I think if I had Daz Studio right now, I'd start chipping away at that learning curve - bugs notwithstanding - secure in the knowledge tat Daz would work them out in the next release. I would not complain once! I promise.

Nice try! I'm sure we all feel the same way. But good old Daz will wait... Of course, if I could get my hands on a prototype of Mike 3... Sigh...

Well, then you should have a great time with Poser 5, as it is available right now. Has a high learning curve as far as actually getting it to work consistently, and there are bugs for you to enjoy. What eactly was the point of your message? To have Daz release it earlier than they are willing? Whatever.

DAZ Studio will (when it is ready) come out as a public beta... and from the looks of it, the learning curve won't be too steep for those who know Poser 4 already. PS: I can't wait until it's ready either :) /P

I'm so disappointed with Poser 5, that I would never buy Poser 6. Let Daz do it right so it gets good reviews. I think Curious labs cut their own throats releasing Poser 5 when it was early Beta at best. It's still Beta as far as I'm concerned. And not even loaded on my machine at the momment.

I'm using P5 and enjoying it. Yeah, its not finished and that was a surprise, but now that know what we have onward ho.

I own Poser 5... and it's still in the shrink wrapped box.

I will be so happy the day Daz Studio is released.

I used Poser 5 for about a week then put it aside for Poser 4 again. I am just now experimenting with the cloth room - interesting possibilities there. Perhaps I'll try out the volumetric lighting capabilities as well. I simply find Poser 4 faster to work with. Those big non-resizable parameter palettes are always in the way. I think someone a while back said the Daz Studio interface resembled that of Lightwave...?

I remember everyone screaming to get Poser 5 out NOW before it came out, and then screaming again when it did come out, and had more bugs than a Southern gas station bathroom..;) Let DAZ do it right..;)

ricewind - yes, it does resemble LW a little, at least in where the controls rest. As for Poser 4/5, it has very little to do with DAZ Studio or how it's final interfaces will be built, and there's honestly no need to denigrate Curious Labs here. The code-monkey cohort at DAZ is more interested in how artists use the interfaces they have now, and how they can be optimized to flatten the learning curve and make workflow easier. Although the two concepts don't always go hand-in-hand, I'm sure a pleasant compromise can and will be reached. I won't go into details (mostly because any generated hype or hysteria sucks IMO), but having seen this thing grow, I can tell you that D|S is one amazing mofo of a Poser-like program in some ways, and in others it won't be like Poser at all. DAZ Studio is coming along very well, though not as fast as we all thought it would at first; this is because there is a lot of work into making sure that everything in the codebase sticks closely to platform-independant standards, so DAZ can avoid the "kludge factor" that plagues any multi-OS capable program. It also means that the closer one sticks to the standards, the less likely you'll encounter bugs, and if you do, the fix can frequently be applied on an equal basis. This standardization also makes the maintenance and upgrade of the codebase easier to do, and it opens the door for alternate POSIX-compliant OS porting later on. However, they do want to make sure that the Win32 and OSX versions work as best as possible before that happens. Having met Taylor (the lead code-monkey) and spoken with him, I am more than confident in his abilities to keep the DAZ code-monkey cohort on the same style sheet, and find him to be a very careful and very diligent programmer as well. There are lots of rather exciting things in the works for DAZ|Studio, IMHO. However, the biggest priority is to get it done right. /P

Open standards are fine but I hope they don't end up with a lowest common denominator. One of the frustrating things about Poser is that it doesn't work like a real Windows application many times (and probably not like a real Mac application either). Not having to maintain multiple codebases has advantages (cost certainly being a major one), but having something as close as possible to native applications is real nice. Hopefully, the platform-independant standards are all in the plumbing (OpenGL, etc.) and not in the UI.

