Wow - it took a while but I read thru it all and "wow" is the only reaction I can give - I have to say that complaining about something that is free is strange to me. Complaining that a company is trying to use giving away free stuff to encourage you to spend money is also strange. Odd though it may seem to some people who have been posting in this thread - companies exist to make money - ALL OF THEM. Anyone who starts a company with the idea that they will NOT make money is in need of a little medical help. And most companies don't give away things like D|S for free. Normally if it is given away for free it's some little tiny thing that is no big deal. They certainly don't have to give it away - heck, they could sell D|S for say 1/3 the price of Poser and they would likely sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money, but no - they give it away. Are they hoping this will cause you to spend money? Naturally - they are a company not a charity. No sales, no paycheques. No paycheques, no employees. No employees, not company. Seems like a simple progression to me.

Ok, I may regret it but here are my thoughts on the things spoken of in this thread:

The question becomes - do you get fair value for the money you spend? Well, I've seen some of the stuff that DAZ sells and it seems to be fair value as far as I can see. The fact that D|S is free seems like a rather nice thing to me. I have it but haven't really had a chance to look at it as I am working hard with Poser 4. I don't know if D|S can do what I need but if it can't, I'd hardly complain since I didn't have to spend any money on it. Still, for many people it does what they want and although you can certainly spend a fortune on stuff for it, the simple truth is that someone who has no money to spend at all is able to get D|S and enough figures and props, etc for free that they can have the enjoyment of doing 3D work - and to me, that sounds like a good thing. Why anyone who be upset at the fact that DAZ wants people to buy stuff is quite beyond me. They didn't have to make D|S available to everyone for free, they didn't need to make figures available - even if you only get the stuff that is available for free there is a lot you can do. Now if you spend money there is a lot more, but why should that be a surprize? And why should that be a bad thing?

As for developement time - anyone who thinks that a year in the works or 2 years even is unreasonable for a product like this, clearly has never worked at software developement - or at least not software of this level of complexity. I've seen big companies which have 100s of programmers working on a project of this size take that long to produce crap [no names offered - I think one potential arguement a day is a good limit to observe and I'm sure if I named comapnies and products there would be someone to champion them - heh]

And although I don't yet know much about D|S, I have to say that Poser is not exactly a perfect product. I love Poser [even if I do only have 4.0] but it has many things wrong with it - things that we Poser users have to learn to deal with and work around. Ever hear of cross talk? I know with P4 it has often been a problem when I'm doing animations with many figures. Or why is it that you can have the pose in frame 14 suddenly go weird when you add frame 50 - even if frame 14 is a key frame for all channels. But you learn to deal with it and you learn to check repeatedly and do clean-ups for time to time. There isn't a program out there in this field that doesn't have odd quirks - I've heard interviews with people working for Pixar [and believe me, next to the software they use even Poser 6 is on the level of a pocket calculator and pad of paper] and they talk about the quirks and problems they have with their vary hi-end software.

As long as one looks at the things that don't work quite right and the things you can't do with the software, etc, etc, it doesn't matter if you're talking D|S or Poser 6 or whatever - it will suck. But if you look instead at what it DOES for you, what is GOOD with it - you get a whole different view. I do animations with Poser [to be honest, until I came here it never occured to me to use it for still pictures - I mean I knew you could, but I could imagine why] and before I had Poser I did my animations by createing single frames in Photoshop - I used multiple layers so that I could reposition parts and use the same layers for a variety of frames or just add or delete the things that changed but even so it took a very long time to get a small sized animation. Poser cut the time down to the point that I am able to work on much longer animations - so yes, it has quirks that sometimes add a lot of extra work that shouldn't be needed, but even so when I compare to animating without - well, there simply is no comparison.

My point? Instead of complaining about what isn't - enjoy what is. D|S is free. D|S allows you to do much more than you could if you didn't have a 3D posing and rendering program. There is lots of free stuff that can be used with it. All of this is good. Is Poser better? I can't say, but it really doesn't matter. I have a friend who got D|S recently - before he got it he had Poser 1 and since his income doesn't leave him anything to spend on hobbies, he was not likely to ever have a better version of Poser. Now he can pose people that actually look like people and they have neat things like actual mouths, eyes, and fingers that can be posed [P1 has none of that] - it means he can do creative things which he was never able to do before. I don't see how this can be a bad thing.