" I went back to have a look at Steven Stahlberg site. That is fantastic looking model and it looks like he definitely got the shape right. However, apart from probably a far superior rigging and texture creation tools. The basic mesh of the model does not look any more complicated that of the models that are made for Poser. I don't see this as a problem with the Poser program as much as it is a great job of mesh modeling. Which mesh creation is not done in Poser anyway..
Maybe I am wrong since I don't do modeling and know the limitations of Poser."

Well, you're right in the fact that his meshes aren't any more complex than say DAZ meshes. However, Maya does things a lot differently than Poser. In programs like Maya and 3dsMax, Lightwave, etc.. the joints are controlled by "weight maps", and not "falloff zones" like they are in Poser. Weight maps provide much more realistic and flexible bending and jointing than the old meathod used in poser. So figures will look much better when posed or animated, and result in less "imperfections". Not to mention the rigging tools in these other apps are more sophisticated, and allow the animator more control.

Meshes made for character animation in most other apps aren't usually as high in poly count as Daz meshes are so that they can be more easily rigged and manipulated. In some apps, you can "mesh smooth" the mesh object only at rendertime, so as to save you from working with such a heavy polycount when animating or posing. Poser 5 has a similar option that works well called "smooth polygons", but leaves you with little or no control over how much smoothing you want.

Richard's characters probably wouldn't looks AS GOOD if converted to Poser. Reason being the difference in the way the applications work with joints and skinning. Poser just isn't as sophisticated in that department, and so many of the problem areas we find in most models would probably still exist to some degree, regardless of the quality of the model. Message edited on: 06/07/2004 20:16

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.