there are some great non DAZ carachters that have come out over at Sixus 1! Scrum, Behemoth, Lil' Britta. Adam, Lillith. I dont disagree. Ive bought a half dozen Sixus1 characters, but theres not a lot of external support for them. The real money isnt in the characters, but in the clothing, textures, accessories and modifications of the base characters. There are only three official versions of Victoria, but there are thousands of products to supplement those models. For chuckles, I did a search through the Renderosity Marketplace for different characters to get some rough order of magnitude of support. Renderosity doesnt sell any official characters of their own, so theres no built-in bias for any particular figure. Here are the results: Victoria - 2248 Michael - 879 Stephanie - 547 Freak - 86 Mayadoll - 38 Dina - 23 Laroo - 18 Alexa - 15 (about, since the search picked up Alexandra, etc.) Neftoon Girl - 11 Nadya - 1 (just an eye texture that's compatible with all figures) Lillith - 0 That's an eye-opener if anybody wants to compare levels of product acceptance. Mayadoll has the next greatest quantity of products next to the DAZ biggies, just about beating nearly every other figure by a factor of two or more. Comparing 38 products to 2,248 for Victoria makes whatever great strides Mayadoll made look pretty flimsy. That's not an indication of what Mayadoll isn't (she's a great character), but points out the mammoth entrenched success that DAZ has achieved with their Millennium figures. It highlights the difficulty of getting a greater share of the marketplace with a new stand-alone figure. These numbers are just in the Rendo store and don't consider other Poser stores or items at free sites, but I would expect percentages to be somewhere in this ballpark where adding all the non-DAZ human figures together wouldn't amount to much more than 1%-5% of all the items supporting Victoria. The real next-best supported figures would be the P4 ones, but there's not much merchant support for them anymore. > The only real reason to make a figure line NOT based on some version of Mike and Vicky is that for some reason, they can't do what you want to. That's why it will be hard to top DAZ right now. I'd suspect that the main limitations of the models, today, is the rigging scheme built into Poser. It's going to be very hard to develop a human character that is so spectacular that a good proportion of Poser users will drop all the clothing and accessories they've bought for Victoria and Mike to move to new characters that require all new clothing and accessories. It's probably a lot less painful to just build that new character off the Millennium figures (and inject them or whatever process works) so that there is a high compatibility with existing inventories of bought items. >On one hand, there is so much available to create really good art in Poser. On the other hand, it has created a situation where everything is already done for you ... textures, poses, expressions, body shapes, body styles, clothing, etc. ShhhhhYou'll be cutting every merchant's throat if you start telling Poser users that they can do stuff on their own :) Everything in life is a mix of time, money, and priorities. Anybody can make a photorealistic texture or create their own characters with the existing morphs that either come with, or can be bought, for the Millennium characters. Anybody can cook their own meals or sew their own clothes and save a lot of money. It takes time and a certain level of skill to do better than what others can do. Sometimes, it's just faster and more effective to buy a frozen meal or buy clothing from a store or buy a character model, texture, or clothing from a Poser store. There's a certain level of satisfaction in doing these things on our own, but there's a cost in time to do them. The real purist thinks we ought to create our own figures, too. There will always be some level in compromise between home grown and store bought. Let's face it, some modelers and texture makers and character builders have a knack that most Poser users will never match. It's often more productive to just buy from the experts. > Produce a relatively low res character, somewhere between Posette and the P4-Lo res figures. It sounds like a niche area that needs to be filled, but it won't knock Vicky and Mike off their pedestals. Look at the Poser galleries. How many images with crowds are there? It's mostly pinups (14 out of 18 images when I looked at the Poser gallery a little while ago). Flak's one of the few artists that routinely does crowd scenes (his Siege drawing had a cast of hundreds). Most Poser artists are happy putting a lone Vicky in an erotic costume on a simple background. I wonder how many P4 clothed figures have been put into Poser without slowing the engine down to a crawl. It would be nice to have more figure options, but most Poser users aren't really stretching the limits of the products they currently have at their disposal (including me, but I'll eventually start pushing further). The future is always hard to predict and it'll be interesting to see what new things come down the pike.

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