galactron22 opened this issue on Jul 15, 2005 ยท 129 posts
gagnonrich posted Fri, 15 July 2005 at 7:25 PM
"I'd rather have a finished product as a 1.0 release candidate." You mean you don't enjoy paying for Windows and then getting to play beta tester with their released software? "The other thing that seems to divide opinion is the different UIs." I wouldn't go so far as to say I hate the UI. It's different, so there's some degree of learning curve to it that takes time. If you look at the meager selection in my gallery, you'll see that time is a limiting factor for me. Until DS has a compelling feature to make me put more time into it, I don't have any great incentive to invest time in learning it more. If it takes me a few hours longer to do what I already know how to do, I'm not going to use it. I can't think of anything with Poser's UI that irritates me, so I guess I like it, but haven't given it much thought. That doesn't mean it's better as much as it's what I'm accustomed to. Different interfaces can be annoying as anybody who has played with different remote and timer conventions on VCRs and other electronics. I know that there are legal reasons why DS can't copy Poser's interface, but that doesn't mean that I have to enjoy learning new buttons and concepts to do something I already know how to do. Somebody who starts with DS is going to have the same difficulty moving to Poser because it is different. The one flaw that any 3D posing application is going to have is that the user is playing in a 3D world on a 2D screen. I'm waiting for an affordable virtual rig that lets a user grab a 3D figure with virtual gloves and move all the figures limbs to where they should be. Trying to do it in a 2D environment is such a pain. X, Y, and Z dials have to be twisted individually to move a limb to where it would be so much easier to just move the limb if it were possible. I'm sure that there will eventually be some killer things that DS will do that force me to get used to its conventions and differences. I'm very sure that the only reason DAZ is developing its own posing program is so that they can eventually do something new with their figures. Without their own application, DAZ is limited to whatever Curious Labs wants to do with Poser. CL has no great incentive to reinvent the basic figure posing rigging and algorithms. DAZ makes its money in content. How much more can DAZ do with their core line of figures to convince customers to keep upgrading to the next generation of Millennium figures? CL isn't likely to reinvent what they're doing, so DAZ has to do it to move forward. For somebody new, my recommendation would be to stick with DS. The only reason to upgrade to Poser would be for some of its advanced features. There's really no reason for a beginning user to want to jump on those till they've pushed the limits of DS. That's months to years away for the average user.
My visual indexes of Poser
content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon