Warning....rant follows.... Hi So I've been trying to get some realism into my renders, and I've got to the point where the skin textures are not bad, but realism is being let down by poses and joints. In particular the elbow, shoulder, knee and hip joints. So I'm thinking, hey, why not develop some better JCM's to fix the problem. So I investigate. No go. The problem with JCM's is that say the elbow only gets screwy once it's bent more than 100 degrees, and JCM's start applying from 0 degrees, so you can't really have a JCM that starts effecting things after say a joint rotation of 90 degrees. So then I think, what about magnets. So I do the old "pose V3 with her shoulders back and arms down and look at the poor joint". The inside of her arms go into her torso. So then I lay down some magnets to try and fix things. Now I might be wrong here, but it seems to me the magnets don't work too well when there is a JCM (the std one's with V3) being applied to the area. So I couldn't get anything resembling a good result. So....next step is to export the previous mesh as obj into Maya and start to try and manually fix the shoulder joint by playing with vertices. But....Maya is designed to work on low poly meshes for deformation. A 60k poly mesh becomes and unworkable mesh. There are some tools to help (blendshapes, clusters, lattices, etc), but they don't really apply to fixing a hi-poly mesh like V3. Totally frustraited, I start playing with shaders in Maya and come up with something pretty good for skin. Run the render - looks a treat. But there is one little problem, V3's bottom is not quite right. I render a few different angles and nothing quite fixes it - so I head back to P5 to morph it into shape.....and......P5 crashes. Agghhhh. So it seems that P5 has a bunch of limitations which people have devised sneaky workaround for. But there are some things (joints!) where P5's implementation means they will be very hard to work-around. I ended up posting the final Maya render, at http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=774523&Start=1&Sectionid=26&filter_genre_id=0&WhatsNew=Yes Thanks for listening - had to get that off my chest.

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