Never thought I'd have to ask the question :) But.... I started with Posette, a long time after most of you. Then came a choice of a new figure - Victoria, or Dina. I picked the latter, BIG mistake, not being a modeller myself, as no support arrived in the way of clothing. So I waited a long while before backtracking and buying Vicky. No sooner was the ink on the cheque dry than V2 turned up. OK, decent upgrade path so no big shakes. Then Steph. Who was kinda fun, different look, not too expensive. Hold on though, she has a sister Aiko. And then Koshini happens. Then BIG investment in V3, even with PC privileges, especially since all the morphs, textures and everything else have to be bought individually. Then MayaDoll. And LaRoo. And now we have both Sara and 3DCs Alexa (oh, and probably Steph Petite). I guess that I've missed out on some in between too. I have to say that there are aspects of all these models that I like, but how is anyone expected to try and fork out for multiple paths AND work out which one is going to be the long term winner? (OK, the answer to that is obvious, but how much will be available for the others?) What does anyone else think here? Are we on the brink of losing it and descending into chaos, or is the establishment of a plethora of (partially) competing models opening up the artistic opportunities? If I was a merchant, would I be justified in developing a similar costume for multiple bodyforms and selling each variant instead of packaging them all together? (no chance of that, but I'm sure others will be wondering too) Interested in other opinions... Dogsbody (PS, If Dina had got a bunch more cloths, this could have been a different story....)

I don't think all those models are competing. Koshini is never going to put Vicky out of business - they are too different. Steph Petite also seems like she will be a different character from Vicky. I'm looking forward to her, because Vicky's quite an Amazon, and I think Steph will have the younger, slimmer look I've been waiting for. (Which doesn't mean I'm planning to delete Vicky from my hard drive.) As for all the toon girls...yes, I think there likely will be some consolidation in the market there. If money's an issue, it may be wise to sit back for awhile, and see who comes out on top. In the mean time, use the free Sara, who is already getting some nice free stuff.

I don't think the problem is the too many girls. (rule #1 in life: there are never, ever too many girls!) ;-) I think the problem is that the existing girls, look all too much alike. I mean Victoria 2, Stephanie, Victoria 3 all started from different meshes, but it's very evident in my opinion that they started from the same creator. They're slightly different but they all share the same basic facial features. And DAZ's Unimesh is going to make the things even worse under that respect (and I think we've seen that already, with the likeness of V3 Male with M3, and also the very familiar aura of the Stephanie petite previews). In other words: I think we really need MORE girls actually. But we need them DIFFERENT. Girls with different heights, different proportions in the body, different facial features. And NO sorry the morphs can't do that all. To make a REAL difference the meshes have to be different from the start. But as no real (or even unreal for that matter) competitor to DAZ exists, I'm afraid that we'll be stuck with the Unimesh clones for quite a long time.

you're right just doesnt seem fair, so many poser girls and so very little guys lol all those women and few men, poor guys ;O) lol but you are right, I'd like to see more variety in the male departments too.--Essie

Your right! Too many girls, way too many girls. Stop making girls! No More Girls!! Enough is enough, let's not see any more girls at all!! is the reverse psychology working yet?? what I would like to see are some more high quality fantasy characters, and some originals like Electronica Fashions' En'Tai at RDNA or some good detailed gnomes other wee-folk like from the mind of Froud (http://www.worldoffroud.com). Perhaps the question should be "Too many people?"

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Caly, your last picture shows very well what I mean. See how different Posette looks from the DAZ trio on the left (the V3-V2-Steph). On the contrary see how closely related the V3 V2 Steph models look, although they are born from different meshes! But they have some common features that make them really look like variations on the same model even if they are not in fact. This is what I mean. We don't need less girls, we need MORE DIFFERENT girls. We need a better year 2004 Posette that doesn't look like an alien like Judy. But two (Vickies and Posette) are not enough. We need other ladies, made by different people with different aesthetical conceptions. DAZ makes a fantastic work but their models tend unfortunately to always look similar if not the same because even when they start from different meshes, they model them to an ideal of human figure that is more or less always the same, and it shows.

More models means having to get more recources like clothes aswell. No thanks. The vivkys will do nicely thank you after all, there's such a thing as morphs.

That's suposed to spell Vickies of course.. not Vivkys..

I dunno...seems like when characters do look "different," all people do is gripe. M3 is "too feminine," Judy "looks like an alien," Dina is "fugly." I think DAZ makes the characters look the way they do because that's what customers want. While I can understand the desire for variety, I also sort of want a standard. I can empathize with the point of view of the person who started this thread. It sure would be nice to be able to use all the cool clothes and stuff without having to buy dozens of different characters first. In a way, it really does remind me of the early days of the personal computer. Will that cool model you sink your cash into turn out to be an Amiga, an Apple, or an IBM? Only time will tell.

I understand the problem of clothes and agree. But the problem is, if I want to make a scene with many characters, or a long story, I will have a hard time making out, say, a Helen of Troy who looks different from Athena who looks different from Juno who looks different from Venus... when ALL of them start from the same basic standard ideal of human female. And let's not talk about etnicity. It makes it even worse. A vicky with a black texture and morphs for black people's nose and lips is NOT and NEVER will be a real black woman. In the end, all stories made this way will communicate a sense of alienation and claustrophoby. How could it be differently, when all characters, Greek and Trojans, Carthaginenses and Romans, and Celts, they all basically look like they are bad attempt to mask their own nature of being CLONES of each other? Let's realize one things: morphs are not the magic wand. Morphs are DEPHORMERS. They DEFORM one shape, they do not craete another. Different shapes have their different harmonies. Morphing to mimick one shape from another most always turn out to be grotesque. Try it. Try to push a morph then another then another... you'll always end up with a grotesque result. Such are the fat people morphed out of an athletic Mike for instance. It's inevitable. It's like when with a sampler, you sample a tenor saxophone, then you play it two octaves up to mimick a soprano saxophone. It doesn't work. It does not sound like a soprano. It sounds like a tenor pretending to be a soprano. That's exactly how a fat morphed Mike looks like. It may be fine for caricatural and grotesque works but not all Poser users may like a grotesque style to their works. So no... for a SERIOUS work, more origin models are needed. Posette for isntance, she is VERY fine! She looks more female to me than all the vickies are. Vicky is like a young athlete not particualrly female. Posette has large thighs and is not so tall and has not all those perfect muscles. Unfortunately she's an old character, that's why I said we'd need a year 2004 Posette (meaning with more resolution). I want more figures like her, that are different, yet realistic. THere are so MANY different realistic body shapes. Just go to a beach in the summer. Not the high class fashionable beach where only nice young athletic youth goes. A normal beach with all sorts of people: old young, black, white, yellow, fat, thin, tall, dwarf. Look attentively how it's NOT a matter of "deforming" an ideal shape with morphs... it's about DIFFERENT shapes, with different proportions, different relative sizes and lenghts. World is DIFFERENCE. Life is DIFFERENCE. Why should a 3D software be IDENTITY if it has to attempt to realistically reproduce an image of our world?

Posette looks "more female" than either of the Victorias? Uh....I don't think so. More fake, maybe. This is not to say that the Victorias are perfect. Just more realistic. FAR MORE realistic. And I've found that plenty can be done with morphs. No problems at all -- aside from occasional cross-talk issues. You want a fat Victoria? Lots of them out there. You want young/old? Lots of that, too. Short, tall, skinny, beautiful, ugly.............on and on. One only need purchase the desired characters, or else, come up with the morphs yourself.

For some artists, lack of variety in the model may truly be a problem, but for most, I think they are more limited by themselves than by the mesh. Look at the work of traditional artists, and you often find that their people always look the same. They carry an ideal in their heads, and even though they paint with oils on canvas and are not limited by anything but their imaginations, they often paint the same type over and over. Edward Burne-Jones, for example, always painted slender girls with big, dark eyes - supposedly images of his wife, Georgie. Rubens preferred fleshier women, to the point that his name has become an adjective. People complain that all the Vicky characters look alike...but then they keep buying the same types, over and over. I know I'm guilty, too. A pretty or handsome character is a lot more likely to get my dollars. And often start a piece telling myself I want this character to look different...but end up moving the dials so that Mike or Vicky ends up looking closer to my personal ideal. It's hard to leave them ugly when it's so easy to fix it. ;-)

Life imitating art...

The ratio of female models -vs- male models in the Poser world is about the same ratio of female humans -vs- male humans on the planet Earth.

I agree that shelling out the almighty money for clothes and accessories to dress up our little people is nice if you wish to do so. Doing so for so many little people becomes a burden. Doing so for so many little people that become stunted in their natural evolution before their time becomes a black hole for the almighty money.

What we need is more Freestuff from those that can provide such wonderful toys for our little girls (and some boys).

Time for those that can produce the human models to do so according to (un)natural law. Provide the large people, the small people, the thin people, the hunched-over people. The young and the old. The tall and the husky. Just not the athletic.

We've already got that covered. ^_~

Oh, and my model of choice is Anime/Maya Doll. ^_^

No, Xenophonz, there are not lots of fat Victorias out there. Every picture I see is of the same skinny ones! I would like to see more use made of the morphs we have - hardly any clothes utilise the morphs the figures have as it is. dogsbody, it is manily about what you like. If you want realistic type people then the latest Vicky is probably the best supported all round (and she is versatile!) but Koshini is your girl for cutesy cartoon, the Anime Doll if you like Japanese style cartoons or Judy if you fancy the challenge! Maya doll and Sara are perfect for semi-real illustrations. And next week there may well be a whole new style which we are all getting excited about!!

Well, as I've said in another thread, maybe the best way to get variety and not go broke trying to clothe all the models is to have just HEADS - a huge variety of heads with very different structures (no, it's not the same as having lots of morphs), and with their own morphs even more variations would be possible. I have no idea what the best way to implement this would be, maybe Dial-A-Head? In addition, they could be offered as compatible with the body of your choice. This might also give us more options for Mike who is definitely lacking next to Vicki and her girlfriends.

The picture in response #21 shows exactly what the I feel real problem is: Not one of those models really looks "feminine" once they are posed. You know what? It's not the mesh. It's the joint system in Poser. Every one of those models has "linebacker" shoulders because of the way Poser handles joint bends. The mesh on the inside of the bend gets crushed and broken while the mesh on the outside of the bend get ridiculously stretched. You can't really move the center of rotation to help, because it fixes one problem while making the other worse. Until the day that some one comes out with an affordable system for posing characters (i.e. a "muscle and bone" based system) it won't matter what the original mesh looks like. One you start posing a character in Poser, it's going to look a lot like every other character in Poser.

The ratio of female models -vs- male models in the Poser world is about the same ratio of female humans -vs- male humans on the planet Earth Uh.... I don't think so, bud. The ratio has women slightly ahead, like 52 to 48. In Poserland, it's more like 5 to 1. Not even close.

the Chinese character for 'trouble' is 2 women under 1 roof..;) ooops..oh..why does Posette look so cross?..;) a 5 to 1 majority would make this a very different world indeed..be careful what you wish for.

let me just say Glamorous and Ingenue Vickie are not deformed in any way, as that is their native shape, no morphs were harmed (or used) in any way. ;-) Actually, the same is true of Supermodel Vickie & Lori, and Posette 2003 (I'm not 100% sure about her, though), now that I think of it. Nice lineup, Caly!

Lessie, adult female meshes: Posette, Vicki 1/2, Stephanie, Koshini, Sara, Alexa, Judy, Kaedeko, Lilin, NeftOon Gal, MayaDoll, Anime Doll, Trixie, LaRoo, Aiko, Dina V and Vina D, Natalia 1, 2, 3 and all her various sets, like Undine, Echidna(etc), Vicki 3, and now Stephanie Petite. And that's really just counting main models, not even stuff like Pinup Stephanie, Glamourous Vicki, Supermodel Vicki, Ingenue Vicki and all the others. Adult male models: P4Man, Michael 1/2, Michael 3, Freak, and Adam, by sixus1, Neftoon Pal, Ichiro and the Muscle Male from Daz3d that was based on the p4 man, and had no genitals of any sort. Lessie: The tally is IN: 28 female models, total, thus far. 7 male models, total. You people do the math. I'm not counting models like the V3 male or my AnimeBoy, because they're based on female figures. There /are/ too many female figures, and not enough male figures. You guys gripe about problems with the female models? The male models are underdeveloped, undersupported and underused, with the exception of Ichiro and M3, and even M3 has some serious issues.

I don't think its an issue of too many female figures. After all, a lot of artists have put a lot of energy into supplying figures for different markets. It's more an issue of too few male models. Adam is still a work in progress and Neftoon Pal has yet to be released. BTW, you forgot about Oxana, Nadya, and Solondra.

Ack, Papa, you're right! And I LIKE Solondra and Nadya. And no, it's not really an issue of too many girls, themselves. Just not enough guys, not enough balance.

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Nice demo! I wish more merchants would include clothes poses, like Dark Whisper did for Teresa and Wyrmmaster did for Victoria Vogue. They worked very well, and I use them a lot. OTOH, I love my Handspan Studios characters to death, but there are no clothes for them, so I can't use them nearly as often as I'd like. Other than the clothing issue, I see no problem with morphing an existing mesh. That's what all human variation is. Babies all look pretty much alike; nature "morphs the mesh" as we grow up, making us into male and female, muscular or thin, black or white or Asian, etc. An old or fat person isn't an alien or a different species; they are what happens when you "morph" an average person.

I've seen a lot. More and even more. But, I'v not seen "real' breasts. Don't know why, but all the nipples point to the sky. I still have to see a decent A or B cup size breast on any Poser mesh. Secondly, normal breasts are lower on the chest. They all seem to wear invisible bra's!!! LOL Tony

Khrys - you forgot Don, and Grim

"They all seem to wear invisible bras" the makers probably fondly, and foolishly, imagine people are going to render their figures clothed.

In post 30, those are all based on V3. It is possible to get unique looks, it's a matter of morphs and textures. So Orio, there are possibilities. :)

I agree that getting a small-breasted look takes some work, unless you start with the pre-teen. That's why I'm so excited about Steph Petite. She looks like a decent A or B cup.

The advantage of the DAZ figures over some of the independent models can be summed down to the level of detail in the model. Vina, Natalia, Cindy, etc. are all very good models until you start to look at things such as the ears.

Well thanks for all your input. A lot of points covered there, and plenty to take away and think about. I think my original motive was to emphasise the 'Aaaaarrrgh, that's another $200 to cloth each character'. Certainly not to imply that folk shouldn't keep on producing new characters. FWIW, I think that since V3 was introduced, the character that has intrigued me most has been the MayaDoll, who had a storming start but seems to have tailed off recently. I still don't think the market can maintain such a breadth of characters unless someone can start offering morphs/magnets to fit current clothing to new figures. Oh, and as for the male figures, I'll leave that for someone else to pick up on - I found M2 and his clothing pretty well good enough for most of the scenarios that I need. Thank you all Dogsbody