Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Does Poser need to change or the figures need to change?

corleone1 opened this issue on Mar 25, 2008 · 285 posts


jonthecelt posted Tue, 25 March 2008 at 6:03 AM

Hmm... ok, I wasn' going to respond to this, but I think I will... several points here that caught my eye, and I'll try to take them one by one:

Quote - Every year or os now poser seems to change or get bought by some other company.
Poser as evolved somewhat but basically remains the same...

Since version 5 it has acquired more features, but to me some of those are completely worthless,

So because, to you they are worthless, there's no point in them being there? Other users get a great deal out of the various options available, and a number of the additions have been in response to user demand,

Quote - Get rid of some of those poser room. somehow i find most of the poser room useless...i only use the pose and material room.

Again, you only use those rooms... this doesn't mean that those are the only rooms people use. Speaking for myself, I often use the cloth and hair rooms. I know others (especially those who create content) use the setup room. The Face Room also has its uses. About the only room I would argue is loseable would be the content tab, since almost everyone has some ofrm of internet browser on their computer, and it's not so hard to manage this externally.

Quote - The other rooms are not worth my time because they are very limited in what they do and there is way to much tweaking involved in those rooms to get any proper results for my liking...

Hang on, you're saying two contradictory things here: are the rooms too limited in their abilities, or does it take to long to tweak the many different settings to get what you want? If it were limited, then there would be only a few variables, and the possible output would have litle variation. I think the problem with both hair and cloth rooms is that the different settings haven't been properly documented - the gravity setting in the hair room, for example, has no units by it, and there's no way of knowing without experimentation exactly how big an adjustment you should make to it. Far from being limited in their use, i think they suffer from being too open, without enough documentation to let us know how to use them effectively.

Quote - Imagine a new version of poser wherein you can add plugins from lightwave or 3dsmax or maya...

That's never going to happen, not because of Poser's limited infrastructure or the coding used within it, but simply because most plugins and so on are proprietary. You can't put max plugins into maya, or C4D plugins into Lightwave... so why should you expect to be able to put any of them into Poser?

Quote - Poser should be modular with plugins like 3ds max or lightwave, that way you buy just what you need and it does not become an overbloated app [...] The companies are trying to do that now  but with each new release the chnages are so minimal that i don't even think that it is worth the effort to invest in upgrading because the worlkflow speed is not really improved...

Minimal? Since Poser 5, we've had the introduction of the face room, cloth room, hair room, material room, python, ambient occlusion, animation layers, an inbuilt talk designer... and those are just the improvements I can think of off the top of my head. With plugins avaialble out there, written in python, you can now share one figure's wardrobe with another, create particle effects, render multipasses for greater control over the finished result, use rigid body dynamics solutions, create clothes within Poser... surely this is exactly what you were referring to when you asked for a 'modular' design to Poser?

Quote - If poser would speed my workflow i would gladly welcome any new versions...that is why 3ds max, lightwave and maya suceed, the base program is made to allow add-ons to speed up or ease work...

You're comparing apples with oranges here, and have done at several times through this post. Max, Maya, Lightwave are all modellers - a completely different genre of program to what Poser offers. It's like complaining that your calculator is ok at what it does, but you can't play Zelda on it, like you can on a Nintendo. Of course you can't - just because they're both computers doesn't mean they are designed to do the same things.

Quote - I think that is the reason why poser can eveolve so little at a time, the base programming that was used for poser is very limiting and hard to implement features that is why i am lamenting that poser should be rewritten from the ground up...

Do you keep track of other software releases, such as Max, Maya and so on? Whilst I don't use any of those (I prefer C4D, myself), I regularly get 3D World magazine, and read the reviews. Often, these packages have reviews stating that there isnt' enough forward motion between full-point releases, or that certain aspects of the program are beginning to look dated or broken. Once the core of a package is written, it's very, VERY rare that it gets rewritten from the ground up. In fact, I cant' think of any packages that have had such a restructuring (if anyone can help me out here, I'll gladly accept the point).

Apologies for the long-winded reply, and I hope I've not put anyone's nose out of joint... but I just felt the need to respond.

JonTheCelt