Hello, I was just thinking (beware, my thinking can lead to quite dangerous things...): Would it be possible to develop a Poser-like application from scratch that would be written by all of us, open source, expandable, would demistify the intricacies and enable the incorporation of current technologies such as OpenGL ( I know, DAZ Studio will have it...) or dynamic level-of-detail polygon mesh reduction for allow quite a few figures in the scene and goodies like that...some cool rendering engine...radiosity...real shading networks... Any thoughts? PD

Great...Do it! :) We needs a Wings 3D for Poser folk. Although I suspect Curious or DAZ or someone would go on the offensive if they program were designed to use they established Poser figure setup, or even the geometries....

Just remember that certain technologies are copyrighted, so you would not be able to use something like open GL or a rendering engine like Firefly without paying for licensing of the technology. All your programming would have to start from scratch and you cannot reverse engineer something like Poser itself. In other words, you can't take apart Posers programming, see how it works, and then just improve that, as that is also illegal. What might be a better option is to start a programmers group that licenses some technologies, and to start from there to make add-ons or improvements or plug-ins for an existing program like Poser (as some people are doing with the Python scripts). By the way, from what I understand, Daz Studio will be open source and anyone can contribute to it's development. I have worked on the development of some computer games and you are talking about a two to five year process before you can have a viable program to be worthy of use or competition to an existing program like Poser, so don't even start if you don't have staying power.

so you would not be able to use something like open GL or a rendering engine like Firefly without paying for licensing of the technology. OpenGL does not cost any licensing fees for application developers: http://www.opengl.org/developers/license/license.html Using FireFly in external programs will be close to impossible without help from either CL or Pixels. But you could use rendering engines like Aqsis that don't cost any fees but require you to publish your source code under the GPL. If you are interested in 3D software development, I'd recommend giving http://www.blender.org/ a visit. This is a fairly advanced 3D application that is under an open source license for a while now (it used to be commercial). They are always looking for new coders. you are talking about a two to five year process before you can have a viable program to be worthy of use or competition to an existing program like Poser Just take a look at how long it is taking DAZ to implement a subset of Poser 4's features for their Studio app.

I agree with Stewer. If it costs 40,000 man-hours to produce a product competitive with Poser, then you have to be the exclusive seller of the product to recover your costs, meaning you have to keep the code under your own control. So this would explain the big delay with Daz Studio. They may not have realized how much effort it would take and what kind of risk they would entail by distributing a free "base" version.

It is kim99. I had developed a Poser-like application
in order to understand the Poser File Structure and OpenGL.
I named it as "Goser".

It have many many problems.
The MorphTarget is not supported.
The conformming is not supported.
The texture mapping is not supported.
.....

Would anybody go on developping it ?

I stop to develop it one year ago.
If you want it, I can possible to offer its source code with Japanese comments.
It was programed by Delphi 6.

Hello, Thanks for highlighting the issues! Indeed, it would be a major undertaking! I am aware of certain copyright issues; however, I do not think that the actual pz3,cr2 files are copyrighted...because then a lot of programs in the MP would need to be pulled for reading/writing those... As for this project to fly, there would be need for a few volunteers, since it is not for one person...of course there will be no profit: it would be open-source...gpl. kim99, you have a pretty cool thing going there! If there is interest, it would be nice to convert your code into c++ and build on it... PD

Stewer's mentioned Blender. There's a python plugin for Blender called Make Human that looks pretty poser-ish. http://www.dedalo-3d.com/makehuman.html They're also working on another plugin called Make Target which will allow you to make custom morph targets.

I'll be danged and double-dipped! The existence of Blender and Make Human does get me thinking... given Blender as a base, how much work it would be for a programmer knowledgeable with Poser file formats to import Poser characters, and add some Poser-like posing. Almost becomes feasible. Not quite though -- still too big to do "for free". Need a solution somewhere in between "locked into one vendor so an application doesn't do what I want" and "open source so I can't protect my hard work and make a living". But this REALLY has me thinking. There must be SOME legitimate way to "have an open source app that is free", yet have SOMETHING that one can make a living on. Maybe offering some niche service that relies on the existence of the free app, but isn't free itself... No, I don't quite believe it makes sense. By definition, if customers aren't paying for XYZ, then XYZ does NOT generate as much resources (money) for its evolution than does ABC, which is paid for. Kind of like Microsoft versus Linux: they both have their place, but only Microsoft could invest $1 billion dollars, to make a breakthrough technology such as .NET. Sorry, I just went OT... I'm betting DAZ Studio can provide a middle ground. Look, we don't NECESSARILY need "Open Source" to acheive what you dream of. What we need is to much more effectively "build on each other's work". This simply wasn't practical in the "stone age" way of writing applications, prior to object-oriented programming, components, scripting, XML. Been too busy to invest programming effort in DAZ Studio yet, but if their app is built as a set of building blocks that could be programmed from .NET, then I and others could whip out some VERY interesting enhancements, and make them available cheap. Some people would even choose to provide those enhancements in source form, as they wouldn't have been that time-consuming to write in the first place...

make a breakthrough technology such as .NET. Around here, we think of it as "break-in" technology. As for the time issues, look at how long it took to get a truly open-source app "completed": Mozilla. of course, a huge piece of the problem is finding a way to make a useful, secure, robust application work in Windows--a bit like trying to recreate the Sistine Chapel in bread dough, vegetable dye, and chicken droppings. Now an Open Source Linux Poser-clone would be the last straw in the OS wars for me, and I'd be happy to contribute the documentation (no coder me).

Well, there is going to be something called Horus. It's not a Poser replacement, it will be a companion app. Poser itself is fine for setting up a scene, but I'd love a better render engine that can do distributed renders and handle really large scenes without crashing. As far as I I'm concerned, a tool that can convert a Poser scene to a format that can be read by POVRay would be terrific. Especially when the tool adds a trick to convert primitive spheres called PointLight_xxxx to point lights (one of the things I REALLY miss in Poser).

Attached Link: PoseRay

jentron:thanks for the link! Going to check that one out.

Povray and poseray... when it comes to a free powerful render engine, povray is THE answer... I just checked Poseray's site (because I didn't in a very long time) and it is getting very powerful (subdivision smoothing rocks) !