quote: "maybe a new forum thread on these topics would be a solution" Ok, I thought I'd start the thread. I'd like multiple level of undos, "easier" search inside of the program, easier library control, and a more integrated method for letting all of the characters share the same wardrobe (and, until then, lots of you buying the software that does that so there will be multiple upgrades on it). I'd like SR 4 to make deleting content paradise a part of the program (though doing the edit myself wasn't that hard). What would you like.

I would like them to fix the hair room, the main reason I upgraded was for the dynamic hair, yet if I put a blower to it it spikes through the head. This is something that needs to be dealt with in THIS version of Poser, not version 6. Tired of them ignoring the fact that it has NEVER worked correctly, even though they still advertise that it does. Marque

Here's my wishlist: 1. Multiple undos/redos 2. OpenGL support 3. GI and a better render engine 4. Content paradise to become extinct 5. More up-to-date rigging process: vertex weight maps instead of spherical falloff zones and a more intuitive, forgiving interface which allows you to load/save work in progress 6. More robust, easy-use figure creation tools and workflow 7. One nobody has mentioned: customizable Toolbar. There are menus that I access so often that my trackball hand actually starts hurting from having to access the menu hierarchy continuously since there are no key commands (Oh, that's another feature they should add - customizable key commands). 8. A separate path for each file dialog or file type. Why I have to dig from the same location down to find my morphs to add every time or why they can't open to Runtime:Geometries when opening geometry and Runtime:textures when opening textures is beyond me. 9. Fix bugs propagated from earlier versions (that were supposed to be remedied by "ground up" recoding). 10. Double clicking a Figure in the library should prompt to Cancel, Replace, or Add New. How difficult could that be? 11. Cut/Copy/Paste for Figures/Props. 12. Built-in method to scale OBJs on import. You could select the units, it could determine the greatest dimension, and calculate the suggested Percentage of standard figure size for you (which you could always change). The list could go on. Several of these (1, 2, 7, 11) are standard practice in most 3D applications, even free ones, these days.

What I would like to see is a partial render function similar to Bryce. As some people have commented/complained that rendering times can be extremly long, make the render, make a small correction and be able to render that portion of the screen. DS has that function.

SR4 - a fix for the inverted light shading on displacements, a fix for the way some hair items come out looking chequered (yes I know there's a workaround, but I want a genuine fix), a modification to cloth similation that makes it stop when it runs into a problem instead of freezing. P6 - major improvements to lights, including introduction of omnidirectional point lights. A major overhaul of the user interface to make things easier and faster to do and reduce repetetive clicking in frequent tasks as well as the introduction of proper content management. Fixes for all of those know little bugs and oddities that have been there for at least the last three versions of Poser. If there are resources left after that, I'd like the render engine to handle caustics.

Hmm, I have yet to meet anyone who has anything good to say about content paradise. Guess I should have said "library and menu control." Lights seem to be another big gripe as I read threads. Doesn't the sketch render handle the "partial render" needs? I'm still learning (I just got my first Poser product, Poser 5, a week or so ago, until then I was hiring an artist (and I'm not going to stop doing that) and doing some postwork).

...in SR4. Easy. Everything they promised and didn't deliver, from animation to collisions to hair room. Fix the memory bug. I don't care about the face room. Setup. cloth, and materials work well enough. Promised content (animals). Optional stop on searching for textures. A check to cover all the alpha and beta testing I did. P6? Open GL, lights (especially point lighting), no stinking Content Paradise. Improved figures. Modular design. Either a more workable face room or the ability not to load it. More texturing nodes. Better cloth and gravity. Better efficiency. Better library management. Multiple undo. Copy and paste of figures/objects. A million dollars and a new Mazarati.

I especially like those last two requests, pdxjims! ;0) Count me in!!

In SR4 I'd like to have a fixed walk designer. As it is now, the only character that will load into it is Don. If I want to do a walk or run animation with another character I have to fire up Poser 4. I'd like to be able to export dynamic hair to another program like Bryce. As Marque said, and I agree, one of the selling points for me on Poser 5 was the dynamic hair. It would be nice to be able to animate it and use it using a utility like Natural Pose and export the animated hair and body into Bryce. I personally am still having problems with preferences. I make a point now of saving my preferences before I exit Poser 5. If I don't, I have to wait longer then Don shows up in the workspace and I have to delete him and then resave them at the end of whatever I'm working on. Another thing, when you want to cancel a render it should cancel. You shouldn't have to wait and then eventually shut down the application as you get tired of its hanging. If there's a way to make the Firefly renderer even faster, that would be a welcome addition as well. I also agree about some new animal models, they'd be a welcome addition. The cloth room should also be sped up somehow. It takes a long time (depending on the clothing) for it to calculate the dynamics. That's all for now.

i would like an update to their poser pro pack utilities. i use lightwave regularly and there are a couple of annoying bugs that i've just learned to ignore and work around. for example, it never remembers any texture files set up in the poser scene. it also has a hard time keeping exact rgb values at times, so that a color looks right but doesn't match the exact color set up in poser. it'd also be nice if props were saved as separate objects from the figure they're parented to. plus it'd be nice if the figures and sets imported into lightwave came in at lightwave scale so that they're not so darn tiny. the "cr2 loader" utility offered at the poserpros website seems to offer a fix to many of these issues, but darnit these should be features in the poser pack set. i paid for poser pro pack already and don't really want to pay $130 for another plug-in.

In P6: A solution for gimbal lock. Perhaps this would be an internal hidden "Body" for every prop.... (As the old song says, Everybody needs a Body sometimes...) In SR4: Give Python the ability to save a "Render to New Window" directly. Also give Python the command to make a complete AVI.

FBX export. That's the best way to give us third party plugins promissed. Lightwave, Max, Maya, XSI, Cinema 4D, they all could import a rigged Poser character beautifully if Curious Labs works out an FBX export and you get it with textures and animation, ready to be manipulate in your favorite 3D program.

The thing that really has to be addressed in Poser 6 is ease of use; the whole ergonomics of the program need revision. Poser can be used in two different ways. We can call Type 1 use using Poser as a posing tool for figures that are then exported to a higher-powered program for scene arrangement and rendering. Type 2 use is doing everything, including the final render, in Poser. I get the feeling that Poser started off with the intent of being a Type 1 program and has gradually drifted to Type 2; emphatically so with Poser 5. The problem is that the basic model of Poser is still Type 1. All the features that you would expect of a good rendering app (like being able to lassoo a bunch of objects, duplicate them, and drag the duplicates to a new location) are missing. Thus trying to lay out a complex scene in Poser is a nightmare. There is a reason for this. Suppose you could select multiple things, and you selected Figure1/R_forearm plus a chair, and tried to bend them, what would happen? Suppose you selected Figure1/Chest and tried to duplicate it, what would happen? However, some resolution of this problem is necessary unless you want to go down the route of placing Poser emphatically as for Type 1 use only. Here is my solution: modal operation. You can work with a file in either Pose or Setup mode and switch back and forth between them. Pose mode is similar in operation to Poser now; you can only select one element at a time, and you can do all the things you do in Poser now. Flip to setup mode, and now everything behaves as it would in a normal 3D app. Figures are now static meshes; you can rotate, move and scale them, but not pose them. But you can select two figures, three props and a spotlight and drag them together round the scene. You can duplicate an entire figure (clothing, parented props and all) just with Ctrl-D. Flipping between these modes would have to be with a very easy hotkey like TAB. One of the things that convinces me that the Poser interface was designed by someone who didn't understand software design is the choice of hotkeys. Changing cameras is one of the things you need to do most frequently. Yet you have awful combinations like Ctrl-; that mean the user has to drop the mouse and pick it up again. Here is some suggested behaviour. In Setup mode: Click on an item, it is selected. Shift-click, it is added to the currently selected items. Ctrl-click, a pop-up menu appears listing the items directly under the cursor in order of increasing distance; select the one you want from this. Drag with mouse, selected item(s) are moved. Hold down X and drag, the selected item(s) are moved along the x-axis only (sim for y and z). In Pose mode: Click on a body part, it is selected (this does NOT happen at present, you get a semi-random part). Shift-click, you select Figure/Body. Ctrl-click, same behaviour as in Setup mode. Drag with mouse, selected body part is moved (as far as is possible). Hold down B and drag, body part is bent. Hold down S and drag, body part is moved side-to-side. Hold down T and drag, body part is twisted. And so on. With intelligent use of keys and mouse you can make a program that would be much more pleasant to use. I would rather have improved ergonomics than any number of new dynamic hair rooms.

A resizeable width to the libraries so I can read long filenames without some funky looking font. Maybe even go to a explorer type view with folders and thumbnails, hover over a long truncated filename (because the window is sized narrow at the time) and like Explorer, it pops up a tooltip with the full name of the file or folder.

fix the problem with the parameter dials disappearing when I revert a poser file to the previously saved version