I'm not ragging on you, Ratteler, honest :) I was just making sure that nothing got out of hand. Just to be clear, I'm not an official spokesmonkey, and I'm not an official employee for DAZ in any capacity - besides, the PR stuff is Steve Kondris' forte', mostly because I really suck at being politically neutral. I just happen to live real close to Draper, UT, and I stop by from time to time to help out wherever I can. I will admit that as a result of being so damned nosey, I have to be careful about what I say and do. However, I've also gained an appreciation for what CL went through, and the folks in Draper have learned from those mistakes (in fairness to CL, these mistakes weren't nearly so obvious in foresight as they are now in hindsight.) But then, any business with a working set of neurons on the payroll learns from their peers - there's no sense in breaking your axles in the same pothole that another car just got done plowing into. lmckenzie - I don't blame you at all. There are programs out there (of any type) where the UI is nothing more than a kludge, and it shows. OTOH, I can say for certain that what I've seen so far in DAZ|Studio shows a very tight integration w/ the OS without resorting to a pure Win32 UI/API or a pure Cocoa (OSX) UI to do it. /P

Bottom line, they just made whatever the hell they felt like. I don't think they deliberately set out to personally insult you. Curious Labs made what they could afford, given limited time and limited resources. When P5 arrived less than perfect, they didn't abandon it. They're still trying to fix things. And they kept the price of the product bargain-basement. In the grown-up real world, you can't ask for much more than that. I hope Daz Studio is great. But it isn't here yet (and look how long its taking - a clear indication of how very hard it is to do something from the ground up). In the meantime, I've been using Poser 5 (since day 1) and it enables me to get lots of things done. And I don't take any of this personally. -jjsemp

I have a lot of faith in Daz and their products. I'm glad I put out the $$ for V2 when I first encountered her ( it was quite an agonizing decision ) since then, having discovered the 3d world - I've been hooked. Did I say 'addicted'? The solid quality of the Daz products has me anxiously biting the bit. I am on the edge of my seat waiting for another great Daz creation so's I can play some more. I love this stuff!

I understand Ratteler's view. I don't have Poser 5 but I've heard many people say that bugs from P4 remain. Three years does seem like a long time, even for a small staff (depending on when they actually started). It's easy to blame the suits, and being a programmer, of course, I would blame them :-). Someone though, it seems, made the decision to go with a fair amount of legacy code - hopefully, they didn't commit the exact same bugs twice. Maybe it was the programmers that decided to reuse what was pretty much working rather than rewrite. Whatever the rhyme, reason or cause, clearly a lot of people are unhappy with the result. Certainly though people preferring an older version is not all that unheard of. Many times, companies add on a lot of extra functionality that seems to be just extra baggage baggage. How many people are probably still using Office 97 because the upgrade is'nt worth it to them. I know you're talking about bugs though. That happens too. There was a company called Ashton-Tate. They had a market dominating product, dBase III+ and at the time, no real competition from Microsoft. dBase IV was such a bug-ridden mess that people continued to use the old version. Borland brought out Paradox, Microsoft brought out Access and the rest (along with Ashton-Tate) is history. Peng, as long as we get things like wheel mouse support and right-click context menus that have become defacto standards in the Windows world, I'll be happy. I actually use a modeler, Art of Illusion, that's written in Java and runs on many platforms. It's reasonably speedy and the UI is OK but it has the few little, not the way everything else works, quirks that are a pain. I'm sure Mac users are equally desirious of havings work they way they are used to. It makes the difference between a good product and a great product, especially when you practically live in it the way many people seem to do with Poser. One reason that Microsoft can still sell Offic for Mac is that they have a dedicated staff of true Mac faithful who code it. I think the must keep them locked away in some undisclosed location. Of course, Microsoft has the money to afford that, DAZ doesn't.

Understood perfectly. Java has always been kinda kludgy in the UI realm, and has often been slower than dirt IMHO - no wonder you were worried :) (and if they tried to get all happy with Swing, then... groan.) What the URL of the modelling proggie? I'm kinda curious to see what it does do (under both Win32 and Linux VM's, natch.) (Strangely enough, when I run Poser 4/PPP under Win4Lin, I do get wheel mouse support... seriously. It's because the mouse's wheel calls from the kernel I/O are most likely intercepted, then converted into arrow keystroke calls before Win4Lin's Win32 shell sees it. Win4Lin was built from the old SCOMerge proggie when the original SCO went under...)

