*"I have to agree. Reading dan's post where he mentions the work involved on V Pro, it should be obvious to anyone that making a major figure is now almost beyond the means of individual creators. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but given the commercialisation of the poser market, it was a pretty obvious development.

The bar has been raised so high for human figures (mainly by DAZ themselves), that in order to get above it, it's no longer enough to make a figure using traditional methods. Body scans, mapping of physiques, hiring models, and all the other stuff involved, now require a team of people, plus the money and resources to undertake a major project, which not many creators have."*

ehh.. i totally disagree. (sigh, im trying to bow out of this thread peacefully and without stepping on any more toes but you are not making it easy for me with a statement like that)

personally im not a huge fan of this 'scanning' thing. a company may spend tens of thousands of dollars to scan in someones 'actual' body, but then that still must be tweaked into a morph... and whats to say that someone is going to find that body style more appealing just because its based on a real person.
take a look in the gallery - a lot of it is fantasy. not to mention that 'scanning' someone in robs creativity and style from 3D art. look at how popular 'the girl' is - do you think kim goosens scanned her in?

weve seen some scanned in people already. personally, im not too impressed. whats the allure? 'woo its based on a real person'. great. if every single work of art ever painted were strictly based on exact human proportions things would be pretty boring. not to mention that just about every 'real person' - even if they can be duplicated reasonably well into 3D, can use a tweak here and there - thats why plastic surgery, health and cosmetics are the biggest industries these days. hell a skilled morpher can take reference photos of a model and produce the same result as having the person scanned in - at thousands of dollars less cost, but would that same morpher hesitate to make some small changes to that morph to fit their own sense of aesthetics, or to give it some character? no, and this is the part of 3D we call 'style', and why it cant be duplicated by a machine.

for those who pursue absolute photorealism (which, imo, defeats the purpose of 3D - if you want absolute photorealism sans style then hire a real live model for $50/hr and take a thousand photos for your gallery instead), perhaps they will feel more confident knowing that they are working with a scan of 'an actual human'. me, well.. i like morphing figures, and im not going to go look for a day job just yet. in the end it all comes down to the appeal to the customer, 'scanned from a real human being' may sell a few more copies but in the end its actually likeing the body or the style thats going to sell it to the customers.
the V3 body is supposed to be a duplication of an actual human. i have no doubt that daz did a good job in duplicating whoever that was, but does that make people like the default V3 body or head any more?

as for meshes? yeah, there are many modelers out there who can put out high-quality professional meshes of V3's calibre or better. the problem is they arent very interested in the poser community - theyre busy doing professional work. you think zygote are the only people on earth capable of modelling the V2 mesh? (V3 is based on a subdivided V2 mesh). as for the ones that are working in the poser community? well.. many of them dont want to commit to the months involved in making something like V3, they just go with the flow instead.

now im not downplaying the work involved in V3. but i am saying that you should take all of the marketing jargon with a grain of salt (sorry dan). for example on the daz site there were pages upon pages of how the V3 textures were photographed using tens of thousands of dollars of uber-amazing equipment to make this groundbreaking amazing super-real texture. now its a fine texture and i have no doubt they did spend a lot of money on creating it using the methods they described - but there are people sitting at home with their $300 digital cameras making better textures. look at stefyzz, morris, syyd, etc, and no - theyre not using photos of 'supermodels' or $50,000 cameras and equipment.

part of the reason daz has such an advantage is because people buy into all the marketing. i could care less if a skin texture was created from a supermodel.. its just photos of skin, and in the end its only going to be the texturer's skill and the nature of the model's skin/pores/coloring that determines how the tex looks. given the choice to make a texture out of paris hilton's anorexic, tanning-salon-roasted ass or 18yr old mary jane from down the block who has natural coloring and skin that hasnt been destroyed by applying makeup 30 times daily, my choice is clear.

and now before someone thinks im just bitching about daz, think again - i have my problems with the RO marketplace as well.
"if users constantly expect more and more realism, the market will provide it."
the pursuit of realism: must 'photorealism' always be the pinnacle of 3D? is the girl realistic? is shrek realistic? are tim burton's creations realistic? if not then why are they so popular?
personally id like to see more highly stylized characters and environments in the marketplace rather than this blind pursuit of 'ultra photorealism'. if you want the ultimate in photorealism take a photo. some of these textures these days are approaching that anyway: 'wooh, look - it looks like a photo from this angle'. umm.. yeah, thats cause it is. its a 4000x4000 photo mapped onto a reasonably flat plane and rendered at 800x800, sure its going to look just like the photo you took to make the texture. magic? skill? umno.
how about seeing some originality beyond pasting a photo onto a UV map and soft-erasing the edges?

now please let me flee in peace :)
i went off the deep end when i first saw this thread, and posted some things id rather take back (although im not the type of person who goes back and deletes my posts) and apologised for. but a statement like 'daz is the only company capable of producing something like V3' screamed at me for a response.

cheers,
-gabriel