as seperate OBJ files, you should use bushi's MorphSqueeze utility (available at his site on Bushi3D). This strips out unnecessary information so that there is no way to recreate the original part of the figure from the morph. If your figure needs a Zygote OBJ file which you have modified (and the figure will not work without this modified Zygote mesh), you need to use Mover to encrypt the modified OBJ so it can only be used by people who have the original Zygote mesh. Hope this clarifies things :) Paul