I decided to take another look at the level of figure support at the Renderosity Marketplace and below are the numbers of items available for each figure.

3600    Victoria 3

1140    Aiko

1020    Victoria

720      Michael 3

690      Stephanie 3

480      Michael

291      David

284      Laura

180      Miki

135      The Girl

121      Hiro

95        Apollo Maximus

94        Animedoll

90        Koshini 1 & 2

87        Freak

72        Terai Yuki

48        Rosy Cheeks Lina

32        Laroo

13        HER

Not surprisingly, Victoria 3 remains the top supported figure. I thought Aiko had grabbed second place based on the available freebies for the character and that is indeed the case.

Miki, Apollo Maximus, Animedoll, and Koshini are the best selling nonDAZ figures. I'm more impressed with the support for Miki and Apollo because they are newer figures and compete more with Victoria 3 whereas the other figures are toon characters. With Miki having twice the support of Apollo, it's a sign of how female figures sell better than male. Looking at the DAZ figures, V3 has five times the support of M3, V & S3 sell more than twice as many products as M & D3 respectively, and Aiko outsells Hiro by almost ten to one. If nothing else, those differences show that a female version of Apollo would have 2-10 times the support of Apollo.

I was also surprised at the relatively low level of support for The Girl compared to Aiko. The Girl had a lot more fanfare when that figure was released. The original Aiko had almost zero support. I'm not sure why Aiko3 has vastly outstripped all other anime/toon female figures.

By looking only at the Renderosity Marketplace, these figures aren't wholly representative of the entire Poser market. Since RMP doesn't have any affiliated figures, it's numbers aren't as skewed as other stores might be (such as Koshini's support at RDNA, Koshini's current home). I did take a quick look at RDNA and the few numbers I looked at were comparable. If anybody would like to add up numbers at other stores, it will give an even better representation of how much support the various figures have.

Another factor that boosts DAZ support numbers is that a number of unimesh morphs and textures support multiple figures. That means derivative figures have larger numbers than solely supported figures. David shares Michael 3 morphs and textures, so M3 products are duplicated in David products. A figure, like Apollo, doesn't get that double count to the same degree.

man, you have way too much time on your hands..;) I hadn't realized that there was that much  Aiko stuff, but there you go..;) A lot of stuff is on the sites that Freebies are connected to, but if you download all that, that way lies madness (finished CD 154..22,000 items so far..;)

This is very handy. I took a less accurate look (only went by page count), when I was seeing if it was worthwhile to do some clothing items for Laura. Thank you so much for posting this.

Uh oh, don't take my numbers too seriously because they're not any more detailed than a page count, multiplying by 30 per page and, when two had the same count, seeing how many were on the last page so that they could be ranked better. With V3 having 120 pages X 30 products per page, it really doesn't matter whether 3586 products or the rounder 3600 I reported. No effort was made to screen out dupes where a V3 product would also be advertised on S3 and Aiko3 pages. To get Laura and Koshini numbers (where neither figure have their own page), I simply did a search on their names. This is a very rough back-of-the-envelope type of calcuation, that took less than an hour to do, but it still showed some interesting results.

I wouldn't say that I put way too much time in this. What I spend way too much time on is indexing my Poser content, but I mostly do it while watching TV. It makes it a lot easier to create Poser art when I have a good visual idea of what content I can use.

Are you telling me there are no market place items for the Poser default folks at all? I find that hard to believe. I know I've bought things for James & Jessi, maybe not here but they're out there. I'd also gonna say add-ons like Glamerous Jessi and Eternal Judy should count as items for Jessi and Judy.

i suspect aiko has considerably more support because she is a much more versatile figure than the girl. i think the girl is cute, but i have zero interest in her for rendering because she forces the style of the art. aiko doesn't; she can go kawaii but also realistic. interesting numbers; thanks for doing that. i was wondering about the overall support other than V3 which clearly hogs the top spot.

Poor old (Young) Luke, Matt & Maddie not well represented at all

I hadn't looked up Jessi or the other figures because they're not broken out at the main level and I hadn't thought of looking into the P5 and P6 categories because I thought they were mostly things like dynamic clothing and shaders. I just looked at Jessi's numbers and there's 7 pages of content, so that's about 210 products. Judy's got 3 pages, so her products will max out at 90. Glamorous and Eternal should be counted within the figures assuming they were categorized correctly.

I didn't look up every single figure because I did this solely to satisfy my curiosity about how far Aiko's support had grown. I'm one of those people that has to scratch the curiosity itch to get it over with. I have way too many friends that can argue for hours over points that neither one has anything better than an uninformed opinion to guide their discussions. I'd rather get the ground truth or at least some better measure than just a gut feeling that represents the whole source of the argument. Once I looked up Vickie and Aiko, I wanted to see how they compared against their comparable male figures and then I wanted to look up a few independent figures. It's by no means an authoritative study looking at the full Poser market. Any figure that didn't make the list was one that I didn't bother looking up.