Attached Link: http://www.artofillusion.org/

Yes, I assumed/hoped they were using something other than Java but as I said, AoI does impress me. Mind you my modeling skills and concepts are pretty much the 3D equivalent of "hello world," so I can't really judge. Take a llok at it. I'd be interested in how someone with more modeling experience compares it with say Wingz or Anim8tor. It has subdivision surfaces, procedural textures, photon mapping, bones, animation camera filters and a slew of other stuff I don't really use or understand. I think one limitation is that someone here tried doing Vicky morphs with it and it turned out to be something about quads or polygons with too many sides or some such. Of course, just today, someone was telling me thay had problems with Vicky's hip in Rhino for similar sounding reasons. Should be great for making props - for those who have the skill. Win4Lin sounds like they did a good job. Jeeze, I haven't heard SCOMerge in many a tear. Never used it or SCO but read about them. I've got VMWare which I can use to run Linux on Win2K. I played with the SuSe they provided. Never could get the internet working thoug admitedly I didn't try very long. After a few untar's and various other assorted command line madness just to get up and running or install a program, my enthusiasm waned.

I played around with AOI and didn't particularly like it, but that's only a matter of taste. The biggest drawback to me me is that it only seems to edit meshes made of three sided polys which is a svevere limitation when working with other apps. Useless for Poser morphs for instance. Or have I missed something? It's loads of great features though and for a free app it really can't be beaten, especially on Mac where there is less choice among free 3d apps. - Baz

Yes, there was a thread in the AoI group at SourceForge by the person I mentioned about using it with Poser. The author, Peter Eastman who confirmed that it always uses triangles and it would be difficult to get around that at this stage. The new version has a 'display as quads' option but I imagine that's just display. I don't know enough about the geometry stuff to discuss it intelligently though. Does Posette have some 4+ polygons as well? At any rate, it's always a matter of taste. I could never grok how people were doing stuff in Wingz. Anim8tor looks more understandable but I could never get some of the simple operations (like selecting an area to deform) working. After the same amount of time, I was able to accomplish more in Max 3 than either of those :-) With AoI, I can at least do some simple things and it feels fairly intuitive. Since I'm more interested in making props than in morphing it doesn't have the drawback for me. Of course, I've just barely scratched the surface as there is indeed a whole lot of functionality there. I'm playing with PoseRay/POVRay now but I really should experiment with the AoI renderer using a Poser figure to see what it looks like. Basically, I've concluded that I don't have the Zen for modeling. The spatial/3D side of my brain is definitely out to lunch. The easiest program I ever used is Simply 3D which is pretty limited though it has some features like animated morphing, animated textures and adjustable UV mapping that are beyond Poser 4. I've often wished that Micrografix had kept developing it. With a little more power, it would have been a great tool. I haven't seen much for the Mac which is surprising considering it's artistic base but I suppose it mainly 2D use. Not a whole lot on Linux either for free at least but that may change. With its Unix roots, I know there must be a ton of 3D stufff that could be ported pretty easily I would think. BTW I just read that Adobe is releasing the new version of Premier for Windows only. Apparently competion from Apple with their own versions of applications like Final Cut Pro is not going down well with some of their third party developers.

Does it have be said again (this week)? We all cried for Curious Labs to release Poser 5: "We want it now! We don't care if it has bugs. A buggy product is better than no product!" So CL released Poser 5 (an estimated 6 months before it was ready). And what did the masses say? "It's so buggy! We don't want it! We'd rather have no product than a buggy product! Why didn't you guys wait before releasing this piece of {bleep]?" So, let's start the chanting with a product that has no release date and that is not even in pre-pre-beta form.

I DO NOT want a finished product in DAZ Studio. I want one that will be constantly evolving. That is a sign of progress to me. << Hmm... I dunno. I don't fancy the idea of them charging me an arm and a leg for each upgrade (and sticking with their policy of 'upgrade in one month, or pay full price thereafter).

