Thanks for the link to Furette! These figures are a bit toony for my personal liking but they certainly are a nice base.

Now only to build up a world for them to interact with...

The base figures are, but you can tweak them a bit (and let’s face it, cartoony is better than anything I’m going to draw! )

Is that what the Folly's corridors look like?

Heh, kidding. Keep tinkering until you like the results.

As for 'taur figures, there's a free chakat mod out there. (It requires the Millenium Big Cat, IIRC.)

No, but they might make a good base if I can figure out how to color them.
What I need to do is make some ‘stock’ critters – so the same person doesn’t grow/shrink from one attempt to the other (unless the deities have ‘processed’ them! )

You could modify them and then save them as separate files to import when you're building a new scene.

That’s what I’m learning about/playing with! Like anything else, it takes practice – which I’ll have to set aside some time to do (and make notes!) I had found the ‘search for stuff on the drive’ once and got it so DAZ knew about the furry ones, but couldn’t find it later to do the corridors, so there may be options on those that I don’t know about. Ah well, me be a writer more than an artist, I just wanted to see how hard/easy it might be to illustrate some of it without breaking the bank.

DAZ programs have.... unique interface. Certainly, their developers are thinking differently, but I'm not sure if "equal opportunity" should reach as far as usability design.

That said, their interfaces *did* improve over the years. You should have seen Daz Studio 1.3, what a mess it was.

I thought DAZ 2 and 3 looked fairly straightforward, especially after trying to make heads or tails out the first ‘Blenders’ I saw! Not that DAZ is all that easy, but I feel I’m picking up the rules a bit better as I go along. (It doesn’t hurt that there’s a lot of DAZ and Poser stuff already made that I can use as shortcuts, I had to laugh and scratch my head at all the options Little Dragon put into their Furrette and Furraldo heads and tails – I should be able to make them look like just about anything! Too bad I can’t find a taur option like that as I have foxtaur to wolftaur and all the different cattaur/chakat/skunktaur forms to deal with.)

Is there a different program you recommend/use? Other than a little time, I don’t have that much invested in DAZ yet (but there does seem to be a lot of ‘free’ stuff for it!)

The biggest no-no in my book, against DAZ, is hiding *everything* behind cutsey icons. It makes finding one's way around a chore. Another one is utter lack of camera movement shortcuts.

Two programs I use are Moments of Inspiration 2 for hard surface modelling (it's a little but *absolutely great* NURBS modeller) and Modo 501. The former is a program designed with an artist in mind more than typical engineering cad work tool but it found its way into quite surprising places. The latter is an exspensive tool clearly aimed at the advertiser market but it has most intuitive controls on texturing/painting/rendering pipeline I've yet seen. It's worth checking out, even if to take a look at how easy these tasks can be.

Another program that might be worth checking out is Terragen 2 which allows creating stunning natural landscapes in minutes... and great HDRI backgrops in about six hours.

Oh! And... it's true that Blender has a learning curve of a tunnel wall met at 250 kph, but if you actually invest time and resources into scaling it, it stays quite flat up there. 2.5 series is less painful in this aspect, even if it's just a little bit. On the plus side, it's one of more advanced tools this side of $10k....

I think Second Life has better looking furs, they also have Chakats, Foxtaurs, and Quange.

sadly I would like them for my tall tale, not for second life ...