I'd encourage anybody, as curious as me, to do similar searches and report the findings both for additional figures at RMP and for numbers at other sites. I have little doubt that V3 will have two to three times the content of any figure at any site. Aiko, or Victoria 1/2, will probably occupy the second position. The positions that I wouldn't put too much faith in would be ones that are close together like Apollo, Animedoll, Koshini, and Freak where the spread is 8 products. I wouldn't be too surprised if any of those characters have a different order of support at another site, but wouldn't expect any of them to have more support than for David as an example (except for maybe Koshini at RDNA since Lady LittleFox only sells her line there and I'm not even sure if RDNA carries any products for other toon figures like Animedoll).

Sales figures would be a better measure, but they're closely guarded by each store. I'd expect the Animedoll products to sell more than Apollo because most Apollo puchases will be at ContentParasise and RDNA which sell the base figure.

Keep a grain of salt handy with these figures.  They are what they are and I haven't fudged any numbers (though keep in mind that they are living figures that change as new products are added and old products are sometimes removed). Until somebody takes more than the hour I put into this, my quick numbers may represent the most "authoritative" measure of merchant figure support out there.

Even though the numbers representative only one market, they still tell an interesting story. Without seeing them together, would anybody have expected that the two Victoria figures have nearly twice the merchant support of all the other figures added together? Or that the default figures that come free in Poser only have a tenth the support of the DAZ figures? Or that Aiko had snuck into the number two spot? It's only one data source, but there's still information that can be gleaned from them.

Hopefully, somebody will be spurred to add more data.

I think, and I'll have to dredge up the figures, that I checked for number of original clothing items for a small number of figures. This is much tougher to learn, as many thumbnails fail to indicate whether they are a clothing mesh or an add-on texture for some other clothing item. I suspect the numbers would narrow a bit, as retexturing Vickie or her clothing marks the entry-point for most people into Poser content creation. Also, the greater popularity of Vickie means each item for her will also be used more and thus generate more add-on packs for itself.

Thanks for adding the Poser default's even as guestimations. It's sad enough that they're grossly ignored by the merchants, they at least deserve some recognition of their non-recognition. 

:b_crying:

How about Koji? He has SOME support, though not a lot, unfortunately.

I think the problem with the GIRL is that she came out (for Poser) too late. At the time she was finally Poserized, the market was swamped with lookalikes (Alexa1, Sara1, Neftoon Gal) and people who wanted that type of characters had already bought them.

My guess is that Koji will be in the 20-40 product range or less. Luke, Maddie and Matt, added together, will probably be less than Laura. If anyone's really curious, all they have to do is add up the number of pages, multiply by 30 per page (minus one page because the last page usually isn't full), and go to the last page and add that to the total. For the figures I didn't count, there shouldn't be much more than one or two pages. I didn't do all the figures because I was less curious about some of them (though should have checked P5/P6 figures as a data point for commonly available Poser figures).

I still remember a lot of excitement when The Girl finally did come out. People were posting images the same day they bought the character. There were promises that a male figure was in the works and a whole toon world of products were going to be built, but the whole thing fizzled out in a few months.

I'll have to agree that Aiko3 is a more versatile figure because I've seen a number of figures that can look convincingly human. I wonder why the first Aiko was such a bomb.

220 Jessi 141 James 136 Maddie 122 Judy 80 Luke 68 Posette 60 Matt 52 Kiki 34 Ichiro 26 Sara 24 Koji 19 Alexa 11 staci tried to count alternate spellings (jessie, maddy, madison) as well as "uncount" obvious misclassifications. there are probably a few additional posette items under "p4 female". a search for "don" results in a mess and needs to be handcounted one by one, and i am too tired now. :) an awful lot of products are hair fits, or mere mentions that V3 textures also fit other unimesh characters.

Thanks for checking those additional details! Here's what the two listings look like when combined:

3600         Victoria 3

1140         Aiko

1020         Victoria

720           Michael 3

690           Stephanie 3

480           Michael

291           David

284           Laura

220           Jessi

180           Miki

141           James

136           Maddie

135           The Girl

122           Judy

121           Hiro

95             Apollo Maximus

94             Animedoll

90             Koshini 1 & 2

87             Freak

80             Luke

72             Terai Yuki

68             Posette

60             Matt

52             Kiki

48             Rosy Cheeks Lina

34             Ichiro

32             Laroo

26             Sara

24             Koji

19             Alexa

13             HER

11             staci

I'm surprised that Sara has so few products because that figure has a lot of independent support and even at least one website wholly devoted to the character.

I looked at Don under the P5 only heading and there's only 7 products there, but that seems low if Judy has 122.

 At least I was on the money about Koji having 20-40 products and that the other three Teen/PreSchool figures added up to less than for Laura (284 products for Laura vs. 276 for the other three combined).

It's a little scary that the two Victoria figures, combined, account for almost half of all Poser figure products sold (4,620 out of 10,185) (a good percentage of the total number will be double counting items that support multiple figures). To throw in another number, there are 1720 products under Sets & Props to compare figure support versus prop support (keeping in mind that props won't have many double counts because they're mostly stand-alone products with minimal, if any, expansion support).

