Boy howdy, but I'm tiptoeing into a minefield but:

I just bought a copy of Vue d'Esprit (at $100, seemed like a good thing to do - I like what it offers) and from what I've read on other posts, it's the way to get the images you want, in the setting you want, full-stop. Faster, too. I'm only now getting my head around Poser 7 with all its material room magic... and am excited about what Poser could offer in the future... BUT

Will it? Is the fact that Smith Micro bought it make it one of those droids that end up on Jaba the Hutt's cruiser, picked to pieces, destined for oblivion? To the point, is Poser 8 being developed? Or is this the end of the line, and hey, Vue d'Esprit is a good tactic? (One can still pose in P7, import into Vue and....)

I doubt Poser will be allowed to die out. With the enormous user-base Poser has, there's too much money to be made by further development.

A lot of people combine Poser with bryce, Vue and even high end apps like 3dsMax and Lightwave.

Poser's biggest advantage is the vast amount of content available for it. It has an edge to other 3d software for poser figures can be reused over and over again, sold and reinvented. Poser figures are user friendly and available to the common joe  that anyone can create his/her own movies or artworks. 3d before is an elitist craft where one should shelve thousands of dollars just to get the software and the school course to learn it. Now anyone with a few a hundred bucks can get the software and a small budget can get himself a neat poser content. Vue and the rest of the 3d softwares don't compete with Poser but works hand and hand and enhances it.
Just imagine the time you save using ready made poser content than to redo the whole rigging and modeling.

Only SM could provide an answer and then only if they actually have an answer.
Right now there is no real competition but things are changing fast. Personally I think SM has about 18 months to produce the next version of Poser and they better include a lot of new features (like a completely 64 bit version, a better renderer [or better yet a option to use some of the available renderers], better rigging, a clothing designer, etc.). A lot of other programs are getting nearer to the Poser niche and some already have better features in some areas. If Poser does cease to exist I am sure there will be competition for the niche soon. Currently Carrara has most of the features but lacks ease of posing. Blender shows promise and would only need a few extensions (I'm sure these will come but nobody knows when). Daz Studio could develop in the right direction but personally I think they got themselves into problems by building everything in small blocks, they probably need to rewrite a major part of it. Vue is very good at landscapes but relies on the Poser interface to handle the characters, I don't expect Vue to develop the needed features themselves but they could attach to other programs to include the landscape.
Personally I don't expect the existing "professional" packages to enter the low-end market but one of them might to make some money if the going gets rough.

In all it looks like we have to wait for 2 years and see what happens. The takeover by SM doesn't have to be a problem but it could spell the end (they do look a bit like Corel and we know how they treat things they bought). I don't really expect any news from anyone for the next year, most packages aren't due for a major new release until early next year at the earliest.

Personally, I think "poser" will exist even if there are no further updates to the program.  First, because of the wealth of pre-made content and second, due to the the compatibility of the content in programs such as Carrara, Vue, Bryce, DAZ Studio etc.  Essentially, poserdom and poser usage has become more about content than the programs - the programs are just tools.  I do think for SM to really succeed, they are going to have to think about the entire poser package, including content, and really assert themselves as the leaders of the poser universe in terms of quality and versatility and not just as distributors of software with default figures.

I agree with all I really do not feel that Poser will die out there are too many users and too much at stake for poser to fate away.

I disagree. I think , unless Daz shoot themselves in the foot too often , Poser as such will price itself out of the hobby market .

When I started with Poser it was Poser 5 at $179 or Daz Studio free. At that time Daz Studio just didnt run well enough to consider , so I bought Poser 5. Today I would have taken Daz Studio and spent some money on content .

Poser content is sorting itself into two camps already. Some vendors supporting both . Originally it seemed the difference was textures . Now some of the stuff has two different obj files , each optimised for either Poser or Studio.   The subd stuff is going to make it worse.

If Daz release a decent cloth simulator and rigging toolset Poser wont be needed .

Just my thoughts ....

Quote - I disagree. I think , unless Daz shoot themselves in the foot too often , Poser as such will price itself out of the hobby market .

When I started with Poser it was Poser 5 at $179 or Daz Studio free. At that time Daz Studio just didnt run well enough to consider , so I bought Poser 5. Today I would have taken Daz Studio and spent some money on content .

