I am new to poser and I am competely confused. I see all of these wonderful characters, textures, and etc for sell and for free, but I am wondering how they become the actual persons own work? I hope I do not make this confusing. For example, if I use say a P4 female and make dial or morph changes, is she considered my character and can I sell her? I have been reading the copyright forum over the next few days and I would not like to ever use someone elses work. I am just trying to figure out how these character packages become the actual work of the artist and not that of the program. Does this make sense? Thank you so much for any help provided.

;-0 (sorry)

As I understand it, any image you create is yours. Some people limit the use of their stuff (non-commercial only, ect.) in the readme, but I'm not selling any pics any time soon so its nothing to worry about much. As far as the actual geometries involved (the mesh), it belongs to its creator (DAZ), any changes or modifications you make to the mesh are yours. Not the new mesh, just the changes. Say the number 4 is owned by me. if you add 2, the addition of 2 is yours, not 6. Did that make sense? If you just plan to play around with poser, and not make any money, don't worry too much, just give a nod to anyone whose stuff you use, even if you modify it. Almost none of the stuff I use is mine. I just twiddle it all together until I like the picture. Don't redistribute anything you don't make from scratch and your safe. It's really alot more complicated than that, that's why there's a forum for it.

Something "becomes" your work when you're the one that made it. There's not much more to it than that. The software itself is just a tool and doesn't make anything. The content that comes with the software was all made by somebody somewhere and belongs to them or whoever they sold the rights to. The stuff you see in free stuff and the store usually isn't a full package. Instead it's a collection of bits and pieces, made by the vendor, that goes together with other bits and pieces you may or may not already own to make a useable character. Some products really are complete packages, where the vendor made everything: the mesh, the textures, the control file, the morphs etc. With human figures, that's rare. Most of the female characters you see in the store are add-on sets of textures and/or morphs for the Victoria figure made and sold by DAZ. If you don't own the relevant version of Victoria, you won't be able to use them. The key thing is, a vendor doesn't include any item in the package that they didn't make from scratch themself. So if you take the P4 female and make a few morph dial changes, the only thing you can sell or give away is a pose file that sets those dial changes. While some people do in fact sell packs of such poses, you really have to be very good at it before people will pay money for them and as I understand it there's not much of a market for P4 woman morph poses. Mike 3 and Vicki 3 would be two of the few figures you could hope to sell morph pose packs for and as I said, you'd have to be good at it. Take a look at some of Syyd's face packs at www.runtimedna.com or Capsces's packs in the store here. Mind you, Capsces usually makes her own morphs and sells those along with the poses so they aren't just packs of morph poses.

Nance, you should be sorry! I wanted to use that line! ;-) If you set the morph dials provided with the P4 figure, you can create MOR files which are specialized Pose files that will set the morph dials to your settings. These are legal to sell. If you create your own morphs without using any of the supplied morphs in any way (you can't use any morph even at a very low setting), there are ways to squish the morph so that it is legal to distribute the morph, including selling it. (If you do it the wrong way, you end up giving away part or all of the figure.) If you are new to Poser, I'd strongly recommend using the program for a while to understand how things work before trying to sell anything. There are all sorts of things expected for commercial files, such as MAT files, MOR files, correct zipping of files for extraction, etc. You'll also get a better feel for what will sell and what will not. (Characters are not as popular if they are only dial settings. Characters based on P4 default figures aren't very popular any more.) Hope this helps, Cres

once you create it in a modelling program, texture it, 'bone' it (bit hazy on this step, but Dr. Geep has a good tutorial on it..go to fallencity.net..I think..;), and put it up for sale or download..'fraid that's it..:|