IMcKenzie - Weird isn't it, Wings is the easiest modeller I've ever tried lol! I'm not sure about this but I doubt any Poser figure has any 4+ sided polys, Poser doesn't like n-gons. Too bad about Premiere, I've heard rumours that Bryce 6 is being developed for Windows only :o( - Baz

Yeah, Wingz is easy enough to use I suppose. As I recall though, you had to use cubes, etc. and than whittle away at the edges and faces. My mind can't visualize getting from point A to point B. AoI gives you curves and triangle meshes and all kinds of methods of modifying them. More options and I guess I'll at least halfway understand one of them. I don't know which version you used. They now have distortion tracks for animations like bend and shatter which can do the old exploding planet thing with control over randomness, gravity etc, neat. I just tried that today and did an exploding Posette head - sick true, but I had to try it. I told you I don't know all the geometry stuff. You said, "it only seems to edit meshes made of three sided polys," and also "I doubt any Poser figure has any 4+ sided polys" I'm confused by 4+ I mean 4 or more. Are you saying Poser objs have 3 and 4 but not more and it's the 4 sided ones that are a problem in AoI? Microsoft isn't going to do Internet Explorer for Mac anymore either. From the little I've read, Safari seems neat enough that people shouldn't perhaps be too dismayed at that - unless it's OS X only.

Poser meshes are mainly four sided, hence the problem with AOI, they may have some 3 sided too but since most if not all Poser/Daz figures were modelled in Lightwave even these are unlikely. I know what you mean about Wings style of modelling (usually called sub-dividion or box modelling) I had difficulties with it at first but with a bit of practise it clicked, I love it know! :o) I didn't really give AOI much of a chance to be honest, I was mainly looking for a renderer to use with Wings. I didn't particularly like the results so I didn't bother much more with it. I never tried the animation options, actually I've never tried animation in any package. Something for the future! Maybe with Daz Studio? I'd heard about IE being discontinued for Mac but I think it's being discontinued as a seperate app entirely and will be built into Windows. Safari will do me along with the current version of Internet Explorer! Cheers - Baz

Ah so, four sided. I checked the SourceForge forum and this is what Eastman said: "AoI doesn't support quad meshes with arbitrary topology, so it imports all OBJ objects as triangle meshes, triangulating polygons as necessary." There's a lot more (Greek to me) about coplanar polys, splitting and such. Oddly, the Poser user, gtrdon, said that he had be successful in creating head morphs for Poser 4 models, though he sometimes had to run the obj thru UVMapper first. It was the Poser 5 models he was having trouble with (Don or Judy I assume). The animation stuff looks like fun but way to intense for my old Athlon. Haven't played with the AoI renderer in a while, he's added a lot of stuff though. PoseRay is easy to use and while learning the bells and whistles of POVRay would be a big task, the basic settings you can control yield some very nice results. It does take forever though if youre using GI, jittered shadows etc. Yes, IE standalone is supposed to go away. I don't know how they're going to handle it. I suppose you'll only be able to download updates not the full product.

Hehe, Yeah I've played with POVray, Yafray, 3Delight, Aqsis. They're all great renderers (Pixie is supposed to be good too!) but hand editing scene files is not my idea of fun! Poseray is supposed to make POVray a lot easier to use but it's not available for Mac as far as I know. I'm just praying that Daz Studio appears before I give up waiting and purchase something else! With 3 Delight as it's renderer it should be capable of superb quality, it's reputedly fast (as long as you're not raytracing) and Daz will ensure the interface is user friendly - Baz

"POVray, Yafray, 3Delight, Aqsis" Yup, been there, done that and have the scars to prove it. Throw in BMRT as well. Most of those guys can code raytracing algorithms in their sleep but build a decent GUI - that's left as an exercise for the reader I suppose. PoseRay is sweet. I might even learn a little of POV's language if it didn't take so long to see the results. Maybe when AMD starts giving away Opterons :-)

:o)