Attached Link: My little gallery

Actually, I asked the first question because I'm curious who the primary users are for Poser. I've occasionally seen Poser used in commercial works, but that's more the exception than the rule. It's still relatively rare to see Poser artwork outside of a Poser gallery. It also says something about the marketplace for commercial content if the primary Poser user is a hobbyist (which is what I am at the moment). Affordable content should sell more than high priced content because there doesn't seem to be a large group of users profiting from using the program. I've got no argument against calling Poser content builders artists. I was sort of leaving them out of the query because, outside of price, they shouldn't care too much whether they're dealing with hobbyists or commercial artists. Another indication that the Poser community is more a hobby venture than a commercial one is that the content being provided leans very heavily in the fantasy arena. As far as artwork goes, it doesn't matter to me how it's created, digital or otherwise. The end product is all that counts. Given two individuals with equal technical proficiency with Poser, the one with more artistic skills will probably produce the better image. If the Hildebrandt Brothers were familiar with Poser, they'd be putting out some unbelievable Poser art that probably wouldn't be very distinguishable from their paintings. Even if we had access to the same models they did, they'd still put something out better than what we could ever imagine. There's no substitute for having decades of experience as an artist. The more a person draws (there's no distinction between digital and natural media), the better they are going to get. It's like any other skill. The more a person practices drawing, the more they break down the barriers in the mind to translating what's in the imagination to a final product. It's a matter of having a good "eye". The interesting thing about Poser is that it allows anybody to produce a good render, but not necessarily a good drawing. Just open up Poser, pop in Victoria, render her with her default pose, and you've produced a better human drawing than what 95% of the people in the world can do with natural media. That's not a particularly interesting drawing, but it's still a very cool capability to have. That's where the photography analogy is useful. Anybody can take a photograph. There's not a lot of skill required to push a button to take a photo and even the more arcane photographic skills can be learned (exposure, lighting, etc.). There are still people who take great photos and people who take uninteresting photos. There is the same disparity in Poser. We've all seen good Poser artwork and bad Poser artwork. The good stuff has figures in natural flowing poses and the bad stuff has stiff, awkwardly posed figures. The best approaches the quality of a painting or photograph and the worst looks like bad computer art. Much as I'd like to point out some concrete examples from the gallery, it's not fair to the people that did the drawings. They're doing the best they can and, given a number of years additional experience, will probably be producing some really incredible stuff. I'm still learning Poser. I'm trying to get over the frustration over the amount of effort to lay out a drawing versus the speed of getting a render. I can produce a good sketch in minutes that lays out all the dynamics of a drawing, but it takes me hours with Poser. On the other hand, it takes minutes for the Poser layout to be fully rendered and much longer for me to try to do the same thing with paints. I've only done two fully rendered images (in the gallery here) and can finally start seeing that I can do something with the program that I find pleasing. Poser is a more iterative form of drawing than using natural media. There is much more control in producing a natural media drawing than with Poser. Poser has to be pushed to get the same results. When I'm drawing, I can put every body part and finger in place with a few quickly drawn lines. I have to turn dozens and dozens of dials in Poser to do the same thing. What I've done with Poser to date mostly just starts showing me where I can go and I've got to crawl before I can get better.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon