Quote - I think the "combatants" frightened away the original post starter IMHO anyone who immediately mentions editing joint parameters in one of these discussions is in the slight minority of poser users i consider "advanced". let alone "hacking a CR2" I still firmly believe more than 51 % of poser users are : BUY-LOAD-RENDER using the canned hair,clothes,poses and most time canned lights perhaps with some slight variation of the canned poses. so to be frank D/S is the Ideal free solution for the majority especially someone who has only now exjted the crumbling cave of P4!! (Disclosure) I use Maxon Cinema4D +interposer pro linked to 2 poser runtimes and Vue will like NEVER buy another version of poser beyond P6 and D/S is just a free toy for me to fiddle with occasionally.

 

I think that all Poser users start out that way, I certainly did.  But eventually you run into a situation where the canned buy load render doesn't quite fit the bill, and for some of us that means starting to branch out a bit and learning a bit more about meshes, textures, etc.. to get the desired effect.

Pretty soon you’re looking at modeling a few things on your own, and before you know it your starting to read up on CR2 files and how they work.  I must admit I've never tried Maxon's Cinema 4D - sadly my budget just can't keep up with all these great 3d rendering programs so I stick with poser for now.

I'll probably look at going to something a bit higher end eventually, but for now Poser does what I need it to do with a minimum of fuss and aggravation. As to the combative nature of some of the responses, whenever you ask a question on an internet forum about which software package is better you must expect at least 50% of the responses to be along these lines, it’s just the nature of the beast.

 

People have a tendency to get rather entrenched in the software they use. I remember not to long ago some folks got there knickers in a twist when I wrote a review of some image editing software called “The Gimp”. I had some nice things to say about the program and it didn’t sit well with some of the folks that read my article and were long time photoshop users.

 

Now I’m a long time photoshop user (in fact I’ve been using it for so long my first commercial copy was purchased under it’s original name of photostyler) and I’m certainly not going to be switching over to the Gimp anytime in the near future. Not that the Gimp isn’t a good program, but I’ve got a lot of time invested in photoshop, I know where the menu options are that I need and what the shortcut keys are that I use on a daily basis. But for someone that doesn’t currently own photoshop it’s a viable option, it’s a powerful program with a lot of desirable features at an unbeatable price – free. 

 

But while I can see the value of a program like the Gimp for others, a lot of people grow rather attached to their particular software and feel the need to defend their choice wholeheartedly. For me a software choice has never been that much of an emotional investment, but for others it often can be strangely enough.