Yes, I'm going to whine about something. But then I'm going to try and do something about it. For those of you who do not know of such things, CGNetworks occasionally runs Challenges. These are fairly big deals with all sorts of prizes and stuff -- but the key to them is originality and effort on the part of the creators for it. THey recently started up a new one -- Master & Servant -- and I finally got a good idea for something that was cool but, of course, can't enter. Why? Because the application that I would render in is specifically forbidden, and I quite simply don't like any of the others -- personal thing, granted, but since I don't like them, I don't have them. The original basis for this particular ruling is that they don't want premade characters used. And I can understand that. It's part and parcel of the challenge itself. But they flat out forbid the use of it. Period. Now, to demonstrate topicality, the program is Poser. Now, I woud never attempt to enter something like this in expectation of winning -- I would do it to have participated. Nor would I have tried to do so using poser 4. I might have tried bryce, but the image requires human emotion, so setting it up would have involved hauling the custom fig into Poser -- and that would have excluded me. But 5 -- and now 6, when I get it -- yeah -- I'll give it a go. Harrumph. Note that I don't think it's actually so much snobbery as it is concern for cheating -- some of the heads over there use poser too, and are aware of what it can do now. That said, it would take me a bit to set it up, but woud anyone be interested in holding our own version of this Challenge? One where we could actually use Poser, that is. If I were to get enough responses -- say, 20 or so -- I'd contact some of the companies and see what I could find for prizes. whine with me, snivel at me, or hop in at your leisure :)

Seems it took a day for my being upset to fester this far, and in the interm Teyon has asked them if rendering in Poser specifically is allowed. The answer was private, for the most part, but publically they said they didn't think there would be an issue with doing that. based on that, I'm going to go ahead, and hope that that very self same Teyon's occasional partial tutes on making a human figure continue to work for me in my efforts. however, the idea still stands -- this sort of serious challenge is something that appeals to me deeply.