Quote - Quote- A tensor is of course much more than this, but not for Poser*. -End quote.*  Could you elaborate?  Thank you for the links

Sure... I forgot the derivative nodes in Poser (dU, dV, dPdU, dNdU, ...) anyways.
Tensors appear in so many fields from norm mathematics to continuum mechanics that it would be a book if I write about every use for them.
And with my english it won't be fun to read, besides that I won't ever write a book about anything.
Not even for an fellow soldier. :p

If you specify a little what you want to know I'll send you an IM.

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A character with more bones sounds great.
It would help a lot in fixing the weird look that figures often get after doing rather normal posing with them.
Right now the only things that help after adjusting of the bones (and related settings) is to take the figure to a modeling app or to play around with this morph brush of Poser 7. The morph brush is great but it screws up the mesh somehow if used excessively.

For those who want a quick result (i.e. not days of importing and exporting and modeling) it's obviously not a very appealing procedure.

I think the popularity of certain figures comes from 1) how they look in renders 2) what add on items are available 3) the marketing.
The behaviour on posing is something that most probably don't care much about. Especially if they are not proficient in 3D and/or art. Direct competion to DAZ figures is difficult.
If there are many customization options it would help. Many clothes and character morphs for a new figures will help also. However, without really intensive and good marketing it won't make many users and merchants switch to this new figure.

Assuming that there would be a similar amount of pictures showing Apollo as there are pictures showing A3, and assuming further that Apollo would be a female figure, then probably more people would start to use this figure and even any new figure that the creator of Apollo, Anton, would create, will have a bigger user base.

At the time V2 became popular there was not really much to choose. Most merchants came
after that one figure. The P4/P5 standard figures are not crap. I remember that I liked the P4 figures better for their flexibility but used V2/M2 and later V3/M3 because there was just more add on stuff available.

I like it if I can load a figure, some environment and clothing, adjust a few things like pose and textures and then do a first render. The polycount is not important for me as long as I don't do "real time" animated stuff for PC.

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Quote - I'm so releaved to have come into CG at an age when you don't need any math knowledge or degrees in geekology to get anything done,tools these days are focused around the artist who creates with them & fortunately we dont need to know the technical in's & out's of vector math to know what we're doing.

spoken as a highschool dropout who's worst subject was math :-)
Cheers
Stefan

I loved math for quite some years while a child, then later I almost hated it for the longwinded formulas needed to describe simple things like weather and after that I loved it again. A good relationship so to say...
It's not that I say everybody has to study mathematics by all means. But I admit that I'm a little biased if it comes to this topic. And I will defend my lovely little vectors with my life. :glare:

Poser offers a nice playground with the material room and most Poser artists don't use it at all, despite the fact that it is not as hard to use as the figure setup room.
There is no relation to high-poly figures or modeling nor will the small field of vector math enable one to describe the whole range of shapes in nature. The whole post was about what  vectors are. With keeping in mind that this a CG forum...

For artists it is not vital to know what app do to let some model or render appear on screen.
While I used/use Maya, Max, XSI myself I was never very happy about the fact that I have to read manuals to create an model that is more than a few cubes or spheres.
Poser was a great invention to ease the creation of CG art while avoiding the the need to model all needed stuff by oneself.

Manuals teaching the usage of some application are different from learning what different canvas types are good for or what kind of paint can be used for what look. The latter is less annoying for some reason while the manuals are more like geology and chemistry for an stonemason. g
The artistic stonemasons usually dont care much about how old the stone is that they work on or where that stone was plenty million years ago or what happened that there is a "stone" in the end.

As a sidenote: I'm not an artist anyways. For me it's nice to see good artwork, can spend many hours with this, but I rather see relations, numbers, physics and later the picture itself. Sometimes I don't even reach that point of seeing the picture and fail to get it's emotional meaning.Remembers me of the days I had to do handicraft work and pictures in school. OMG...