A few questions, I may have missed something.... 1. Is there any where a joint's intended range of motion is saved? If so, can you restrict a poser character to that range? That would allow IK to work without placing your character in horrible postions. 2. Collision detection. Is there any way to enable collision detection? If not, I'd like to see it. Makes it a BEAR to have a model grab something when you cannot tell when surfaces are in contact. Finally, are there any "Video Settings" I can tweak? I have a GF3 and was wondering if there was a way to tweak things like shadows, fog, etc in real time that would keep me from having to do a ton of low-res renders to check lighting and whatnot.

nope

heyas; let me expand: 1: if you double click the body part rotation dials, you will see the min/max range. they are saved in the cr2 file when you save the figure to the library, and most figures should have these all set. to enforce their use, go to the figure menu and check 'use limits.' note that this may not help you much with ik turned on, the joints may still scrunch and poke out at painful angles. 2: this is a definite no, not in an app this low-end. you need to position things visually. if you're trying to grab something in someone's hand, use the hand camaras to swoop around and see if it is in position. the only tweaking you can do to make the shadows render faster and quicker is to set the shadow map on the light(s) to a low res (like 64), then make them higher for the final render. there are also render options to not render shadows at all, to anti-alias or not, and to use bumps/textures or not. look under render:options. by the way, poser does not use a ray tracer, so its rendering time is rather speedy. and there is no fog. there's the depth cue, which can be turned on and off, but that's about it. (i dont recall if depth cue is actually rendered or is just a preview function.)

The depth cueing is rendered, but the rendered version looks WAY different than the preview version, which is why I have to render so much. I have a fairly peppy CPU (Athlon 1.3) but it would still be much faster to see actual shadows and the depth "fog" in real time rather than having to keep doing small renders. Thanks!

Collision detection would be a nightmare in trying to have clothes conform. As it is, it takes tweaking, magnets, and transparency maps to make clothes appear to fit.

Huolong, I disagree. With collision detection, you'd just put the person in the shirt in the default pose, click "Drop object to the floor" and the shirt would hang naturally on the body. You see, the shirt would be trying to fall to the floor, but collision with the shoulders, chest, arms, etc would keep it from jitting the floor, so what you end up with is a gravity effect. Then, as you move the body, the shirt would move with it, but you would lose the gravity effect for a while. After re-posing your model, hit "Drop Object to Floor" and it would simulate gravity again. Does that make sense?

Unless the clothing-character has flexibility, which they don't, it wouldn't "drape" but hang up on a body part that didn't fit. To assume such flexibility would cause a character-character to turn into a blob when it was "dropped to the floor". I think

I've seen demos of collision packages that support clothes draping onto a person. Basically the clothes still have to be a child of the person but the physics will collide the clothes correctly to the person. Havok's package for game engines supports this in real time (while game is playing). I've seen demos of a Chinese guy wear a Gee which collides correctly with his body, arms and itself. To have this in a low end package like Poser would be pretty daunting but maybe worth it. If CL spent money and integrated Havok into their engine they would not only get soft body support like drapes, clothes etc but also the connectivity model so a figure would fall to the floor and all the joints would collide like a real mannequin being dropped. I say mannequin since the human body has muscles and such that act like little springs effecting the motion. They would also get real physics support for hard bodies and liquid surface support. Now integrating this package would be daunting and expensive (100k for the full package for one product). I don't know what their budget is but I would imagine 100k would take a huge bite out of it plus they have to pay an engineer to integrate it. Max and Maya will be using Havok in their next releases. There is already a Havok plugin out there for Max 3 for commercial use. I have used it and it works fairly well. For a $200 or less package, this is extremely complex to integrate so I doubt CL would do it.