"So is it about animation?
How very important is animation?"

Judging purely from personal experience as well as observing the 3D market on many levels over the past 5 years, animation is king in 3D. It's where the big money is for professionals, and it's where the 3D medium truely makes its efficiency known.

I know for a fact that the Poser community in general is lightyears behind the curve of what is cutting edge in the animation genre, and it's not simply because of the lack of new animation features, but mainly because most of the users, who have been with Poser since the early versions, come from a 2D/still image (drawing, painting) background. I see this changing now though, as new, seemingly younger users are introduced to the app (since P4 pro pack/P5). These are users who got interested in 3D from what they've seen in movies (from ToyStory to LOTR to Finding Nemo), and have a great interest in creating animations.

"Will the inexpensive package that allows for animation be the winner in the next go round?"

Well, Poser is already inexpensive, and can do fairly complex animations in the right hands (with the aid of Python scripting). I suspect if they improve the render speed, and integrate network rendering capability natively, it will have much more success in this area. It can definitely stand to improve on it's animation toolset, but right now I see the main problem with it being its lack of speed, memory efficiency, and workflow.

Message edited on: 03/04/2005 23:41

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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.