I first thought of making "Birth of Galatea", while watching the movie "Mannequin".  I was woking on something else at the time, however I still began to look for items that could be used in the image.  I hand planned to create the character in Poser 4 and then transfer them to bryce to compose the scene and render it.  I did not consider rendering the image in Poser 4, because, I could not get some of the textures to render as I wanted them to.

I had planned to use some different models for the ladies in the scene.  During character design, I ended up using Regina as the base for two of them.  For the other, I was having trouble getting the appearance that I was looking for.  With Ahjah's help that was solved.  For Pygmalion, I had already descided on using P4NM.

The biggest problem that I had was finding the clothing for the characters.  I wanted a gown for Greek goddess, playful clothing suitable for a ancient Greek maiden, and a man's work clothing suitable for the period.  I did not find what I had wanted, I experimented in creating the clothing, I threw those attempts right into the bit bucket.  I found some Greek/Roman style clothing from the classical age.  It was not ideal for this older cypriot period, but might have worked.  There were various problems that prevented their being used.  For the two immortals, I settled on a modern party dress that I could adapt with bump and transmaps, to almost looking like something from that age.  After a little while I had the textures for the dresses ready.  Next came clothing for Pygmalion, I could not find any that you look fit him and look right.  I tried adapting some skirts to fit him, but when sized for his body, they look at best...comical.

I wanted to have part finished statues in the background or a work bench with small practice statuetes.  What I really wanted was background statues covered by sack cloth.  My attepts at modeling the cloths were not bad, but not good enough to fit in to this picture.

This is when I got my copy of Poser 5.  I paused work on the picture while playing with Poser 5 to see what it can do.  Oh yes, this is when I also reconfigured my computer so to provide a larger Windows partition so that I would have more space available to support working with these programs.  Once the reconfigureation was complete, I got back to working on the picture.

Seeing some of what Poser 5 cloth simulator can do, I had the ladies toss away their clothing and wear some new dynamic clothing that I had just downloaded.  With some manual resizing, changing the parameters of the the cloth simulator and some new textures, the clothing for the ladies was as you see them in the posted picture.  For pygmalion, I took one of Judy's skirts, fit the waist bad to him, widened the rest way too much and shortened it far too much.  Processing that skirt in the clothing simulator resulted in his outfit as in the final picture.  The cloth simulator was also used to make the sack cloth overing of the background statues.  My computer is a bit underpowered for Poser 5, so it took quite some time to run the cloth simulator.

Texture creation was simple compared to preparing the models.  I prepared the other custom models in Poser, bryce, and in TrueSpace with help from a few other programs.  Now it was time to transfer the individual model into bryce, but I thought that I would like to see what Poser 5 and it firefly render engine can do, so I tweaked the textures to take advantage of Poser 5 and built the scene in Poser.  I then Rendered it there.  The only effect that I had wanted to create that I could not get Poser 5 to do was the auras surrounding the immortals, that was done with with gimp during postwork.

Since installing Poser 5 and trying it out for a day, I have not had to fall back to using Poser 4 even once yet.  I just love the support that it has for multiple runtime directory trees.

With that Galatea's gestation was complete and she was born.

Pangor

Thank you for your explanation Pangor, I've to reveiw the new album's pictures in the weekend, with more relax   ! I used the dynamic clothes features only a little because my PC was not a fireball and I've not enough patience. Now that I changed motherboard and main processor and bought more ram ( $$$   ) I'll try some techniques   and use the firefly render engine   !!

____________

My box was not that fastest machine around when I built it about eight almost nine years ago, but it was a nice. Compared to  today's machines, its less than 500Mhz is a bit underpowered, but I like it.  Once I was through testing the idea, the cloth sims took a week to run.  Latter when I was building the scene from the prepared elements, I noticed that two of the sacks had some problems.  I was alsmost going to tweak them and rerun their sims    but I got lazy, instead i rotated and positioned them to hide the problems.  

Firefly is slower than the P4 rendering engine, but I think that the results are worth the time.  I have read some horror stories about firefly, I have not had any problems with it yet but in time who knows...   I may end up having a love hate relationship with it, but then is that not how we end up feeling about all software in time?

Pangor

I've not enough patience...lol...

____________

I have an AMD Duron 700 Mhz with 512 MB ram in a very old Win98se and the clothe simulator runs fast enough, but I remember that when I had 128 MB ram it was very slow and used a lot of the swap file, about the firefly renderer, I didn't  like the ugly method of conecting nodes, (I like a lot the DazStutio material panel) but a weekend I took the time to read and search the web, I found wonderful things like the skin nodes and the wonderful speculars, and translucensies, but there is not yet a tool like Mat Pose Edit to save all that setings and become a little tedious to make the changes in each new work, about the speed, if you don't use reflections or displacement maybe, the speed is not much longer than the P4 renderer in P5 (P4 renderer in P4 is faster) and results are by far better, but some raytracing or special node must be used, if you render a simple P4 mat in firefly no big diference will be seeing... (this is too much english for me in a single reply )

Rayera, don't worry, your english was good.  About your findings, they do concur with what I have experienced with P5.  Yes, I was comparing the speed of the P5 firefly render engine to the P4 renderengine in the original P4 program.  It feels to me like P5 does not have the P4 render engine, rather it uses firefly with compatibility parameters set to emulate only emulate the P4 engine.

Pangor

dynamic clothing is just fantastic for some icky situations.

True, I don't think I would have even gotten a proper fit with the kilt without modeling from stratch otherwise.  Adapting Judy's dynamic skirt to Dork was a trivial exercise in comparison.

well at least thats one good thing in Poser's direction?

____________
[size=12:6e3b313dff][font=Andalus:6e3b313dff][color=indigo:6e3b313dff][b:6e3b313dff][align=center:6e3b313dff] I Feel So Pretty... the cat just scratched me!!:lmao: [/align:6e3b313dff][/b:6e3b313dff][/color:6e3b313dff][/font:6e3b313dff][/size:6e3b313dff]