The whole idea of a new binary file format for content that one company controls makes me very uneasy and to be honest I'm not too excited about the state of DAZ Studio with already more than one year development under its belt (and don`t get me started on the state of poser 5)

I think DAZ should either make DAZ Studio Open Source or the community should get together and start its own "poser like" project. I think this would be the best way forward and would benefit everyone.

This project should have a plugin architecture that would still allow everyone to write proprietary plugins that they can sell but the core functionality should be developed by the community.

Im a software developer in the 3d graphics space myself and Im convinced that this is a more than doable task and because of its interesting nature would definitely attract a lot of talented developers (which could make money later on by developing plugins for a program they know inside out)

Poser has such a dedicated community that I`m actually surprised that no one has suggested this before...

Attached Link: http://www.daz3d.com/products/studio.php

Bizarro - you need to read more. ;) From the Daz official announcement: *"The SDK for Studio is maturing and is being used by a few developers to implemement some of the features that will be added to DAZ|Studio in the months following its initial release. DAZ|Studio has been designed from the ground up to be able to have extensive functionality added to it via the plugin interfaces. Plugin developers will have access to nearly all aspects of the Studio core code and much of its interface. We are very interested in assuring that plugins that are developed for DAZ|Studio are of the highest quality in both their feature development and their user interface interaction. Right now, we plan to wait on the public release of the SDK until we feel like it is mature enough to not require extensive support. It is still in need of documentation and example code and will probably continue to be used by developers that are specifically doing work for DAZ development for a few more months. If there are those in the community that have features that they would like to develop for Studio, we welcome you to submit your ideas so that you can either become a DAZ|Studio developer yourself, or so they can be developed by other coders available in the community."* For more just follow the link.

With "Open Source" I talk about the core of the product which is totally different from publishing the SDK so that others can write plugins. My point is that it would be great to have an application whos development is driven by the community and not one company with its own agenda.

Ah - now I see where you're going. In other words a linux type Poser program which is written by the community and sustained by the community?

Actually your somewhat behind the times on this. I proposed it almost immediately after the launch of P5 and before the development of Studio was publically announced. The community reaction was, on the whole, lukewarm, which is why it hasn't been widely publicised since. Nevertheless, specifications have been made and reviewed and there is prototype code and work on serialisation has begun. Although while I've been tied up with other work recently the project is very much alive and is likely to go public sometime in the first half of next year under the Mozilla public license. The concept has evolved from a stand-alone "Poser-like" application into a general purpose scene description core library with all of the peripheral elements (user interfaces, im/exporters and renders) defined through the plugin modular interface. In conjunction with MPL this means it could also be considered as a royalty-free library replacement core for Poser, DAZ Studios and other existing applications as well as the core library for network rendering clients and format conversion utilities. Basic user interface and rendering interface modules are to be developed and included as part of the project, so that it will be usable as a stand-alone application, but its hoped that independent developers will contribute more sophisticated interface elements, e.g. open-gl support. If you want to go it alone, however, the best advice I can give is to start a project on sourceforge, which provides hosting, sharing and source control for open source applications. Bill

That the concept works is well proven by the many open source projects that are available. POVRay and the Gimp are very fine examples. I'm not a programmer, don't have too much real concept of what's involved, but it seems to me that any program that will do image manipulation such as Poser or D|S is going to be a long term project. Maybe I should have said "object manipulation", but it seems to me like that's going to end up as a very lot of code. POVRay has a lot of front ends, none that I like any better than the text screen scripting. Maybe something that can carry on a "two way conversation" with POV might be a place to start, but that would probably require that most of POV's rendering engine be incorporated in the program. Stuck in the collection of instabilities that is known as windoze would be a mistake. THings that crash in windoze have no problems in my Linux box. Micro$oft'$ stubborn refusal to include any compilers in windoze is another factor. Limits the number of people that are going to stick out the money for their overpriced collections of patches and crashes.

I personally don't see why Daz would make it open source, any more than you would allow anyone who walked up to take your paycheck or your car. They are a business after all. If you don't want to use the Studio then by all means, do an open source project of your own, but don't make it seem like Daz is the bad guy because they won't open it up. I'm just glad they are letting us use it and make suggestions on what we want and need, unlike other companies I could name. Marque

As far as I know there are already quite a few general purpose scene graph engines out there so I would propose to really focus very narrowly on the Poser realm. I have not really thought too much about it in detail but I would propose cross plattform Qt for the GUI (with windows still being the main target platform), Python for internal scripting, OpenGL for real time preview and an interface to PovRay for rendering (with support for other render modules to follow). Plugin support could be implemented via a COM like layer (which is actually not windows specific). I think before anything else the program should be able to read and correctly display any poser 4 content. This is the one thing that I find severly lacking in DAZ Studio which has all kinds of fancy features but actually can't even read one of my custom characters without problems.

Marque: DAZ always maintained that the basic version of D|S will be free indefinetly so they never planned to make money from it. They want to use this as a tool to sell their content and their advanced plugins which they could still do if they make D|S Open Source (and choose the right license) In fact from the DAZ quote above it appears to me that they are going for a "half open" source concept as they are inviting developers to join their team which probably does not mean they want to hire them but rather provide them with an NDA, the souce code and let them work on subprojects.

Bizarro, The reality is that the Poser market is really and truly mostly a hobbyist platform. Yes there are many who use it for commercial purposes, but the VAST majority of users are more in the hobbyist category. By extension, most of that same category is not programming literate. You will face a BIG challenge in 1) getting enough people interested 2) getting enough skilled/tech people interested 3) pulling this off in any timeframe that makes it viable. You would be better served spending your efforts developing plugins to the higher end software packages (LW, Max, Maya) that fully utilize Poser content.

Ryamka, I tend to disagree. While it is true that the poser users consist mainly of hobbist that does not mean that there are not a lot of developers among them. I'm an engineer and I'm drawn to poser precisely because my artistic talents are limited and I could never create a good looking character in 3ds from scratch (...and because I was always fascinated by virtual porn ;-) Actually I would bet that more so than with posers users that seriously use lightwave, max or maya are probably more likely to be hardcore artists with no programming skills whatsoever.

I am not trying to discourage you, but I stand by my original assertion. The Poser community is just not that tech savvy (no offense to everyone). It is a hobbyist product used primarily by those who like to play with the characters and make pictures. Besides hitting the reset button when their systems lock/blue screen, or accepting the relative simplicity of use of the Mac platform (the baseline skill level of most Poser users), there are not going to be enough people able and then willing to make time for a project like this. Good luck at the attempt, but I seriously doubt you will find enough people interested and able to participate.

Actually I was under the impression that the studio would be free but the plugins that will come later will not be. Have they changed on this? Marque

Biz, I'm in the same mind that you are. The high end stuff is ok, but there's no way I'm going to plunk down that kind of money for what would just be another toy for me. Leave that for the professionals to do, I'd be happier if Poser worked as their blurb says it does. The other thought that enters my mind, any of the programs that try to be the "All", try to do everything, usually end up doing none of them well. It seems to my mind that having one for doing nothing but posing, using the textures that come standard, then switching to another for textures, if desired, would make more sense. Yet another could do morphs, and on and on. If they could be called from inside a main GUI, much the better, as long as each one does what it's supposed to do, does it well, and doesn't profess to do it "All" well. As far as changing a mesh, there are a lot of programs that will do that already, and like you, I couldn't generate a good humanoid form if my life depended on it.

(Besides hitting the reset button when their systems lock/blue screen,) THis is the exclusive property of the windoze system, I've been running other programs on my Linux system, and in three months have yet to have it lock or crash. windoze seems to have the concept of backing up one step and start again escape them totally. Being more than 200 frames into a 500 frame animation when windoze lost it's mind isn't prone to making for productive time or happy operators. Each patch for windoze reminds me of nothing more than buying another box of bandaids to stick on the mummy. High end programs are high end because they spend much time trying to beat down windoze and allow the program to do what it's supposed to do. (Like I said, I'm not a programmer, but keep the company of quite a few that are.) Don't know how large a team it would take, but it strikes me that the POV-Ray team isn't all that big. The fact that most of the high end stuff will EXPORT POV-Ray, but none of them will import POV files should say something.

A few thoughts:

Building an application like Poser or DS is a very large undertaking. Having designed and built a 3D application of a comparable scale to what you are talking about, I can tell you that you are looking at a minimum of a couple years of development with a dedicated core of at least several developers. The time it has taken DAZ to get to a decent alpha on studio is a testament to this, as is the overall amount of time that has gone into Poser over the years. Could this project be done as an open source project? Sure. It is just a very large job, and regardless of the number of overall contributors, would depend on a few very competent and dedicated core developers to drive it and push it along. Given that, it's certainly possible.

If I were to think of building such a project from scratch, I would probably build on top of wxWindows rather than QT, but QT is certainly up to the task as well -- it's more of a personal preference. I would also probably build on top of an existing open source scene graph rather than building my own (unless you want to do it just for the experience). OpenSceneGraph is a decent open source scene graph that wraps OpenGL, and it can integrate easily with wxWindows. Building a C/C++ plugin interface would of course be ideal, though it is a fairly difficult thing to do well, but integrating Python is simple to do. Actually building a good Python API takes a good deal of time, as the auto-API-generators don't usually quite give you quite what you want, but its a straightforward process.

If you are greatly concerned with having full control over the core of the 3D application itself then rolling your own is certainly the way to go. However, I would have to agree with what some others have said in this thread. You may find it a more rewarding expenditure of time and energy to either write plugins to DS when the SDK becomes available, or extend Poser via the Python interface (the recent work from WeirdJuice gives an idea of how far you can actually take this). Or, if you want to build a whole new posing engine, it may be more rewarding to build a character posing and/or animation plugin for a general 3D app. That way you do not have the burden of building the supporting framework of the entire 3D application, but rather just the part that you want to do well. If you're not into targeting an expensive high-end app like Maya, MAX, Lightwave, Cinema, etc., even something like Carrara has a pretty good plugin SDK. This approach at least gives you a (fairly) stable basis to build on, rather than having to construct all that yourself.

I also have to wonder if ryamka is largely correct regarding the community that would like to see an open source poser-like program built. I would think that if the community were full of software engineers with a background in 3D programming that we would see a much larger group of people creating Python-based extensions for Poser itself. Those I know of that do have the abilities seem to be generally involved in commercial projects. Maybe a misconception -- I dunno.

Anyways, just felt like dropping my $0.02 on the subject.

-Jeremy

Hey guys, there already IS an open source project similar to what you are talking about - actually a combination of TWO projects. (I admit though, I'm still interested in D.S. - free is always good!) The new project's aim is to create Open Source meshes, textures and morphs, male and female morphs (similar to the Daz unimesh I think), you can mix and match pieces, giving you lots of combinations. It even uses Python, same as Poser. :-) (Newest feature, someone is apparently working on a stand-alone environment so it will run independently of the parent project environment, a good idea I think) The meshes and Python-based API is based on another O.S.S. AND cross computer-platform (win,linux,unix,mac) project. That project went OSS last year, and has a modelling envirnoment, which includes metaballs and sub-division polygon and NURBS modelling, good built-in texturing features, interactive face texturing as well as UV-texturing, powerful posing and non-linear animation tools, relative key morphing, multiple-layer editing, animation (including BVH import), rendering (scanline, radiosity & raytracing), import and export to a wide variety of formats, and just about everything else you could want in a commercial program, including compositing and a new real-time game environment as well (just finalized I think). And its not just for characters, you can create and animate anything. It was originally developed by the graphics and arcade gaming company, NeoGeo. For those of you who don't know yet what I'm talking about, check out it out there's been a TON of new stuff and improvements over the last year, including free documentation, tutorials and user-interface changes! (for the old "but Blender is hard to use" cries! I found it confusing at first but the documentation is MUCH better now and I really like Blender compared to a lot of other programs I've tried). http://www.blender3d.com Plug for a fellow Blender user here (who says he's been very busy lately, so don't bug him too much, ok?). http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=EnVal Enrico had a tutorial published in Renderosity magazine a year ago, and he can now post it freely. www.enricovalenza.com/makebongoenv.html The "Make Human" project I mentioned above seems to be going pretty good too, although I haven't used it yet. http://www.dedalo-3d.com/makehuman.html I must say though, Blender will NOT just import 'everything poser' right off the bat. But most of the pieces are there, including UVtextures, BVH animation, and there's OBJ file import/export (as well as DXF and others). PLUS all the source is available for anyone who wants to work on improving that situation. :-) I think it should be possible for someone to write a Poser import in Python mostly by joining existing building blocks. You don't even necessarily have to be a programmer if you can at least be an organizer. Go to www.blender.org create a new Project there and try to recruit some programmers - a lot of times programmers are just waiting for someone to say WHAT they want :-)