Poser content is sorting itself into two camps already. Some vendors supporting both . Originally it seemed the difference was textures . Now some of the stuff has two different obj files , each optimised for either Poser or Studio.   The subd stuff is going to make it worse.

If Daz release a decent cloth simulator and rigging toolset Poser wont be needed .

Just my thoughts ....

You know you do have a point there it would be very easy for Daz to do this. But I also had the understanding that if you bought all the plugins for studio it was more than a copy of poser? I could be wrong as I haven't really priced all the bells and whistles of D/S.

Good point about it being more about content than tools, PapaBlue. I've been moving content around from app to app, creating in Blender3D, posing and boning in Poser, editing functionality in Notepad++ and texturing in Kerkythea, with the idea of importing the final product (the main players) into Vue to give it depth by creating a real-world scene for rendering, although Kerkythea is a brilliant renderer in its own right.

I see a lot of people using Poser 5 still - it does what they want and the price (recently) was good: wasn't there a free download of that program somewhere? Sorry I missed it - be a good adjunct to Daz Studio because of the toolset.

Quote - I disagree. I think , unless Daz shoot themselves in the foot too often , Poser as such will price itself out of the hobby market .

When I started with Poser it was Poser 5 at $179 or Daz Studio free. At that time Daz Studio just didnt run well enough to consider , so I bought Poser 5. Today I would have taken Daz Studio and spent some money on content .

Poser content is sorting itself into two camps already. Some vendors supporting both . Originally it seemed the difference was textures . Now some of the stuff has two different obj files , each optimised for either Poser or Studio.   The subd stuff is going to make it worse.

If Daz release a decent cloth simulator and rigging toolset Poser wont be needed .

Just my thoughts ....

The problems that I see w/DAZ Studio are as follows:

1.  3rd Party products are required to do very much w/DAZ.  And after you purchase them all, you have spent more than a copy of Poser 7 & still have less functionality.

2.  In the past a new version of DAZ would break 3rd party products & then everyone gets to wait for those products to be fixed.  God forbid if the maker of a 3rd party product decides to do something else or gets hit by a bus.

3.  Just because something is supported by DAZ today, does not mean that it will be supported tomorrow.

DAZ knows better than you what you want.

I think Poser will probably hang around for a while simply because it does have so much content available, and because a lot of people already own a copy of 5, 6 or 7.  However I don't see a lot of folks paying to upgrade giving SM's new upgrade pricing structure, and I see even fewer actually paying the full $500 sticker price for a non-upgrade version.

So SM will eventually be forced to either get realistic in it's pricing structure and abandon this foolish quest to try and pretend Poser is something it isn't, a pro level app, or they will abandon development of Poser entirely once they realize that the market they thought was there just isn't.

Sure, Poser itself will continue for a while, even without upgrades or updates, but eventually even with such a strong aftermarket content market it will begin to decline as newer programs come out with better features that allow you to read poser content natively.

Once somebody comes out with a half way decent program that will read poser files and render them halfway decently without charging an arm and a leg for it Poser is going to be in serious, major league trouble.  It's become a case where the content supports the program, not the other way around.

So either Smith Micro will sell Poser to another company that doesn't have there heads crammed into a lightless orafice I probably shouldn't mention, or they'll simply abandon it at some point, or they might actually peek there heads out of that lightless orafice enough to realize they pulled the bonehead play of all bonehead plays, line there marketing department up against the wall and have them all shot and then hire some new marketing guys who aren't totally clueless as to how the 3d market actually works.

But I'd say it is probably most likely that SM's sales of Poser will decline rapidly, new upgrade versions will not fly off the shelves they way they expected, their will be serious and costly delays on the development of Poser 8 which will further complicate matters, and when they do release 8 it will be little more than what Poser Pro is, a minor upgrade from the previous version with most of the "new features" fairly unattractive to your average user and none of the old bugs or problems will have been addressed, yet again.

They'll want an arm and a leg for the upgraded version, probably even more than they do now, because they will have killed most of there of their other market share by then, and it will go over like a lead balloon, causing them to more or less abandon  Poser development all together.

In the meantime some smart programmer out there will build an inexpensive or even open source method of reading CR2 files into other 3d graphics apps and Poser itself willb e doomed, considering that even most open source rendering engines stomp firefly into the dirt for both speed and quality of render.

Nope, just a matter of time really, once people can start using there Poser content in another program with a nice usable interface that is simple to use Poser will slowly die.  Daz studio is making some inroads here, but it lacks some of the basic functionality it needs for a true takeover o the hobbiest market, and I doubt Daz will fix this anytime soon - they seem to have set a specific course for studio that doesn't include such features.

Guess will just have to wait and see, but personally that's my prediction.

DS is friggin costly. I saw 3 plugsins that cost about $25 each for lighting and that was not all of the needed lighting plugins, let alone all the other need plugins for DS to do things. The free base reasoning is very misleading. But, people think it's cheep because they buy single plugins as they come out. Poser is cheeper now.

I don't think Poser will die very quickly but I do think it is gasping for breath. SM needs to understand what they have and do something or else.

This is another reason I'm glad I got the P7Pro version. It runs better and gives me a stable poser incase it is the last one. Now if we could get an SR for it and another one for P7 before it dies.

All good things must come to an end and the same with the wild wood weed, err poser I mean.

So either Smith Micro will sell Poser to another company that doesn't have there heads crammed into a lightless orafice I probably shouldn't mention, or they'll simply abandon it at some point, or they might actually peek there heads out of that lightless orafice enough to realize they pulled the bonehead play of all bonehead plays, line there marketing department up against the wall and have them all shot and then hire some new marketing guys who aren't totally clueless as to how the 3d market actually works. I don't think Poser Pro and its half-baked attempt to break into the professional market was Smith Micro's brainchild. It originated with e-frontier and was in the pipeline when Smith Micro purchased the software.

IMO a big part of the reason poser is headed for an early-ish grave is precisely because it's so cheap. The poser userbase is so spoiled by the artificially low prices in the market, that they simply wont pay for the R&D and tech upgrades that poser requries. It would be different if poser was a mass market product and volume sales could make up for this, but poser is a niche in an already small CG market. So if poser does die, blame the people who cut off it's blood supply, namely 'us'.

As for D|S, i would point out that D|S loses to Poser in quantity, not quality. Every feature of D|S is at least as good and frequently better then the coss. feature of poser. Yes it costs more, but for it's pricing is quite justified in most cases. It does no good to save money on a cheap ass app, only to be saddled with crappy tools from the last decade that waste your time and require excessive workarounds for the simplest things. Eventually D|S will get to a point where it will be a true rival for highend apps, and then it's price will seem very small compared to what a typical high end app costs.

"Yes it costs more, but for it's pricing is quite justified in most cases."

I disagree, for the price it costs now for someone to start in DS and get all the plugins, they would be better off putting that money into a higer end app.

I do agree that we have been spoiled price wise for a long time and this does cost poser in the long run. You could also argue that we are justifiable in thinking that  there has not been enough advancement in Poser versions to pay more.

The Poser Community absolutely frickin' rocks and that's what most other 3d communities just don't get.

I render a scene in Poser and it's a community event - scenes created by dozens of artists in one render.

We are truly one of a kind.

Wow. Lots of opinions. And hard to disagree with any of 'em.

As long as people spend wads of money on Poser no matter how pricey, it will never die but neither are they making the program any better with all the money they make off it. It amazes me the amount of greed each time this software has changed hands, it's like, once they make their millions, they dump it and move on.

Poser is so clunky and out dated I don't see how it can last much longer and compete. Shame that they never upgraded the interface only adding and few bells and whistles and a name change. I will never upgrade from P5 no matter who owns or what they add to it.

D|S is putting Poser to shame with it's shiney code and for free. You don't need plugins for rendering and it animates better than Poser. Im starting to like it.

Not sure why people think plugins are needed to make render in D|S. I find that laughable. Many plugins have already been added with the new release.

And that's just a fraction of what Poser 7/PRO can do....

So until you can show me another program that can do stuff like that as easily (and for the same/lower price), I might say that any reports about Poser's early demise might be slightly exaggerated.

Quote - And that's just a fraction of what Poser 7/PRO can do....

So until you can show me another program that can do stuff like that as easily (and for the same/lower price), I might say that any reports about Poser's early demise might be slightly exaggerated.

