Attached Link: Etch-a-Sketch

It doesn't bother me if there is a new category for Poser-No Postwork. It probably won't get many hits and most people will want their images in the gallery that gets viewed the most--that would be the current Poser gallery. The No-Postwork gallery will be new because it's doubtful that any moderators want to spend weeks culling postworked images out of the current gallery to make it pure Poser. I'm really siding with the posters who don't think it makes much difference. Anybody who's used Poser for a while can fairly readily spot what's Poser and what's postwork. There are very few images in the Poser gallery where Poser isn't front and center. There may be some postwork to smooth over the rough edges that Poser can have. There aren't many images where Poser is buried under postwork. After all, if the artist could paint well enough that Poser isn't needed, Poser wouldn't be used. I basically consider Poser-only images as being somewhat akin to Etch-a-Sketch art. It's amazing that somebody can create real art on the toy, but the skill that allows them to do that can readily transfer to pencil or pen & ink work and could be completed much faster and more reliably and not have to worry about being jostled and erased. Poser-only artwork is a similar kind of curiosity. It's fun to see how far somebody can push the program, but there's eventually a wall that usually isn't worth going beyond. Spending hours working on lighting, that can be made perfect in a couple minutes with a color correction in a 2D graphics program, doesn't make much sense on a continual basis. It might be worth pushing a few times to learn how to use lights better, but constantly trading efficiency to go a Poser-only route leans towards obsessiveness. As each version of Poser improves a little with each release, it doesn't make much sense getting too hung up on intricacies and workarounds to flaws in the program if there's better ways of fixing them. The time spent pushing Poser's weaknesses could be better spent learning a better way of fixing the problem. Poser weaknesses may be fixed in a later version and all that time, trying to work around them, will have been wasted whereas learning new techniques in an image editing program has a greater payoff in Poser and other 2D illustrative work. Poser's a great little program, but it is by no means the best 3D program out there. It's really not worth spending too much time fixing a quirk with Poser when a fuller 3D application doesn't have the same problem. A Poser-only image usually looks unfinished to me. I've seen a few that are quite impressive, but more often than not, Poser-only images could be made better with a small amount of postwork. The one area where I would like to see more Poser-only work is in before and after images. It's interesting to see what a heavily postworked image looked like coming out of Poser and seeing how the artist improved the original raw image. The couple times I posted that topic, it got almost zero response, so I'm sort of alone in finding fascination in seeing the image that the artist started with. If enough peopel feel a great need to have a No-Postwork gallery, that's okay by me.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon