Attached Link: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~beitler/vrml/human/yt/001/yt_001.wrl

I recently found this link. It's a female mesh. When I saw it first I had to think of posette. After converting to .obj and loading into poser I compared this with posette and p3 female. I noticed the mesh looks a lot like p3 female. The copyright in the .wrl file says "The original geometry used for this model was of Acuris' Ideal Woman". http://www.acuris.com seems to not exist anymore. Just out of curiosity: Does anyone know the history behind this?

P4 came out in less than a year from the release of P3 so it is hard to remember. I know zygote did Posette from an artist sculpture. So I think Zygote started with Poser in P4. But I really don't remeber much about who did the original figures. Since CL liscences it's content for inclusion in Poser, there must be a readme somewhere. Maybe the P3 female has comment lines in the obj file. Would have to open it in a text editor and see. I vaguely remember comment lines where used alot back then. Cooper told me once who did the early figures but the mind is a fragile thing. hehe. ------------------------------------------- What I do know. Chis Creek(Daz Partner) who models the figures for Daz and Zygote also worked for Viewpoint aaround that time. Acuris did content work for MetaCreations along with Viewpoint. They did content for Raydream and Poser. (can't believe this old link works) http://www.metacreations.com/press/rd3dship.shtml Poser2 figures by Viewpoint http://www.metacreations.com/press/poser2_mac_ships.shtml Reading those archived Press Releases was like reading "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". I think it is funny that all the P4 links go to Viewpoint and not CL. :)

Yeah the default Poser Characters are not Poser specific. They existed before Poser ever did. They were available from Viewpoint as 3ds models and a few other formats. So if you happen to see the Poser family in commercials or something its not necessarily Poser output. PeteJ

Cinema 4D is another program that includes Zygote human figures.

Big thanks all! After reading this and what I've found so far by searching this forum is: Zygote 'bought' Acuris and DAZ is a 'subdivision' from Zygote. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So the 'connection' to Viewpont may be 'Chris Creek'? Would like to know, who is the real mother/father (creator) of the Poser figures... (and if he/she is still developing meshes...)

A few of the partners left Zygote, purchased the Poser business market from Zygote, and some of the staff to form Daz. Thus Zygote isn't in the Poser market anymore. I would say Cris Creek of Daz is basically the creator of the majority of the Poser human meshes. Since Don and Judy were unauthorized rehacks of Posettte and Dork, technically Daz's could be partially credited with those as well

I do believe there was a modification rework as well. So many years ago. I know the Poser figure rights were aquired by Daz when they left Zygote, which is why Daz handles copyright for the Poser figure meshes but Zygote can have a model on their site that is similar. Cl may own the older figures but I know the recent ones are liscenced. The P3 stuff is kinda like a missing link in the chain though.

You guys are pretty close... good reconstructive effort. At Metacreations, we licensed the base Poser 3 figures from Zygote for $xx,xxx. These were the same figures that Zygote was selling via Acuris as the "18 Perfect People" collection. I had originally seen these figures in a few magazine ads, early CGW, and wanted to include them in the next release of Poser at that time. Some earlier conversations had taken place between Zygote and Meta to provide a few other bits of content, a few animals for testing and some aftermarket 3D parts and props. Larry Weinberg and I met with Zygote in late 1997 to discuss a license deal and show them how to construct characters for use in Poser. This was prior to the figure set-up room, so all early rigging had to be done by hand, Larry doing the lion share of the set-up. By early 1998, Zygote and I structured our deal to include the figures and a few animals in Poser 3. I sent Chad and Chris mark-ups using Poser 3 rendered images of their figures to enable them to modify the faces, some aspects of the figures' shapes, and clothes designs. Some other elements were taken right out of the Zygote catalog, like many of the hair styles. The figures only supported materials and needed to be UV mapped to hold textures. I guided the team at Zygote so they could produce the first projection mapping of the figures. If I recall, Chad was using Flesh to create a modified projection map. At that time, our expectations of the mapping were far lower than they are today, and the UVs were all over the place in terms of skewed proportions, stretched pixels and made it near impossible to draw a straight line on any of the figures. I created the the textures for virtually all the figures and props in Poser 3 (exceptions being the raptor texture by Aaron Begley, horse texture by Heather ???), and once I started trying to create shirt textures with patterns and logos it became apparent that the UVs were problematic, but we were up against a delivery restriction, and the figures went out in that state. Yikes! The magnitude of managing the Poser 3 project proved to be quite a challenge for both Zygote and me. The content development process at Zygote hadn't ever been set-up in an assembly line-like nature, so the content came in pieces and often times was older versions sent by team mates other than the lead. We had content coming in up to the very last minute before we went gold- this drove the QA at Meta crazy. And it didn't make the process any easier on any of the team, inside or out. For Poser 4, we re-licensed the content included with Poser 3 for $xxx,xxx, and had new content created to fill the needs for conforming clothing ~why oh why didn't Larry and I patent that? ;-) ~ and we picked up some new animals and a few other pieces of cool content that Zygote had success with. I again directed Chad to re-cast the UVs for the new versions of the figures. He again used Flesh, but this time we did a much better job of scaling the polygon UV mapping so a lot less distortion occurred. We also stretched the seams joining the front and back texture maps so less blurring and bleeding would occur. I found inspiration from the community when I created all the textures for the Poser 4 figures. In Poser 3, I had used photos of animals for their textures, the dolphin and cat for instance, but had used a noise pattern over a skin-tone solid base color for the humans and hand painted in nipples and all. Prior to P4, a few folks in the community were creating very good human skin textures using photos composited together. I took this technique and downloaded lots of adult content to compose the P4 textures that shipped with the application. And as it should be, once the app was in the hands of artists with more time and skill than mine, great textures came out. At that time, I encouraged community artists to use my base textures to create new ones... My how times have changed. Any way, sometime I'll have to find someone to help me co-write a book on all this stuff. Maybe I can get one of writers in the community to help out... I have one in mind, just need to lure him away from his great blog work. Cheers, Steve Cooper

"Prior to P4, a few folks in the community were creating very good human skin textures using photos composited together. I took this technique and downloaded lots of adult content to compose the P4 textures that shipped with the application."

Strictly for "research" 's sake huh Steve? :o)
I agree, you really should write a book about your years with Poser. I'd definitely buy it. Thanks for the information.

Kenmac said- Strictly for "research" 's sake huh Steve? :o) When I was DLing all those images, Meta was in the midst of trying to control adult content coming in across their servers. The IT department covered for me big time. When I took over the P3 project and introduced female content with two breast morphs versus P2's one, I caugfht a lot of heat- it turned out to be a good choice. What was tougher to justify though, was the Y-rotate on the male genitalia. First, I had to carefully dance around when asking Zygote to build them for me in the first place, and then I had to sort of forget the control was in there when the content shipped. That was a favor granted by the head of Meta's QA. They found the control- was it Grover? and let it slide. Another "hard" but well placed choice. ;-)

Hi Steve. Nice to see your post. I too would buy such a book. Poser has a very interesting history. As for letting other artists build on your work, I agree that there has been a huge change.

Again a big "Thank You" for all this informations. It's a lot more 'fun' to work with poser when knowing more about the backgrounds. Somehow the meshes get a "life"....

It IS nice to see you around these parts again, Kupa! Hope ya hang around for a bit. 8-)

Fascinating look into the process that became Poser. PeteJ

Great to hear from you Kupa. The info really is fascinating. Many years ago, there was a boo, "The Soul of A New Machine," that did a good job of covering the birth of a new computer but I haven't seen anything as readable on software. The story of Poser might just have a wider audience than the initiates.

Kupa, your history lesson prompted me to install Poser version 1 again. Is this the best quality we could get on the Poser man? There really isn't much functionality in Poser 1 compared to Poser 4 or 5.

lol It was almost 10 years ago.