Has anyone ever seen available in Poser format or Poser compatible domestic interior scenes modeled on urban African, Middle Eastern or South American apartments? In my experience visiting family in these places the apartments are very different in design, color schemes, and furnishings than what I have seen in North American and European apartments. My attempts to create these scenes for myself has not been overly successful. Also, are there any good medium resolution building exteriors to place outside the window of my North American apartment interiors to represent the buildings across the street? When I search for images on Google they tend to be skylines or areal views rather than what you would see right out a window in the city mut something in mesh would be better anyway to not jar with the Poser interior. Thank you.

For the backgrounds, you could try something like the Storefronts pool on Flickr.

I've noticed some Toronto photogs who get good angles for Poser purposes....

http://www.flickr.com/groups/storefronts/pool/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/593706@N24/pool/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32175940@N06/

http://www.urbantoronto.ca/forumdisplay.php?f=9&order=desc

Those are nice photos. Thanks.

As for South America it all depend on the country and city.
For example if you want Buenos Aires you can use Paris with English train and subway and if you want you can add some Italian monuments and statues.
Old buildings, one century or more, in general have Spanish or Portuguese architecture and modern buildings are modern buildings as any modern building in any part of the world.
All is made with masonery, wood is not used at all.
A combination of Spanish, French and Italian buildings will work fine.
As for misery and miserable people that exist in many countries and cities, there's no architecture at all and it makes no difference if you are in Rio de Janeiro or South Africa, it all look the same.

I'm thinking interiors strictly. Specifically lower middle class or working class Kingston Jamaica, San Jose Costa Rica, Shubra/Cairo Egypt, Johannesberg South Africa, Kinshasa in Congo or Nairobi Kenya. All apartments in any city are different from each other but certainly from a single photo you can usually tell if an apartment is in Central America, the Middle East, Africa or the USA/Canada unless it is a very luxury style apartment. I guess Central American is most similar to US but Egyptian apartments for instance have consistently different living, cooking, washroom and sleeping set-ups then you ever see in the US in my experience at least at the working class income level of my relatives and their neighbors. The wall colors etc are very different too.

Really I would love a normal working class US apartment for Poser as well. In my experience living all over the North East US many working class apartment are very 50's era. Even when I lived in Boston and for many years in Manhattan my friends and I all lived in places from circa 1910-1950. I have used Mapp's WWS6 - The Hotel kit to make rural Vermont apartments although things like the doors had to be changed. The closest I have found to a New York or Montreal apartment is ockham's 50's kitchen. I have lived quite a few places in New England, the US South and even Alaska and they all had destinctive interior architecture and typical furnishings. I think there are far more European middle class interiors like greenpots' available for Poser then US style for some reason.

America was colonised by Europeans and also in the 19/20th centuries was a great inmigration of Italians, Spanish and some Germans and Poles, so there's not too much difference with Europe.
In the past there was no industry in Central and South America and so all the furniture and household accesories came from Europe and you still can find old European or European style furniture in old houses. Today exist local industry and all have modern style that all the same everywhere.
Climate is also important, snow almost doesn't exist and in many places is not so cold, so a poor house can have very simple windows and doors and even none!, for sleeping you can use a net hanging between two posts, but the DVD player is the same China made.

Asia and Africa are very different cultures, so almost all is different.

 If you need some specific background image of Italian style, and you are not able to find it on the net, let me know and I will be happy to go outside with my digital camera and catch something for you.

(for a small fee, of course!  ^__^ )                        *<------ joke

*Giorgio

You know those of us in Africa don't have one single style - if you go to an apartment in Johannesburg and I used to live there - I live a few minutes north of it now - no two will look the same. There may or may not be African-type images in our houses but mostly they're sold to tourists. I don't think any two houses in the complex where I live would have the same look inside even though our houses are identical in architecture - or lack of architecture. You'd paint the walls any colour you feel like cos you'd do it yourself and the next person can repaint it again - but the vast majoriy will have white / beige and other boring colours. If you like clutter your house will be full of trinkets - if you like minimalist - your house will be minimalist.

