Judging for the posts in the galleries, Don and Judy are dead. There is no image of the new Poser 5 figures. How bad is the situation of Curious Labs? Can Poser 5 be "fixed" to archive the expectations of the community? It this the end of Poser? Do we need to wait for DAZ studio?

I've wondered that too?

I suppose it is up to us whether we use Judy and Don. I have done some stuff with them but not posted it. If no one wants to use them, then that is that!

Some people love them, I personally can't stand them. Although a lot of folks have had fair-to-good results using them, and I am sure we will see some pics posted here to back that up, it remains my opinion that they are not in the same league as V2 and Michael 2, let alone V3.

To which I should add, I suppose, that there is a sizable contingent that either doesn't have, won't install, or won't use P5. :-)

Or can't use it. *Sigh, I think I'm done now lol

Well I like Judy but I fixed her face. But what do I know, I still like posette. No, nothing has been fixed for her in a long time so I guess the ones that like her are out. I have posette, Vickie 2, and Judy. Don't have Vickie 3 and don't plan on getting her for awhile. I work sometimes sixty hours a week and just use poser as a hobby. I really don't have the time to figure out what parts I have to buy what I have to inject, etc. and besides that, I'm too old to try to figure it out right now until I take a few weeks off. And as much as I love Poserworld, (been going there for years) I will let my subscribtion run out because only one thing was ever made for Judy and now everthing is for Vickie 3 which leaves me out. But you are correct, Judy and Don have joined posette and it seems that Vickie 2 is not far away from joining them too. Bill

No, not dead, but I did sent Judy to a spa to work off some of the excess baggage "in the trunk". Don went along for moral support. As soon as she has morphed down to a more attractive size I think she'll be back. Seriously, I like working with the figures in movement, Don's not as bulky as Michael and Judy need slightly less horse power than V3. For my tastes, however, she needs a slimmer look that I havn't acheived yet. I hoped for some freestuff morphs but I haven't seen those either. I guess V3 just took over everyone's time. Oh, and sorry if this offends anyone, It reflects my personal view of Judy's shape, others will, and are certainly welcome to, have their own opinions. mike

maby they're just.... Lost In Space :)

I think they're great. The bodies do need some better 3rd party morphs, but so did P4 and the Mils. Of course that's only an issue if the figures are unclothed. :O) The face room is great. It's a shame people haven't made better use of it, but too many Poserheads would rather spend money than experiment and develop skills. With a couple exceptions made for specialized characters, that were based on P4, I've used P5s exclusively since I got it.

Don and Judy were pretty much DOA. They could be made to look decent with a lot of work, but then so could the Dork and Posette. Some people really like them. I think they s*ck. The lack of built in morphs, and the way the current morphs work are the real problem. Setting the muscular on Don makes him look deformed, not muscular. They've got built in emotion expressions, but very little face and body shape control. I was hoping capsces would do a morphing package for either of them to make them more versitle. The same problem haunted the Dork. There were morphs done for Posette that were prety great, but never anything for the Dork. Sure, the face room has great potential with them, but the one window in P5 that won't resise is the face morph window. It's just too small for me to work with, and I can't get any fine control in it. Don't grow old, the eyes go first. I think this all goes back to the fact that CL doesn't really do content to any great degree. They've learned to rely on 3rd party content rather than develope and market their own. Pity there. Some good figures that were face room ready would sell pretty well. I don't expect it to happen though. 3rd party providers won't pony up the bucks to make a figure face room ready, and CL is spending it's resources on SR3 and the Mac version of P5. They have much more to think about than good figures, especially when Daz just released V3, is working on M3, and is coming out with the Daz Studio base for free. Frankly, I think that other than a few animals, scenes and props, most of the provided content is a waste of time and disk space. The only time I really go into the P5 libraries anymore is to get materials.

I quite like Don, but I don't use P5 to actually pose, so... "lost in space" good one! :) later jb

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=335126&Start=1&Artist=EricofSD&ByArtist=Yes

I used today Antonio(bought on Renderosity) derived from Don.Nice.I would like to use also Judy but she is so .see,so ,not so pretty and i cannot do nothing nice with her.... and Vic 3 is so good caracter .If someone make a derivative product from Judy with nice face and features i will buy her.

I have p5 and think i may delete Don and Judy. I have only tested and not liked using them.

I like Will!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=333242&Start=1&Sectionid=0&Form.Search=shelly&Form.C

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=296594

I haven't done much with Judy yet, other than this:

Video clip (MPEG format, 725KB)

I have been working on more practical morphs for Don, however.

Little Dragon, I just about fell out of my chair! I think a similar theme with the breasts would be great, given the proportions of some of the rendered females around here lol

LOL. I think Don is OK. He's no Mike, But He can be worked into a decent looking character without much hassle, and he doesn't look anything like Mike so it makes variety easier. Judy takes a lot of work. I don't think she's worth the effort but I'll probably use her for some extras in my animation project... If only to use her wardrobe.

LOL! LD That is funny.!! I was a little surprised by the morphs which come with Judy and Don. I eagerly awaited the 36MB download of the figures updater and... hang on! There's something missing! Don has tons of muscle morphs... hundreds... you have to be some sort of sports therapist to do anything with him. Judy... well, I now have full control of her breasts and vagina... That's handy! Looks like Judy is designed for CG porn and that's about it. I suppose I can make her flaps sway as she walks now!! LOL! tsk just don't understand why they didn't include USEFUL morphs and let the usual suspects make the "anatomically correct undercarriage" morph sets. Now I only let my daughter(8) use Steph and Posette... "What does the %^&^$(*" morph do, Dad?" well, it's an education, I suppose! H:)

Little Dragon - nice sound effects. :) Other than that - 'fraid I have nothing to say about Jusy or Don - don't have Poser 5. :)

I think the problem is simply that everyone was expecting more then 2 new charicters with Poser 5. I just got the progrm myself so I'm still relearning Poser. All and all I love the changes but difficult to figure out some things. I think that will make the differance.

