It has been quite a few years since I last posted on this forum. But I still have been working on 3D art work. I have always been a fan of Poser and when I last posted in this forum, I was using Poser 5. I have since upgraded to Poser Pro 2014, upgrading through two other versions, Poser 9 and 10. Here is a test render of a character I created originally in Poser 9 but eventually imported and rendered in PPro 2014. This is Aliaa El Sharif, a character of Middle East origin, from Egypt, although she could pass for Spanish, Italian, or a number of other Middle East, Central Asian, or Mediterranean people. She is a modified Alyson figure, the Maria version, for those of you who are familiar with Poser figures. It wasn't until I upgraded to Poser 9 and beyond that I began to discover bump and displacement maps, and indirect lighting, and subsurface scattering, all of which give heightened realism to renders made in 3D software. Although she is far from perfect in terms of realism, she is worlds away from what I was creating with Poser 5. But I eventually expect to submit images of some characters created with Poser 4 and 5, because even these figures look real good when rendered in the later Poser Firefly render engine. Here is Aliaa again. I created hair for her but hadn't styled and applied dynamics to it yet, and just did this test render, but I liked the render anyway, even though the pose has some minor flaws and the hair is all over the place. One particular problem I notice with posing 3D human characters in virtually any 3D modeler is when posing them in a kneeling position sitting back on the heels, or any position where the knees are deeply bent and the joint is flexed, such as crouching, stooping, cross legged, or sitting lotus position, etc. that the knees and legs never look right. So I worked on getting her and other 3D human characters to look right while kneeling simulating the bulge and flattening of muscles in the thighs and calves. And since I often have my characters assume this position, like in a Japanese tea room, sitting seiza position, it was important to get this right. If you look at my earlier artwork in this forum, you can see that I was experimenting with this even with Poser 5 figures. You can refer to my "Crouching Mariko" and "Conversation in the tea room" to see what I mean. I had to use magnets and deformers to try to improve the figures' appearance, but it was not perfect and the flexed knees still didn't look quite right, but still it was an improvement. Poser 9, however has a morph target sculpting utility where you can sculpt and shape the mesh across body part boundaries and thus I was able to sculpt the legs to the proper shapes and simulate the bulging in the calves and thighs and even the bones in the knees and make it look a lot better and more natural and realistic.