I haven't seen it much because frankly I'm a noob.  I've been doing artwork in any form since about November of 2006, about 8 months now.  I post here and read here because there's valuable information about the apps I choose to work with, and don't frequent some of the other forums mentioned because they don't have info about my apps.

Not like I was too poor to afford 3ds Max or other apps.  I spent two weeks trying to figure out rigging V3 in 3ds Max 9 before I decided I was wasting my time.  If there was a commercially-available, well-engineered, RIGGED, with JCM or some equivalent, human figure with a large complement of flexible morphs and materials for 3ds Max or Maya, I'd be using Max or Maya.  Money is not important to me.

If I had started with Max 8 months ago instead of the DAZ figures and Poser, maybe in a couple of years I could match pure number of man-hours that have gone into the rigging and morphing of a typical $30 Poser figure.  I do not think that is a good trade of time for results, I'd just as soon cough up $30 and spare myself a few years of work.  Anyone really putting forward the idea that ordinary individuals should be modeling, rigging, texturing, and doing all morphs and whatnot - this screams "you are a hobbyist".  Major animation production houses don't do it that way.  All the work is subdivided in a very bureaucratic way, and huge collections of proprietary content are designed and textured etc, and passed to other workers who may have no concept of how it was produced.  They're only concerned with using it.  This isn't really different from Poserdom except money does not change hands.

Granted, some people are capable of modeling, rigging, morphing, texturing etc a figure from scratch.  These people (e.g. Anton Kisiel) are very cool and brilliant, and I look up to them highly.  They also have many years' head start on me.  Should I stop my artwork and go train for 5-10 years before going forward again?  Someone can try to sell me on the idea that any random person can pick up 3ds Max and do all this in a short time; from direct experience with Max 9 on very high end hardware, I don't think so.  As I continue to learn and understand how these figures work, I really don't think so - JCMs are a very good example.  Seems to me the base model is rather the easy part, the rigging and morphing is where all the work goes.  

Cobaltdream could you cite some of these examples of what you're talking about e.g. yucky work?  I frankly don't go out and look for the stuff.  Yes you are very capable of looking at Poser renders with an unbiased critical eye, but since I don't know really what you're comparing it to it's hard for me to really benchmark anything (not that that's really needed here).

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