I only play one on TV, so to speak. The co-moderator of the copyright forum (with Mehndi) is actually a lawyer who really has a much better grasp on the law. All this stuff can get really ugly as you start running into both the computer copyright law and the visual copyright law. Most (or all) of the useful non-lawyer accessible stuff on copyright is for written works, which doesn't necessarily work the same as visual or computer stuff. And then you also have the contracts, which for Daz3D is something like 14 paragraphs of contractese. . . .

Look at page 120 of the poser 4 manual. It seems like a fairly clear explanation.

I think the concept of "owning" is the issue here. Unless you created the character yourself or commisioned the the character as a work for hire you don't own it. You are given or buy a right to use it. You do not have the right to distribute it unless that is explicitly given to you in writing. You also don't have the right to modify it and distribute it without premission, as it is a derivative work. You cannot give away or sell someone elses work unless they give you permission to do it. Generally this requires that you pay them money or give them credit, depending on how valuable they think it is or any other criteria they choose. Zygote/Daz3D allows the distribution of morphs and other parts of their base (posette, michael, etc) figures as long as you don'tr distribute geometry. So you can modify a CR2 and distribute it without violating the license becuase the license allows this - mostly as the cr2 is usless unless you own the obj file. But if you buy or get free a character (A CR2 file and other parts) that was build from michael you cannot distribute that character without the permision of the creator. The work that the creator did in creating a distinctive character is their work and they own it. So if you buy (for example) Mehndi/Jager's Saluda character you cannot distribute anything that is orginal to that character without their permission. In this case that is the pose files, the textures and the saluda morphs and probably other parts. Othervise you would be stealing from them. If you distributed the file with the Vicky geometry also then you would also be stealing from zygote/Daz3d The only way around this is to distribute your new item in such a way that it requires the original item to be in your possession to use it. That is what Objaction Mover does. However it is limited to obj files only.

There are a lot of downloadable demos out there. Every product has a work cycle you need to use. If you are not happy with it you will not enjoy using the product. So try before buying. Academic discounts are also a useful trick.

3DS Max is like $3000. Rhino is an outstanding modeler, possibly the best tool if you are going to just do poser modeling, but is just a modeler. There are at least half dozen tools less than $500 out there that people like, and several free ones. Cinema 4D Go was what Poserworld was mostly made with and it is about $200. There are a bunch of threads here about just this topic if you search for them.

What period? For what airplane? For flight duty or on the ground? Things changed fast betwen the 30s and the 50s. And by the time they were USAF they were not wearing those kinds of clothes when flying IIRC, that is more USAAF. A useful source for modeling military guys are the line of books by Osprey. Something like their "Modeling WWII Figures" might help or have links to sources. Also look at something like "U.S. Military Combat Aircrew Individual Survival Equipment : Ww II to Present, a Reference Guide for the Collector" "A detailed study of United States Air Force, Army, Army Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps aircrew survival equipment. Items covered are: survival vests, leggings, and chaps, life preservers, survival (ejection) seat and back pad kits, personal survival kits and first aid kits, etc. Tag and label information is provided for each item., over 170 b/w photographs, drawings, 8 1/2" x 11" A large library would be helpful, particuarly a university library.

The chain break tool is used to limit how far IK propagates. I almost never use IK in poser, but the tool can be used so that moving the hand will only move the hand and forarms, not moving the shoulder. Assuming IIRC, that is.

I have seen people doing long animations in poser alone. So it is posible to do this. You have to accept certain limitations, but it is cheap. Chris D. has a list on egroups/yahoo called poseamation (IIRC) that is certainly worth a look. He is an ex disney animator and a real nice guy. Part of the key is doing a series of short animations and putting them togther in a composing package, not trying to do a single 9000 frame animation. Poser don't like that trick.

Educational discount, if you can manage it, would be the best bet. They all offer them, but exactly how you qualify varies. But you can save thousands of dollars. When you export out of poser you get just the figure and textures. You will have to bone up the figure. Exactly how hard that is is a question I don't have a good answer to, but I'm sure it varies between programs. And whether that really matters depends on just how many figures you need. You are going to rendering 9000 frames for a 5 minute movie, so total difference in project time whether it takes 5 minutes or an hour to set up each figure is going to be noise if you are only using 5 or 10 models. You are probably going to have to be reworking the models (hopefully mostly with subdivision surfaces) for closeups anyway, as the poser figures really doesn't have enough polys for tight work.

Oh, but it doesn't integrate into Poser at all. But once you buy poser or a figure you can use the models in another product, you just can't distribute the model. And it would be a lot easier to build a figure starting with a Zygote model that a blank screen. And poser models are vastly cheaper than other 3d models. And it looked much easier to bone up a figure in Maya than in other packages. (Not that I really have enough experiance with the other packages to really compare, however.)

I saw a Maya demo a few days ago and was blown away by how fast they could do stuff. Of course, it was a demo god running it, but it was amazing. It started with already existing motion captures and boned up characters, but the ability to edit the mocaps and build stuff was very nice. But for $7,500 for the "lite" version it should be. But it includes all sorts of very powerful tools.

Most of the storyboarding I've seen has been very basic, without worrying about textures, exact dimensions or such details. Its really to give an impression on the scene, not to block out camera angles and other things where you really need to worry about the actual set. You could do that with very basic props in poser quickly, without even rendering.

Attached Link: http://digitalBabes2.com/dload.html

I have ended up importing the character and the clothes into Cinema4D, setting the skin to a different color than the clothes and start moving the clothing mesh around. The edit the cr2 to point to the new obj, test it it, and go back into C4D and work some more until I am satisifed. It is highly painful. You can often get pretty close with magnets.

Digital Babes, I think.