When I got P5, it was pretty much 2 weeks after release and I lot of people that had previously used P4 expected to get a bevvy of lucious high res high morph characters that would make possette look like Dame edna everidge. However we got Judy.....I must have spent many days in the face room trying to create something reasonable, which I suppose I did to some degree, but somehow it was still Judy, I haven't yet seen a rendered image that I couldn't tell that the base figure was judy. I even managed to get the body looking reasonable, but to be fair we shouldn't have to struggle, we should have got "a fit woman" in the first place. I use Don a lot, no probs there, but in answer to the question, I feel Don has mileage in him, but the lack of morphs, clothes, a reasonable looking base figure and the resulting lack of interest will be the death of Judy, what were they thinking? MARV

Well, Don has exactly the same geometry as Judy, so how one can have more mileage than the other is beyond me. That's why they both work in the face room. The clothes are irrelevant. You just have to adjust the joint parameters on clothes for other characters, along with some scaling, to make them conform to D&J. Yeah, it's easy to spot renders using the P5s. They're the ones where the characters don't like P4s or anything by DAZ.

Don has got more mileage, because he hasn't got a face like the back end of a bus and a backside to match! He looks reasonable looking enough and has a fairly reasonable physique therefore you can use him in your work without it dragging the overall ambience of the image down to the "oh look what the cat dragged in level! Yeh they dont look like anything from Daz because his figures are a generally beautifully crafted characters and to use the the comparison of a P4 figure is totally irrelevant as we are considering the relevance of P5 Judy and don in relation to todays 3d enviroment and not something that first appeared several years ago. Furthermore the availability of clothes is relevant as not everyone has your obvious fantastic talent and skill for using poser, so therefore would favour The V3 models, textures and clothing over spending many hours piddling around with joint parameters! You obviously favour Dog features Judy, that is your perogative, but why have cotton when you can have silk, you struggle matey, sit down and watch your Betamax video, judy is dead, long live Vicky3!

I like SoulCatcher's morph the best, incidentally. When I had P5, the one thing that always irked me was the fact that no matter how hard I morphed her, Judy would always look like Judy. Soulcatcher is the first I've seen to have actually made Judy look pretty (even though IMHO there's still quite a bit of Judy's shape in there...) I guess it's the structure of the skull itself, the way it frames the face... it all seems to look too similar to my eyes. Usually, Ingrid at Handspan does a kick-butt job of making a mesh look like something completely different - she even made ol' butt-ugly Dina look like a babe with the Katie morph... but even she couldn't un-Judy Judy's head... and if a highly talented artist like her can't do it, then who can? Perhaps, IMHO that was RDNA's undoing... they made the mesh look too much like a specific person. Most other meshes have anough of a generic shape to allow for damned near every contingency and morph. fis13 - you bring up a good point - they share the same geometry, but one is more versatile than the other. This is how I can best answer you on that: The DAZ Preteen Milgirl and DAZ' Vicky 2 share the exact same number of vertices and the exact same number of polygons, yet getting one mesh's clothes to fit the other's frame is nearly impossible. This is because of the way Poser itself works... and the limitation is unavoidable, no matter which proggie you use, since the differences lie in the reference object file. Same story with Don/Judy... w/ Vicky, I can make her look like anyone, or anything. W/ Vicky 3, I can carry it even further, molding her from a barely pubescent teenager to an old woman, from anorexic to mobidly obese... no sweat. I cna make each face unique in every way, shape, and form. With Posette, there are enough morphs out and actual magnet use to make her look like anyone - just a quick sweep of the Japanese Poser sites will produce a zillion differing morphs to give Posette a zillion different looks. The trick with Judy is to provide enough additional morphs and magnets to alter her fundamental head shape and to modify the way her face is framed. Otherwise, you always get Judy. To be honest, Judy's body is fine... it's essentially Posette writ with more polygons and shaped differently. The problem lies in the head. Fix that and you've fixed Judy. /P

It's not the faces of the characters that turn me off to the P5 folk, it's the lack of substantial BODY morphs! I've just played with the face room and can see the potential power of it (although every effort I made came out with a distorted neck, but, as I said, I really haven't worked at it). However there are no good morphs to make substaintial changes to the body. Posette has thousands of free third party morphs, Vicky1,2, and 3 have thousands, either 3rd party or inherant. Poor Judy and Don have been nearly, completely ignored! I had hoped that since they were made by the folks at RDNA that there might be some support there for them (after all the Morph King is over there!) but even they seem to have ignored them! Oh, well, just my gripe I guess. mike

I dunno - I find it much faster and easier to scare up a decent set of magnets in P4 (and I know full well that I own the complete copyright to the resulting face since it would be a product of my imagination), than to pull in mug shots and wait for Poser 5 to eventually get the job done... Besides, a 2GHz Pentium 4 w/ 768MB of RAM and a GeForce card shouldn't bog down under the weight of a simple compositing proggie, not when even Maya 4.5 PLE positively flies by comparison. /P

I'll finish by saying that I feel all the images above look (in my opinion) quite presentable but the time and effort involved in obtaining them differed considerably. MARV