A dose of reality first... women police officers in Japan have smaller eyes, longer skirts --and they don't carry guns.

"Biishoujo" literally means "pretty girl," a phrase inevitably found in company with the word "kawaii," meaning "cute." Frederick Schodt, author of "Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics" speaks darkly of an excessive worship of cute...an obsession with these figures that combine childish innocence with budding sexual maturity that borders on the pathological. It is a pathology not restricted to anime, as anyone who has watched the Fox Television Network, or who has shopped for school clothes recently, could attest.

Pathology aside, there has always been a human presence in my Bryce works. With this image the human moves to center stage. Or, rather, center stage is taken by a highly-morphed "Posette," that being the unofficial name the 3D arts community has given to the default female figure shipped with Curious Labs program Poser4.01

(Posette has it good...her male counterpart carries and has earned the unofficial nick-name of "Dork.")

Poser has been derided by serious animators as "push-button software." It uses the same base technology -- bones, polygon meshes, morph targets -- but they are hidden behind an easy-to use dial interface. Even more, although Poser ships with a couple of simple figures and some J.C. Penny outfits, there are extensive 3rd-party libraries on-line for free or for a nominal price. Indeed, there is an active user base constantly creating and trading new material.

So it is possible to work with Poser for quite some time without ever going behind the dial face, as it were. Of course I did nothing of the sort. To get to this image took me through text-editing of cr2 files, custom UV-mapping, deforming meshes in outside applications like Ray Dream Studio and Amorphium...and of course the final image was rendered in Bryce4.0

Sorry for all the Geek up there. My little essay "cr2, pz3, M.O.U.S.E." may help in understanding how Poser does what it does. Suffice to say here I used Ray Dream Studio (now in a new guise from Eovia) and Amorphium (from Play, inc.) to create morph targets of huge eyes and small mouth, and I applied a certain percentage of these plus a dozen morphs from other people to get the facial shape I was after. The cover, above, of a girl's comic book may show how close I got to my aim.

I also re proportioned the figure for that properly neo-natal look (big head, big feet, et al). Which led to problems with fitting clothing, which led me into the mysteries of joint editing.

Most of the meshes and textures are not mine. The Japanese police uniform comes from ISO, textured by minerva -- http://mine.site.ne.jp/dld/ I altered the texture to make up for differences in material handling between Bryce and Poser.

The knee socks are chopped-off versions of the Bat Labs knee socks -- http://isweb40.infoseek.co.jp/art/bat_lab/

The boots are morphing versions of the Poser4.0 boots created by MorphWorld and others, found in a Dirty Pair character set. http://digitaldreams.bbay.com/

The base texture is through Yamato (yamato_k@ja2.so-net.ne.jp) and is based on Happy World Land's "P4 Pale Gal." I increased the size of the iris's considerably and added reflections for that anime look.

The Tifa hair I downloaded from Renderosity but it had no read-me and no credit can be given for that or the excellent reproduction of that character from the Final Fantasy series.

Add to that the "Smart" mini-car created by Weill Marcel, the Seburo CX modeled by Martin Haeussler, the Future Truck to whom I have lost the credit, and the Dystopia series of city blocks created by Mobius87, converted to Poser by Jon Lynn, and hosted by FishNose -- fishnose@immediate.se

I realized immediately the mini-car would make a fine police car. In fact, something like it has.

The light bar was created in Carrara Studio 2 and is actually translucent, with white lights mounted inside. The textures were created from scans of actual police cars, and both the license plate and chrysanthemum hood ornament were modeled as gray-scale terrains in Bryce.

To dress up the Dystopia setting I used the Japanese Font Pack from Mike McGee of Inaka Software -- http://home.packbell.net/inaka -- to create various signs. The orange sign says, in my poor gaijin Japanese, something like "Ramen. Healthy, cheap and hot. Eat up!"

I also built the street lights as a sort of geometric Sid Mead fixture.

There are traditionalists who insist on doing everything within the software. I am not one of them. In hindsight it would have been easier indeed to apply all those lighting effects in Adobe PhotoShop. What they are, instead, is a dozen fuzzy balls and volume cones spread all over the scene. It took most of two days to get them all lined up in any kind of order, as rendering times increased to over an hour per thumbnail. The only post-work done was to fix a ragged hem on the socks, and reduce the image to a JPEG small enough to post here.

That in itself is a window into the heartache of 3D art, and for me at least, Poser in particular. I find I can shape a character, a gesture, a scene with a pencil in ways that more accurately reflect what is seen in my mind's eye. The software is a constant struggle, a frustration of repetative tasks and inevitable compromises. In all of this project I had the most fun drawing up a "Hokusai" sign for a traditional Japanese bath.