Welcome aboard and such a really fine first render. You look like you're off to a good start. Just to let you know, anything in your runtime is fair game to mix with anything else. That's called using your resources to their fullest and it's all just a part of the creativity process. By the way, that's a really cute expression and great hair.

Thanks for the advice. So I am looking forward to using my creativity in the future months. I hope there is still some left after working as a software engineer for many years. ;) As for her expression... to be honest it took me hours of experimenting. It seems it's not so easy to get a good smile with Poser and having no experience at all doesn't make things easier. ;) But it's impressive how real the lips, skin, teeth and also hair can look. I also like Emilee hair a lot. It's so detailed, has a nice shine... nearly like it were real!

Firstly, welcome aboard. You are indeed off to a great start, I look forward to seeing what you produce after a few months of practice.

Thanks a lot for the warm welcome. I do appreciate it. :) I think you used the key word: Practice. For now I am still trying to find out what one can do in Poser and where can I find those functions that I am looking for. As I don't have any experience in arts this doesn't make things easier, but it's still lots of fun and I hope that one day I can do complete scenes and some real creative stuff.

Its not merely the cuteness but the aliveness and mischief that's captivating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Great great work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks a lot! And you are very right. More than anything I wanted her to look and feel like a real girl and not just like a artificial character. ;)

Great first image. The content we are working with now is so much better than when I started. She's adorable.

Thank you. :) I already thought that there must have been a recent improvement, because I've never seen anything in the past like I just discovered on Rendo. It's impressive how many great pictures and resources one can find here. I wished I would have come here earlier, lol.

Looks good. Welcome

Thank you. :)

First I like to say Welcome to the gallery!... have to say she's a real cutie. if this is your first render, then you're off to a great start... you know we're going to want to see more of this cutie in more renders. I think this pose you used really make her look sweet. but next time you may not want to turn her eyes so much, still they look great. Look forwards to seeing more... and don't worry if you're not an artist, you'll find that a lot of us aren't artist either!, just have fun with it!

I understand well what you mean about the eyes, because actually I had the same concern as you about "cornering" her eyes so much. I only did it because her face looked even cuter from that angle, so it was a classical compromise what I was doing. I would love to have more pictures of her, but unfortunately I already run into a problem: I have changed/morphed her face so much that now I get weird results whenever I try to apply stock emotions. Seems that the more you deviate from the standard V4 the harder it gets to fit stock morphs and also stock clothing!

Fabulous portrait! Congratulations on your first post.

Thanks a lot!

Lighting is key to rendering and for your first one you honestly did really well.

How true! Actually this was the very first thing that I learned. Because when test rendering just the stock Chaya my results were so terrible that I thought there must be something wrong with my poser installation. Fortunately some stock vendors were hinting that light is crucial in getting good results. So I got Sabby's Soft-Shadows, adjusted the render settings, and suddenly the render looked great. It's like night and day!

Very fine image !!

Thank you!

Beautiful job for your first render!!! Love the expression.

Thanks a lot. :)

I'm very impressed. This is way better than my first render by far (I don't even think I have most of my oldies any more, after several hard drive failures). You're really off to a nice start here! :) Looking back now, I think the best pieces of advice I have for newbies are: 1. Keep organized. Especially when it comes to your zip files and installers. You may know what everything looks like now, but you probably won't remember so well after a few years (and hundreds or thousands of individual items hit your accounts), so you may want to consider keeping at least one promo image with each. Stores sometimes restructure of close all together (though not often the "big" ones). You don't want to agonize over trying to find something later on, so good backups are an excellent idea (burn DVDs and maybe even get a drive devoted to just installers and your "working" art files). 2. Reading tutorials and looking at others' art is good, but nothing beats knowledge you'll build by just playing and trying different things. Take the time learn the interface well for the programs you're using, it'll save a lot time later.

Thanks a lot for your advice. As for keeping organized and making backups regularly I have got an advantage as I have an IT background so these are all standard procedures for me. At present I have the following approach: Whenever I buy things at Rendo or other stores I always save the links of the products that I just bought and organize them in a nice folder structure in chrome. Eg I have a character folder, in there are folders "male", "female", "kids", "others" and in female I have V4, A4, S4 and so on. This way I not only quickly get an overview of what items I have bought already, but I also quickly will get excellent preview pictures which are way better than whatever you see in the Poser library. As for backups I have multiple hard drives. The Poser library is installed on my system SSD, I always keep the original zip-files on my data SSD and at least once per day I backup any new files from both to a regular hard drive. This backup is setup that it will only add new files, but never delete old ones. So even if I should delete some files by accident I always can retrieve them back from the hard disk. Getting good at Poser is way harder for me, probably because I lack any experience with arts. I've also never used other digital art software such as Photoshop for instance. So I not only have to get familiar with Poser but I also need to learn everything about (digital) arts from scratch. To be honest I am just trying out things without really knowing what I am doing, lol. But I hope that in about a year from now things will be different and then I'll be able to do some real nice looking scenes fairly quickly. Now even simple scenes take me many hours. Particularly I tend to struggle with fitting clothes properly, and also hair. And I never can predict if I will be able to get the look that I am trying to achieve, I only can try and see. :)

Great pic, the character looks really cute. Very nice job with the face expression.

Very, very nice! You are off to a great start right out of the gate. You have a good eye and compositional skills, so I'd say there is indeed an artist lurking in there. You have just taken the first steps on, hopefully, a long and fun journey. Some times frustrating and angering, but mostly fun and enlightening. Awesome work.

Wow, for a first render this is really good, everything about it is fun and playful. I absolutely love her pose and expression!