Only difference I've seen between USA and here - we won't put in white carpets unless it's in a room that's seldom used and for special occassions only. Tiles and wood floors are more practical - wall to wall carpeting is popular too. We don't typically have airconditioning. But you have so many cultures and languages and races living together in Johannesburg it would be completely impossible to say - that's a JHB apartment and then you'd probably have to target a particular race group - which in Africa would be okay - in USA probably politically incorrect. Also JHB is 100% city - there's nothing much left here of "Africa" - except in the odd curio store. 

Fashion comes and goes around here too - some people like the cottagy look others want ultra-modern. We have stores for everything.

None of us dress in the way poser content dresses African people - except if you're in a tourist area and putting on a show for them - and we no longer live in grass huts in the cities ... although you'd find them in the rural places. Very poor people live in shacks which is really not much better than living nowhere and there'd be not actual structure there.

Really I think you could take any modern apartment with modern furnishings and tell someone that is in JHB and it would fit

In Buenos Aires there is a location or neighbourhood called " La Boca" where houses are painted with strong saturated colours, red, blue, green and so on, it looks very strange and unusual.
Why? The story:
La Boca is located in the port and harbours and poor people and port workers lived there. Ships need painting and so ships were painted and always remain some paint cans and so, sailors brought half can or even a full cam of paint as present to some lady or not so lady living in the poor's houses and houses need to be painted.
Ships are painted in one colour and so houses were painted with this colour, when there was no more available paint cans from the ship the painting of houses stopped and remained some houses painted or half painted and other houses not painted.
With the next ship in the harbour the available colour was other, so within many years La Boca turned into a rainbow.
This is one or more century old story, today many parts still remains as a traditional place and for tourists, but nobody paints in that way!!!

 In Liguria (the Italian region where Genoa and Savona are located and where I live)  there are many small towns with the same painted houses. The reason? Exactly the same told by kawecki.

Have a look here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotogiannella/sets/72157606463377650/ or search for "houses Liguria" with Google.

Giorgio

America was colonised by Europeans and also in the 19/20th centuries was a great inmigration of Italians, Spanish and some Germans and Poles, so there's not too much difference with Europe.

I don't agree... I have visited Europe and also seen many movies... the apartment interiors would not be remotely plausible for any region of North America. I did not believe greenpots interiors were any more realistic than the Hobbits Home until TrekieGrrrl posted some images of her apartment.

As for Africa... maybe it is a class thing. When I Google apartments for rent I see apartments the same in the USA, Africa, and Europe and the Mediterranean but when I travel I stay always with family. I have close family in every continent but Asia. My people are all working class people, factory workers mainly, not for any lack of smarts but simply because of opportunity and circumstance. The apartments of all my aunties and uncles and cousins and their neighbors are very distinctive to their country and very different from these standardized middle class homes in the Modern Western Style you see on Google search. Even in the US I had friends who lived in mansions, a few middle class acquaintances but new mostly working class people whose apartments looked nothing like those shown on the internet.

Most definitely not one single apartment I saw in say Cairo could have been found anywhere in North America and when I show photos of my travels to anyone they know immediately if the photo was taken in the USA or Middle East or Africa or Mediterranean. The closest match I saw from one country to an other was San Jose CR to Miami USA but even then all the stove and plumbing was different etc. and although the walls and floor layout were similar really all the details were different.

I think maybe the working class is not very much shown in cinema etc. I know my upper class wife had never once visited a neighborhood or home like that of my parents before meeting me. Because of the elite university I attended I am unique in my family in having visited the homes of middle class and very wealthy people. As I child the middle class homes shown in American sit-coms had as much reality in my mind as the inside of a space station on TV shows. I did not know there were actually people who did not live in the "slums" I had only ever seen. I thought there were in each city several hundred rich people who had big places or lived in fancy towers but I did not imagine they lived in places that looked much different from my own. When I befriended rich and Middle Class people in university I was literally amazed their homes looked inside like those shown on television and in movies. In American films rarely are poor or working people shown in less then lower middle class living circumstances from what I have seen.

