Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2729748&page=1#message_3171753

It's just my personal opinion and I still highly recommend everyone go over and at least try the demo. Someone might just find it does what they need  :)

I'd like to hear comments on what others think about it over here in Poser land :)

Wasn't there some Quidam version included in Poser 7 Pro? If it will be sold some time that is...

I picked up Quidam Studio because ultimately Poser content doesn't work well outside Poser / DAZ studio without the use of hosting plugins.

I like Quidam very much, but it's a very different animal than Poser - no moprhing, limited material capability, no dynamic cloth / hair (which I don't really care about).

BUT it's ability to sculpt geometry and make characters is really cool (I guess P7 can do that but I never upgraded past P6); but Studio's greatest strength is its ability to export low poly cages (think 3K polys) which can be subdivided (smoothed) in other applications. That's what sold me. I'm in the process of remapping Quidam characters to accept Mil 2 textures, but I think it's a great program.

For P7P, unless they provide a way to create and store morphs - most especially for  phonemes and basic facial expressions - it's difficult to say how eager users will be to create their own.

actually Poser Pro has low and medium res characters created with "Quidam for Poser" which will be one of the features in Poser Pro ability to create your own low res characters

 Right, but I don't know if Poser Pro's smoothing ability will be as robust  as other apps. Poser's great for stills but renders a little slow for animation for my tastes.

I have trying out Quidam...  No good points to point. Need more information from you that are going deeper. 

 Well, if you've ever tried to rig a DAZ figure NOT in Poser or D|S, then you'll immediately recognize its benefits.

Painting weights on a 70,000+ poly character is a nightmare, so the Low Poly export converted to a subdivision surface is the key. This is a huge advantage, and one that cannot be realized within the "spherical falloff zone" schema.

Disadvantages:
(1) no morph support - facial expressions, pheonemes, etc. If you're planning to create them yourself, then that's no big deal.

(2)  Quidam characters are not as aesthetically pleasing out of the box as the DAZ characters. The sculpt tool allows you to create a wide variety of characters.

Don't get me wrong, I love Poser (especially creating procedural textures) but it is a "gateway into 3D" drug. I'd like more flexibility than Poser can offer (animation controls, rendering speed) and Poser content doesn't play well in other apps (yeah, yeah I own a Vue license; I don't understand the Cinema4D interface, though it appears to be the best way to host Poser content). So for those that have evolved beyond Poser hoping that one day it will be as stable and powerful as other apps, Quidam is a great way to import humanoids without having to model them. To each his own, I suppose.

It would be great and a real reason for upgrade if Poser Pro's Firefly would handle Subdivision. The inclusion of the low poly Quidam figures seem to hint in that direction - as a REYES renderer FireFly/Tempest should be able to do this - but at the moment we cannot use that feature.

Not that Studio is that much better when it comes to subdivision. 3Delight certainly can handle subdivision, but DAZ studio seems to have no way to use that.

It's a bit strange. The main advantage of REYES renderers it the ability to handle high-order surfaces like subdivision and NURBS. Poser seems to use it for dynamic hair, but there is no way to use it for other models, as far as I know.

I was under the impression that when smoothing is enabled in the renderer and the model, it is, in effect, subdivision. I’ve never actually attempted smoothing on a low poly model in Poser, but people on this board have asserted that this feature is like a subpatch.

@bantha - I agree, that would be a compelling reason to upgrade. How fast is 3Delight in D|S?

 Poser's smoothing - I think - is not as aggressive as it should be. This past weekend I was experiment with procedural materials on primitives. I used the lo-res sphere and there were facets on its profile with smoothing enabled. I think it could've rendered smoother if I knew how to connect "derivative rate of change" nodes to surface normals.

 Ooh, also wanted to respond to the hyperlink link listed at the top:

The raytracing is not meant to compete with Firefly. I don' t believe that N-Sided thought that their renderer could compete with more powerful renders, more like to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I love the "powerful-toy-interface" comment. It hits the nail on the head.

Quidam is more like a character factory than a more complete solution. It has no animation capabilities, so I believe it's meant for primarily exporting characters.

The plug-ins are $100 USD. The plug-ins allow you to export the mesh, textures, UVs, bones and weighting into the Max / Maya / C4D, etc. in Quidam File Format. I use Studio without the plugs, so I use Low Poly export but must (and prefer to) manually export mesh, textures and UVs. I handle bones, rigging and weighting in the host program. 

Posers smoothing is far from true subdivision.  It just smoothes sharp edges, while true subdivison smoothes the whole model. Work a while with Wings,Hexagon or Silo and see the difference.

I haven't done a real comparison up to now, I mainly use Poser. But the few renders I did with D|S were faster than I expected, so I would say it's significant faster. But since I like IBL with AO in Firefly, I will have to wait for D|S 2.0, hoping they support more of 3Delights features.

 As a heads up, here's the link to a very rough draft of a Quidam character remapped to accept Mil3 textures.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2728077&page=1#message_3180917

Let's look forward to quidam 7 . looking back to Poser 2 and comparing with quidam 2,  I think quidam is the winner.It has a better rigging system.I won't buy Q2 now but I will watch it how it will develope.Someday I will surely buy it.