It really IS the Hair that makes the figure look real... that's been proven over and over and over... Someday...

Nice work, Tim! I don't necessarily think that this is "cheating", either. After all, I used photographs of hairstyles from various angles to make the transparency-mapped hair. You just used one photograph of one hairstyle for this image, and did the work in post instead of in Poser. The purist approach to CG says that everything must be modeled (preferably from scratch!) by the artist. I've seen pictures done by 3DMax artists that were meticulously detailed and modeled and where the creator was obsessing endlessly about something being a tiny bit off in the refraction algorithm of the raytracing, never seeming to notice that the picture itself was dead. No composition, no aesthetic appeal, no interest. Just cold, plastic technical near-perfection that screams "computer-generated." I love using existing images, elements of images and combinations of images -- stock photos, paintings, whatever -- as backgrounds and props in Poser. And I never feel like I'm cheating because I didn't spend three days modeling every detail of that third tree from the left in the picture's background. Admittedly, it's an approach that can make for just as much bad "art" as the CG-purist stuff (boring, unoriginal pastiche is no better than boring, unoriginal exercises in raytracing.) But it's at least a different approach to the paradigm of digital art, and one that can allow for much originality. -Nemo (who must have had too much coffee this morning)

When I tried that, I decided it was a really good way to create images that would scare the paint off the walls. Look at it as if it where a real photograph.....the flip-flop, back and forth from reality to virtual-reality can be pretty creepy. If I ran into this woman, I would wonder if I had been slipped some LSD! Fun though. Good work.