Quote - But very few programs are seeking from scratch to emulate Poser to the extent Studio has.

IIRC, Poser is only a starting point due to existing inventory. If you look at the rest of what DAZ bought up lately: Carrara & Hexagon, Bryce, etc etc... all signs point to independence. > Quote - Not really. They already cracked everything else in the cr2 and duplicated it's fuction and performance. I doubt there is anything dubious about "taper".

I'm not sure about that... The .cr2 is in ASCII and most (not all) of its functionality is fairly easy to grok (not easy to code, but easy to understand), and its various functions can be tested against. As an example you've mentioned yourself, scale is pretty easy to do. Quaternion Rotations (joints and such) are a well-defined mathematical expression. It's the out-of-the-way stuff that gets to be a pain. > Quote - Tom think about it. If that was true, none of these pose packs and character packs would work. Of course the tracking is plottable. Once you know what off and what 100% is, it is easy to define all the percentages in between.

Sure, if all you're doing is importation. Going the other way as well, is where things get ugly. > Quote - > Quote - Unless the function is vital, it is far easier/safer to leave a feature out than to throw a ton of time and cash at emulating it - especially if the results are at best not going to be perfect

Well techically "Scale" can be achieved with x.y.z scale so it is even less vital than taper, being it is completely reduntant. After 5 years and what I am sure is over a million in expense, I don;t think supporting "taper" is going to bring the company down financially.

I doubt it by itself would either, but look at the whole of what I wrote there. Wait - it's prolly not well-defined, my apologies. I'll expose it from a different angle: if it is easy to figure out, okay... chuck it in. If it's not-so-easy, then you have a decision: is it worth doing priority-wise, or not? Cost vs. Benefit starts kicking in at that point. > Quote - There is no reason the results can't be emulated just as well as they did with Scale, Xscale, Yscale, Zscale, PointAt, Joints, etc, etc, etc.

It can be emulated (I can almost construct the chain in my head as I type this). That said, can that emulation be exportable (so that it works as predicted in Poser) as well as importable? Me, I don't mind either way... I'm still waiting for a native Linux port of it (don't ask - long story :) ). OTOH, I'm just pointing out the ugly programmatical aspects that come up. Not impossible, but when you're paying for code-monkey time at the rates that DAZ pays 'em, that time gets precious indeed. /P