Quote - So, what you're saing is that if E-F intend to remain within the current (manily hobbyist) market, Poser isn't likely to get much better in terms of things like rigging. That doesn't sound too optimistic. Doesn't sound too 'Premier 3d Figure Design and Animation Solution' either.

I think the future of the hobbyist market in all likelihood lies elsewhere, in terms of improvement. My guess (and bear in mind, my crystal ball is a bit cracked) is that Poser will never change a whole lot. The changes that do come will be in the way of wholesale, plugged-in features, like the cloth room and face room were. Any significant change would make it a new product, and it would probably be marketed as such.

There are alternatives, but no pretty ones. The best advantage that Poser has is that it's easier to use for CG development than most over such tools. Take a stab at Blender sometime, for example. You get all the same things you get with Poser (except the Face room, really), plus a whole lot more. There's a thriving on-line community of artists and users. You can do rendering, bone rigging, posing, texturing, and animation. On top of that, you can do model making without needing an external application, it can import and export maybe three times as many formats, it has a better lighting system, and you can interface to multiple rendering systems. You can import a lot of your Poser content, and re-rig it for use in the app. If there's something you want improved, you have unparalleled access to the developers, or you can get the source code and take a stab at fixing it yourself. And, best of all, it's completely, 100% free.

Good luck with the user interface, though. And the documentation. No one, not even it's staunchest supporters, will say it's easy to use.

I doubt there will ever be a really good answer. Poser has this great user base and fan club, in large part because when it came along, it really was the Premiere. There wasn't much of anything else you could by that was similar. They didn't make it easy, but you could make your own add-in content for it. But now, there's lots of choices, the market competition is stiff, and there's more money to be made in making more content than there is in making improvements to the software. Poser's falling behind a bit, because as software gets older, it's just plain harder to change it.

The best thing that could happen would be for e-Frontier to give up on the software itself, and throw it to the wind. Make the source code available to the community, and make their money selling content for it, and other applications. If they did that, and enough interested programmers took up the banner, you'd see an amazing amount of improvement. Things would get a little scattered and fragmented, there'd be multiple versions, and the documentation might get a little chaotic. But open source has given the world a lot of really neat software, especially in the CG area, and it would really blow the doors wide open.

As long as one company is developing Poser as a commercial product though, I really don't think it's going to change much. I'd love to be wrong, but that's just how things go in the software business. To stay in business, they have to make money, to make money they have to keep costs down while the revenue comes in, and making the massive improvements that so many people want while keeping the price point down just may not be doable.

Captain Jack