/this

That about sums it up in a nutshell.  But, the biggest thing about Poser is that it is easy to use for what it offers.  It may not be terribly easy to master, but you can get mid to high results popping out of it with a relatively shallow learning curve. 

The #1 Rule is: If it is easy to use, the user will use it.

Poser is easy to use thus, people who buy it will actually be able to use it right out of the box.  IF they can get good results (what they think is "good" and pleases them) then they will be "happy" about it.  They'll see that there is a boatload of content out there and having a whole slew of human figures and animals without anything to wear, eat, sleep on, ride, sit in, fly, beat on, beat with, shoot, catch, etc.. would make their "good looking" renders really boring.  So, they'll buy the content.

Poser will live on.  I think there is a price ceiling there though.  "New" hobbyists may balk at a $300.00 price tab for something they're just thinking about getting into.  However, guess what?  There's a big freebie out there called Daz Studio that uses much of the same content! WOW! WHAT A COINCIDENCE!  :)  DAZ  Studio is a "precursor program."  Much like "precursor narcotics" DAZ Studio primes the way for future purchase of Poser and other 3D applications by the simple hobbyist.  The hobbyist will see something another program can do that DS can't and say "I just HAVE to have that funcionality!"  $$ money in the bank.
Poser is easy to use with a good interface (relatively so compared to beefier applications) is very customizable and can, with a little bit of practice, give the customer what they want.  I think that's a pretty good combination.  With Poser sharing file formats and import/export capabilities with some of the biggest names in mid-level 3d development, it'll be around awhile.

Quote - Photorealistic shoulders created in Poser 7 for SP3 using the MorphBrush. No Postwork.

Nice.  However, the Morphbrush in my Poser is evil.  You must have gotten the "good" one.  Mine stares at me, daring me to take it out of its cage and murder figures to death with it.  Pure evil man, pure evil...

(I can't stand the thing.  It's good for poke-throughs and such but I can't do much else with it that ends up satisfactory.  I'd rather spend an hour import/exporting to a 3D app than letting the Morphbrush go on another rampage on some poor character's face again.) :)

Guess I opened a can of worms with that question, hey?

I'm not familiar with D|S since it's been revamped - I had it when it was version .95 or something. There were no plugins. I then got Poser 6... which was a ready source of frustration because of its instability and slow behaviour, then moved to 7 when the price was right - same reason I got Vue d'Esprit. The price was right.

Now, reading the forums, I hear a lot of whingeing on the part of Poser users wanting to import figures into Vue.

Point being: no such thing as a perfect app. I've tried Cararra - abysmally slow and clunky and buggy - crashed more than it flew. Hey, that's just MY experience - I'm sure there are artists who use Cararra to great effect.

My point in bringing up this question was this: I had heard rumours - and I know I shouldn't be spreading them BUT - that Smith Micro does not develop software: they buy end-of-line stuff and flog it until there's nothing left to flog. Please refute this if you do know of development being undertaken for the next version of Poser.

Even IF this is the last version, I'll keep using it. There is a lot one can do with Poser 5-6-7 (maybe even earlier versions too) - haven't even scratched the surface of its capabilities. Tutorials and discussions and forums continue to breathe life into this awesome tool. I do not believe that unless development continues on a product, that product is no longer valid or dead.

 I doubt that will happen.  if if does, I feel the market for figure creators will be hurt badly, because I personally became aware of all of these other sites, like renderosity and DAZ only AFTER I purchased poser.  Yes DAZ studio is free but new folks that might want to use it, don't know its there to get it for free, until after they've purchased Poser.  
Dan

"Nice.  However, the Morphbrush in my Poser is evil.  You must have gotten the "good" one.  Mine stares at me, daring me to take it out of its cage and murder figures to death with it.  Pure evil man, pure evil..."

The #1 secret is playing with it's magnitude.
The default strenght (magnitude) of 0.2000 is way too high and only good for smoothing.
For everything else, sculpting and morphing, you need to use A LOT lower magnitude, like 0.0100 to 0,0050

You also need to learn when to switch between "surface" and "screen" to get the morphbrush to do what you want.

