Hi,

now that you have found our webside, i want to say some words to our project here. I didn't make it earlier, because i hate vapour-ware by myself like most of you, and i don't want to talk about things that maybe - or hopefully :-) - will be published somewhen in the future.

But to avoid wild rumors, i answer honestly to the questions here. Please excuse my - not perfect - English, i hope you will not misunderstand me because of my mistakes.

First of all: why do we do this? The main intention was the disappointment with Poser5, a lot of good ideas, but even more bugs. So we decided to program a better renderer for Poser-files. This is the main purpose for the basic-module that we will give away for free, when we are content with it:

a good, fast and bugfree renderer/raytracer for Poser files

you will be able to import pz3, cr2, obj-Files; you can manipulate, translate, rotate, scale, morph the objects; you can play with materials, you can change cameras, change lights (also with pointlights and ambious lights) and you will have several renderers from a fast GL-based renderer for previews and animations to a full raytracer, developped by ourselves. This is the result of my own 'wishlist' - a software that i want to have as a Poser-Power-user. DAZ-Studio is similar, but seeing the render-speed of the releases so far, i'm not very impressed of it, i'm rather sure, we can do this better - without being too bragging.

While working on this we got more and more ideas what we would like to see in a good poserlike-software, and so we build up our software modul-like from the base, similar to the DAZ-approach: a free base-software and then a couple of not too expensive modules for the people who like our software enough to make more with it. The software will run on windows-pcs as well as on Macs, maybe also Linux.

Now to several questions and remarks from this thread here:

1. Fileformats, export, fbx and so on: this is currently not so important for us. Our base-software is thought for people, who want to have a good raytracer without paying some thousand dollars for a software like maya, lightwave or similar. People who have such a software don't need another raytracer, so our base module is not so interesting for those people. Maybe later, when our advanced modules are selling good, we think more about various export-formats.
   Same with editing the Horus-files: we hope, that this will not be necessary at all, and so we concentrate more on load/save-speed at the moment. But when people like our stuff, we are open always for suggestions and wishlists.

2.from Catlin:

This sounds very much like how DAZ describe DS, only in DS
you can already move, manipulate, etc without having to
pay extra.

The basic manipulations will be part of the free software as i have written above. It is currently not sure how far we will go here, so i don't want to make many promises at this point, but basic transformations, morphs, texturing, light and camera-manipulation will be certainly part of the free basic-software.

3. From Fredy concerning the hair- and cloth-module:

Here was a misunderstanding: those additional modules will not be published together with base module. Of course this is not an easy matter, but we are no beginners; we have done a lot of work in those topics already not only as part of our own software-development, but also as users from various 3d-software. So we are knowing both sides: the software engineering as well as the pain of a user dealing with some dozen more or less easily understandable parameters :-). We want to find here a good compromise between power, speed and usability; and you can be sure, that we will not publish anything, before we are content with it by ourselves. There is no big company with a hourglass in our back, that can force us to publish something that we don't like.

4. From svdl:

Actually, all that I really want is an app that can read a
Poser 5 PZ3, including shaders, cloth dynamics and hair
dynamics, and render it. I can do everything I want in P5,
except rendering, if the scene gets too complicated, the >render engine crashes. So if the basic Horus can do that,
I'll be happy.

Exactly this is our goal for the base-module. Not a competitor to maya - we are not such crazy :-) - but a tool that you can use additionally to Poser for things, that Poser cannot do.

So, i hope with this long message i could answer some of your questions. Those are our plans, the given time schedules are from us, and if we need longer, we will take this additional time. Better a longer development than to publish a software that is full of nasty bugs, which make it a torture to use the software.