And lets not forget who the new owner of Poser is. Unlike Meta or CL,Shade takes great pride in their figure creating. That's an interesting thought that there could be new generation figures introduced in a future version of Poser. CL hasn't indicated anything like that happening with Poser 6 and would probably be gunshy over the lack of acceptance of the P5 figures. It's not out of the realm of possibility, particularly if they look as good as some of the Shade models I've seen. If CL provides a large quantity of new content, as they did with Poser 5 (I'll post the list in a new message), it at least gets users a lot of outfits to start playing with the new models. New characters, packaged with Poser, have the potential to gain wide acceptance because all users of the software automatically get the new figures. From the comments above, Don and Judy were basically too little too late and weren't any better than Michael and Victoria, so they never caught on. The other fly in the ointment is that CL and DAZ are slowly taking diverging paths and it's likely someday that both Poser and DAZ Studio will be different programs with incompatible figures. Both should remain backward compatible with P4, but DAZ already ignores Poser 5 features, so there's little reason to believe that they will make any efforts to be compatible with future Poser features, especially as Studio becomes a fuller application. That's a shame because the real losers in such company fights are always users. No matter how good a new figure is, it's hard to move people over to a new standard. With Mayadoll seeming to be the next highest accepted Poser human figure, the character is still dwarfed by what's available for Victoria. I just looked at the other major Poser stores and there's no Mayadoll support at them. There's none at DAZ, none at RDNA or 3D Commune, and there's only three Animedoll products at PoserPros. I'd estimate that there are roughly in excess of 5000 commercial products (adding all the big Poser stores together) that can be used for Victoria and less than 1% as many commercial products for Mayadoll. Again, this is all numbers and not a reflection against the quality of Mayadoll. I'm only using Mayadoll as an example because, at the moment, Mayadoll is the closest thing to a competitive figure against Victoria--which is a good indication of what a great job Studio Maya did with the character. In spite of how good Mayadoll is, it's hardly a threat to Victoria's mass acceptance Poser users, who have invested hundreds of dollars in clothing, accessories, figures, and textures for Victoria are going to have a hard time shifting loyalties to a new figure, no matter how good it is. I know, in my case, I pick a figure based on the outfit I want in the image more than who the figure is. I'm more likely to use Victoria 2 than 3 in my stuff because I have more outfits for the older character. I had a SWAT outfit for V2 and not V3, so that's what I decided to use in my werewolf image. I haven't used either enough to say one is better or worse than the other. There's not much reason to buy something for one character if I've already bought it for the other. I sure don't have the money to duplicate wardrobes for each character. It's odd, but having just thought about what I said above, it dawned on me that one of the keys to creating a successful new figure may be less the figure than what's available for the figure that nobody else has. The success of Nintendo, Sega, or XBox is not the basic box , but the software titles available for each. The companies behind each videogame have ensured that they have a killer product that the others don't so that game players have to consider getting the other box to play the game they want. As with Poser, the money is not in the base products, but in what can be bought to supplement them. Of course, there is a massive difference in the workload between creating a current videogame title and a Poser figure. If somebody created a killer outfit for a brand new character, it would only be a matter of time till another creator did something similar for DAZ characters (after all, Alexa and Sarah bore striking resemblances to the The Girl). Is there any advantage to creating a human character with an entirely new mesh over providing morphs to a unimesh character? I've got minimal skills as a modeler, but it seems as if the DAZ figure meshes have enough capability in them to satisfy most modelers. I'm curious whether there is any inherent advantage to go to an entirely new mesh. The immediate problem is that compatibility with existing products gets thrown out.

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