It is funny. I used to work in the second (or third?) tier of the film industry and Toronto was a stand-in for Chicago and Old Montreal a stand-in for Moscow for these cheap American film productions. My wife and I can tell any movie or TV show set in the US but shot in Canada within seconds. I once saw the most ridiculous Italian film set for no apparent reason very unconvincingly in Manhattan. My wife and I watch the TV show "Doc" with Billy Ray Cirus which was shot in Canada for a Southern US Christian TV network simply because not a single scene, interior, costume, hair style or character is remotely plausible for its Manhattan setting. Funny since so many people in New York actually come from places like Toronto or Nashville or St. Louis. We ask ourselves why the costumers couldn't just go to the airport and watch people getting off a flight from New York if they can't afford to visit and take some pictures. My favorite movie location solution was a Rutger Hauer film by the direct Albert Pyun which was set in California but since it was shot in Serbia the first establishing shot shows a cheaply made English sign saying something like "Welcome to Ye Old European Village". I think those two film greats also did a rip off of a Japanese swordsman series where Florida was the location used to film scenes set in a traditional Laotian village. Albert Pyun rocks!

"Taxi Driver" looked plausible. "Brother from Another Planet" featured pretty reasonable Harlem settings. I wonder where it was shot... it was so long ago I can't remember how much was done with sets and how much on locations. The movie "Happy Accidents" looked very much like actual workaday New York City. A famous example of city transposition is the the San Francisco apartment and rooftop filmed on sets in LA for "The Room" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISXiFJS9D5A

It all depend on what you are looking for, in any way people don't live and dress as you see in American movies. In Brasil we don't speak Spanish, we speak POrtuguese and in Buenos Aires there's no beach, no coconut trees neither you can see the Andes.
You can discover an American tourist from a mile far away, nobody dress in such ridiculous way, neither American do inside the US.

As for poor and working class people, I am speaking of poor and not miserable people that is another story, there are very little possible combinations.
Poor people live in small apartment or houses with only a small room or two, so you have a simple bed, a table, some chairs, a stove, a refrigerator and a TV set, no more room to put anything else inside, how different can be an apartment from one place to another with so few elements, a simple bed is always a simple bed that has no more details to make it different.
The refrigerator and stove can be different depending on the fabricant and model. The same with the TV. A table is a table, in general made of wood, but of someone got a plastic or metal table then is a plastic or metal table.
The decoration can be very variable, it can have clean or dirty walls, painted with colour or not, if the person is some religious fanatic or not, his favourite football team or he doesn't care of sports, the rgion from where he comes and so on.
So unless there are some specific elements that can identify the inhabitant you have no idea where it is.
As for the architecture, there is or time to time there is, a goverment assitence to poor people and goverments builds apartments for poor people, of course much less of what is really needed. So you have thousands and more thousands of  apartment looking the same as other.
Next election, another politician, another plan and you have another series of thousand houses this time looking very different of the other. How the houses look will depend on the regional politician, the time, the plans of the burecratic goverment employyees, the profit over profit company that built it and so on.
If you look here looking at a building complex you can identify the politician responsable for the robery.

If you want to put some regional flavour to a poor class apartment interior just look in the US inside a poor class Mexican or Latino apartment and you have a lot of them.
Unless the apartemt has some details that can identify him as Mexican, Porto Rican, Brasilian, etc it will not make any difference.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1701077&user_id=12831&np&np

The obelisk: An Egypcian style obelisk that exist in the main part of Buenos Aires that is the symbol of Buenos Aires.

The street lamp: It comes from the tango lyrics, I have no idea how the street lamp looked in those days, still remain some lost in some places, but the lamp was changed. Anyway the prop looks something similar to what it was.

The street: The streets were made of cobble-stone (imported from England) and still exist lost in some places.

The mail box: The model doesn't look very good, but the mail-box has a story by itself for the Porteños.

As for the houses I have used images of houses I found in the internet, of course not from Buenos Aires. Images of houses from Europe that I have no idea from where, but fitted very well for what I needed.