I guess I should begin by saying I am extremely new to Poser, but already thoroughly addicted. And over the course of the past 48 hours have been able to pry a significant amount of answers out of the program by lots of trial and error (more of the latter than the former, and a health dose of the revert function. Now I have a couple of things that neither the manual or the book I bought regarding poser can make clear for me so I thought you all might be able to. First off, my first project is something with a little military flair to it. I grabbed PhilC's BDU set last night and have managed to get some props working, and make some smart props once I had them positioned. Now that I look at the overall picture I realize it is missing 2 things.... 1. Wrinkles in the fabric of the uniform and 2. An enviornment other than the standard grey box. I realize I am getting a little ahead of myself on the skill to want ratio. I have looked through a lot of tutorials on the web and can't seem to figure out how to make fabric appear to have wrinkles or creases at joints on the poser figure. The clothes are not form fitting so I should have some room to play. I assume I would need to move them out into photoshop and work on them there but once again I can't seem to find a definite answer on the steps required. Now, for the enviornment. This one is killing me, because I don't even know where to begin. I don't have 3dsmax due to the high cost and the fact that my wife would probably kill me for even entertaining the thought of buying one program that costs that much. So creating my own enviorments is out of the question. I have seen some props in the freebie section and some great ones in the merchant section but I like an outdoor theme and am not sure if I can build a forest out of individual prop trees. If you have read this far, you have my thanks as I realize I am rambling. Any pointers or suggestions are greatly appreciated as I am sure some of you have ran into the same thing.

You might be able to create the illusion of wrinkles with a bump map.

I don't know of any complete, assembled forest scenes for Poser, but you can find plenty of other scenes/environments here and at other sites. liteluvr has some excellent tree props in the Marketplace, in addition to his freebies in Free Stuff.

Attached Link: http://www.elite-expressions.com/homepage.html

For the environment, you could try Nerd's backdrop prop in the market (About $10.00 as I recall), or try Graphon's free 360 degree Environment downloads at his site (See Link).

Attached Link: http://host1.bondware.com/~syydr/index.ez

The cove prop at rdna would also be a good background. It is in the free downloads section.

Yeah I thought my chances of finding a pre-built forest I was happy with was between slim and none as well. My thoughts for the first scene was to have the major event of the picture taking place off screen. Some kind of border checkpoint or something. But like a lot of paintings the characters are focused on something you can only speculate about. As you can see from the image I have attached with the post, the clothing has to much of a play-doh look. I think I can take care of some of the spot with protective gear such as knee pads and such but there are some spots like the chest where you just need some nice large ripples in the fabric to make it look better. I had not thought of a bumpmap but after some thought I don't see why it would not work. Will have to save that for tomorrow night though, can't afford an all nighter on my sleep rations right now.

Man in the time it takes me to formulate a reply there are 2 more suggestions. Thanks a ton for the links, that will give me something to research from work tomorrow if the internet nazi's don't block them.

For the forest, do a search for "billboard trees" or "billboard forest" in freestuff.

I was talking to a friend of mine today that recommended trying out Gmax. From what I understand it is a consumer version of 3d studio max and the price tag is much more within my price range (we all like FREE!). Has anyone played with this at all, if so what are your thoughts on the product?

I don't know about gmax, but you can hop on over to the Amapi forum and click on the link for the free and fully functional, and easy to use version of Amapi.