Another measure of support would be counting freebies because freebies represent which products people are using a lot. It was the volume of freebies for Aiko3 that got me curious about where the figure was standing in commercial sales. Commercial products only represent what merchants want to sell and often are slanted to perceptions of which figures are selling.

The first time I did one of these counts, I was shocked at how little support the figures, that come free with Poser, have received. Part of the problem is that the Poser figures are relatively old even though the meshes have been updated a bit. If memory serves me right, Jessi and James are still based on the old P4 female and male meshes. E-Frontier can shake up the Poser marketplace if they release new advanced figures with the next update of Poser. Their announcement of new second generation figures so far sound less like advances then unifying the line to take the same textures and morphs.

Jessi and James are completely new figures for Poser 6, they were created in Shade, no relationship to older mesh geometry.

65 of the 94 ApolloMax products are pose packages.  Just think how many pose packs are available for the Vicki figures, yikes.  I seem to remember one bored night I counted 150 texture products available for V3 Morphing Fantasy Dress (made by Anton ApolloMax creator).

Vicki2 has really been around a long time, and V3 is about 3-4 years old now, it's not suprising that a female figure that has had no direct competition has that many products available.

Sara was given away for free, and the support has tried to stay grass roots free only, not really supprising that there are not products for sale for the figure.

Mechants in general have been that if it's a free figure model then there is not a reason to develop and sell items for that figure.  Sara, Poser 5 Don and Judy, James and Jessi.  Starting to change with james and jessi but slow in moving.

I proudly present Clark 1.0

Clark 1.0 or C1 is a new male figure for Poser that can be explored by poser creators with morphs, clothes and other type of related products for him.

This figure was created to let poser creators explore it in all kind of Poser products.

Hope you like C1 as much as I do.

If you have any question about C1, please send me a I.M.

Have a excellent day!

Quote - Jessi and James are completely new figures for Poser 6, they were created in Shade, no relationship to older mesh geometry.

That's good to know. The buzz, when P6 was released, mostly said that Jessi/James still weren't up to the quality of V3/M3. They were better than Judy/Don, but not being better than the figures, DAZ now provides for free, didn't make users want to jump on them.

Just because a character is free doesn't mean they don't get supported. Mayadoll had a significant amount of early support when it was released and, combined with Animedoll, still is one of the better supported figures (with a few more products than Koshini). Mayadoll has been somewhat replaced with Aiko3. Sara got buried when The Girl came out and got repackaged as a lesser, modified character that wasn't as good as the original. Merchants probably wouldn't care too much that a figure has a free grass roots effort

Merchants are mostly going to release products that have a good chance for lots of sales (or is something they want to do or something that they think will fill a nice niche). Doing something with a new generation of Vicki and Mike is going to generate more sales than with other new figures because the DAZ characters are, as a given, going to get better support in today's environment.

If E-Frontiers were to incorporate new figures, in a future version of Poser, that are state of the art, look great, and have better joints than the comparable DAZ figures, there's a good chance that those figures may start challenging the DAZ figures. Lyrra dropped a hint, back in 2004, that she was nudging Poserworld to release figures of their own. That hasn't happened, but a figure getting the full support of Poserworld would have a pretty impressive wardrobe selection that would quickly make the figure very versatile for use.

Aiko's rise to the second most supported figure is an indication that the status quo can be challenged, even if Aiko is still a DAZ figure. Of course, a good part of Aiko's numbers are due to compatibility with the other female DAZ figures (but so does Stephanie who has about half the support). For a new figure, Miki has a decent level of support (just behind Jessi) because it's the best looking, most realistic, Japanese Poser figure on the market.

WardrobeWizard hasn't yet equalized the market, but it's not a perfect solution for fitting clothing to another figure and still takes some effort to use. It's the closest thing to a 1-step solution, but it's still not the holy grail of clothing conversion. Maybe a better clothing converter will be the answer.

As a point of comparison, here's the breakout from May 2004:
Victoria - 2248
Michael - 879
Stephanie - 547
Mayadoll - 161
Koshini - 154
Freak - 86
Dina - 23
Laroo - 18
Alexa - 15

I just want to point out that for Don, You should include ANY and ALL skin Textures made for the default Michael 2.0 as the textures work fine on Don as well. I'm not sure about Vicky 2 and Judy though so if someone else knows, speak up. I'd say of Michael's 5 pages worth of textures at least 80% are actually Michael textures so I'd guess 3 time's 90 or 270 skin textures that can be used on Don. That's just guessing without going and counting all 5 pages to see which ones are actually textures and which ones are misfiled under Michael's textures and don't belong there.

nah, mizrael, i wouldn't do that, mainly because we didn't do it for any of the unimesh figures either, but only counted the products that specifically mentioned a figure, in order to see to whom the market tries to cater. if one were to do a count of what content is actually usable by each figure then yes, those should definitely be added. as should the freebies, of course. and not just at renderosity. i am not volunteering for that, heh; that would require some serious free time and willingness to put up with tedium.

Oh, Ok. Well It's still good to put it out there so people know just in case they didn't. I've done my good deed in that regards. ;)

There is a shirt for the P4 baby somewhere out there. That appears to be all.