There IS a learning curve, but It's definitely not as steep as learning other brush-sculpting tools like Z-Brush.
IMO, learning to use the MorphBrush tool to permanently fix a joint isn't harder than learning to use the paintbrush in Photoshop to do postwork.
And unlike postwork, once you "fixed" a joint, you never have to do it again.

Oh Poser's Doomed I tell you Doomed! The World Will End in 30 days! Please deposit another Twenty Five Cents.

Quote - And that's just a fraction of what Poser 7/PRO can do....

So until you can show me another program that can do stuff like that as easily (and for the same/lower price), I might say that any reports about Poser's early demise might be slightly exaggerated.

It's just a matter of time.  Check out some of the freeware render engines that are available for Blender, they completely blow firefly off the map in both speed an quality of output.

At the moment Blender is the leader in the open source community as far as 3d software, but its interface could best be described as cryptic.  However this does not mean that at some point someone won't come along and using blender and several other open source projects as a code base develop something that has a decent, easy to use interface.

When they do Poser is in a great deal of trouble.  Once you can start using Poser content inside a good, stable 3d program with a decent price tag associated with it then Poser the program will eventually fade away.

The Poser community, of course, will still remain - but they will slowly but surely switch to other software. 

I don't think it's an issue of Poser, any upgrades, or its content suddenly becoming unmarketable.  It's more the point of whether the program will be surpassed in ease of use, innovation, development, and content by another program - and at this point that's more likely.

Things to look out for in the future with the various programs include compatibility with subdivision, conforming/adjusting/transferring morphs/scaling (ADS/morphoforms) from figures to clothing/props, optitex (which D|S is working on), node-based shaders (which poser has - Carrara and D|S do not), body-weighting, etc.

Quote - I don't think it's an issue of Poser, any upgrades, or its content suddenly becoming unmarketable.  It's more the point of whether the program will be surpassed in ease of use, innovation, development, and content by another program - and at this point that's more likely.

Things to look out for in the future with the various programs include compatibility with subdivision, conforming/adjusting/transferring morphs/scaling (ADS/morphoforms) from figures to clothing/props, optitex (which D|S is working on), node-based shaders (which poser has - Carrara and D|S do not), body-weighting, etc.

I agree, and with the advancements recently in many open source packages I think it's only a matter of time before somebody out there gets fed up enough with Poser to code there own package.  Truth be told I'm leaning that direction myself.

Don't get me wrong, I like Poser and I think its a great program overall, but there are a lot of features I'd like to see changed or added and it just doesn't look like the development for Poser is headed in that direction at all.  In point of fact I believe that the develoment of Poser will probably come to a halt relatively soon, once Smith Micro begins to realize that the Pro market just isn't falling all over themselves to pay that kind of coin for what is still a hobbiest application.

So unless another company purchases Poser from Smith Micro, I think we'll probably see at best one or two additional "upgrades", both minor, and both more designed more to integrate Poser with other higher end apps as opposed to truly updating Poser's own capabilities particularly in the rendering arena.  The other alternative I see possibly happening is that Smith Micro purchases a higher end app like Vue, Carrara, Bryce or something in that range and tries to integrate Poser with it, selling the two apps as a package and given their recent nonsensical price increase probably jacking the prices of the "integrated" package to something in the $1000 range.

I know a lot of people consider this "sky is falling" rhetoric, but the plain and simple truth is Poser simply cannot compete in the $500 per license market, it just doesn't have the horsepower.  So either SM wakes up (unlikely), or more than likely they simply abandon Poser and consider it a tax write off.

If and when they do get around to selling it to another developer, the next developer is really going to be up against a wall from the get go, working with code that is for the most part fairly outdated by most of the competition and competing with what are likely to be other alternatives like DS that will have advanced in technology while Poser has remained more or less stagnant.

Either way I doubt it will be long now before somebody, perhaps myself, perhaps someone else, comes up with an open source alternative that will read and manipulate Poser content and give at least some of the features you mentioned above with an interface that isn't quite as hostile as Blender is now.

Yawn.
Sorry, but unless someone can show me an alternative that let's me "pose" realistic (as in PHOTO-realistic) 3d humans, I see no reason for any "doom & gloom" at all.

D|S is a complete non-issue regardless what new gimmicks they might introduce as long as their rigging is still on Poser 4 level.

Give me 3d humans that look and bend like real humans. (Like Poser 7 and PRO can)
Give me an easy way to create my own morphs. (Like Poser magnets and the MorphBrush can)
Give me a way to modify/do my own rigging. (Like the Poser SetUp room can)
Give me an "open" format I can experiment with. (Like Posers cr2 which I can edit with notepad)
Give me years of 3rd party support. (Like all the helper apps and python scripts folks made for Poser)

Give me ALL THAT and MORE and make it BETTER, CHEAPER, FASTER and MORE CONVENIENT to use than Poser, so that I have a reason to dump eight years of learning/using/experimenting with Poser and spending more of my valuable time learning a new program from the ground up, and then I MIGHT give this issue more than a passing glance.

Poser is far from perfect, and I welcome any attempt to improve it, but as the saying goes:

Those who can, do.
Those who can't, talk trash on the internet.

Quote - Yawn.
Sorry, but unless someone can show me an alternative that let's me "pose" realistic (as in PHOTO-realistic) 3d humans, I see no reason for any "doom & gloom" at all.

D|S is a complete non-issue regardless what new gimmicks they might introduce as long as their rigging is still on Poser 4 level.

Give me 3d humans that look and bend like real humans. (Like Poser 7 and PRO can)
Give me an easy way to create my own morphs. (Like Poser magnets and the MorphBrush can)
Give me a way to modify/do my own rigging. (Like the Poser SetUp room can)
Give me an "open" format I can experiment with. (Like Posers cr2 which I can edit with notepad)
Give me years of 3rd party support. (Like all the helper apps and python scripts folks made for Poser)

Give me ALL THAT and MORE and make it BETTER, CHEAPER, FASTER and MORE CONVENIENT to use than Poser, so that I have a reason to dump eight years of learning/using/experimenting with Poser and spending more of my valuable time learning a new program from the ground up, and then I MIGHT give this issue more than a passing glance.

Poser is far from perfect, and I welcome any attempt to improve it, but as the saying goes:

Those who can, do.
Those who can't, talk trash on the internet.

Well, you've made some pretty big assumptions assuming that I cannot "do" preciesly that.  I won't bother giving you my bonafide's, it's doubtful you'd believe them anyway, but suffice to say that as a programming project is concerned, Poser's internal mechanics are really not that difficult to duplicate or improve upon given the current level of api's available. 

Plenty of programs offer human posable figures as realistic if not moreso than Poser, in higher end packages.  Current open source API's available for even Java and C++ would make it possible, with a bit of coding, to duplicate all of Posers morphing technology and then some using open source libraries like opengl.

As to "open format", personally I think Poser's CR2 format is far to cryptic, in fact a lot of "features" in the CR2 file remain undocumented to this day.  if it were me I'd probably use something more along the lines XML format, so that editing and reading would be a snap and you'd have a wide variety of options available to you as far as readers and editors were concerned.

As to third party support, it wouldn't be difficult at all to build most of the functionality of what's currently available for Poser as far as scripts are concerned into the program itself.  These scripts exist because Poser either lacks features or the interface for said features is difficult or time consuming to use.  As a result 3rd party programmers had to add in functionality using the embedded python to make up for these difficult to use areas.  Also embedding python into a C++ application isn't particularly difficult, so you could make python scripting available for the new program as well.  Rigging is one area in which Poser in particular needs a great deal of help, the current rigging interface is clunky at best.

Most of the 3rd party support for Poser is in the actual figures/props/etc that people have created for it over the years, but again if you can teach your program how to read poser file formats you could easily integrate all of this great content and make it available for your program as well.

But of course the whole point of this is that Poser has survived because it had a niche in the market place, a niche that it's current developers have more or less abandoned.  You might notice that I mentioned more than once that I use and like Poser myself, but it's current state of development is not my primary area of concern.

It is future development that has me worried - in as much as I don't see much future in Smith Micro continuing to develop Poser and trying to market it at such outlandish prices.  That's not "doom and gloom", that is common sense.  I'm not a graphics Pro, and if I'm going to have to pay "pro" prices then why would I ever bother to upgrade from the version 7 I have now? 

It would make more sense for me to skip future Poser upgrades and purchase a much higher end program that can actually render well instead of continuing to dump huge amounts of money into Smith Micro's pocket for minor bug fixes and features that do me no earthly good.  If
I don't own 3ds max or Maya (and I don't) then all the integration in the world isn't worth squat to me.  I think most other hobbiests would agree.  But Smith Micro really doesn't care about our business anymore, they are after graphics pros now - a market that by and large looks at Poser with scorn, considering it a hobbiest app.  It's just bad marketing no matter how you slice it.

So you can ignore the facts, if you wish, but the truth is that if SM continues down it's current path, Poser development will eventually cease entirely.  Either way they've opened the door for other apps to take over the market they have abandoned.  That's nothing against the Poser application mind you, just a realistic analysis of the current situation regarding it's development.  I'm not knocking Poser or saying it's a bad app, I'm just saying that there are areas of Poser that need additional development badly and those are areas that have been ignored since version 6. 

So please, feel free to remove yourself from the cross, I'm sure somebody needs the wood. 

See, I'm not a Poser fanboi.
I really couldn't care less who owns Poser or what happens with it.
And until Poser 7 which introduced the morphbrush I was one of Posers biggest critics.

If you really can "do" an alternative to Poser, then please by all means "do" it.
(But excuse me if I don't hold my breath while you're doing so but rather play with Poser) :rolleyes:
Even if it's just an app that can just "pose" a Poser figure (= correctly read a Poser cr2), but is linked to a professional render engine.
(FireFly is cr*p)

But I think you really don't understand the market SmithMicro is aiming for with "PoserPro"
It's the "prosumers" and the "professionals".

And both groups don't care about money that much.

The "prosumer" buys everything as long as it gives him the warm fuzzy feeling of owning the latest greatest.
And for the "professional" time is money, so if "PoserPro" saves him a few minutes per task over Poser 7, he couldn't care less if it costs $500 or $5000.

PoserPro is not meant to replace professional modeling suits but just to give easier access to the slew of Poser content out there.
So you really can't compare it with "Pro" apps despite it's name..
It's meant for people who already have all those programs and who usually don't have to look at the price.

I doubt PoserPro will be a big money maker but I also doubt that SmithMicro ever believed the contrary.

Out of curiousity, how is DS UI better if you don't like using it? You want a real UI, check out Modo. Don't bother with the different app arguement because the same can be said with comparing DS, a new software, to poser, the original.

Does anyone remember how fast P4 was, even on our old slow machines, before all the new features of P5? Same could be said for DS before you add those poser features. But don't get me wrong, I don't hate DS, even if it may sound like that at times. DS has it's place and is doing what it was designed to do. Keep Daz in buisness.

I don't think someones going to design a new app in a short time that will take Posers place. DAZ has been working on this for a few years now and still not there. But who knows what will be in a few more years. Maybe Daz code will be outdated too.

Software changes as do the machines we use. What we think is gods gift to CG today can be crap tomorrow. Some sofware dies fast, some linger on for a few years and slowly get replaced. Poser has the power of the user base so it will take some time to die, if it does. SM has the final say as to Posers future.
 

Quote - Out of curiousity, how is DS UI better if you don't like using it? You want a real UI, check out Modo. Don't bother with the different app arguement because the same can be said with comparing DS, a new software, to poser, the original.

Does anyone remember how fast P4 was, even on our old slow machines, before all the new features of P5? Same could be said for DS before you add those poser features. But don't get me wrong, I don't hate DS, even if it may sound like that at times. DS has it's place and is doing what it was designed to do. Keep Daz in buisness.

I don't think someones going to design a new app in a short time that will take Posers place. DAZ has been working on this for a few years now and still not there. But who knows what will be in a few more years. Maybe Daz code will be outdated too.

Software changes as do the machines we use. What we think is gods gift to CG today can be crap tomorrow. Some sofware dies fast, some linger on for a few years and slowly get replaced. Poser has the power of the user base so it will take some time to die, if it does. SM has the final say as to Posers future.
 

The thing that amazes me about the newer versions of Poser, 5-7, is the tremendous amount of memory they consume just in the loading process.  I'm not entirely certain what all they are loading into memory, but all of the newer versions of Poser are serious resource hogs.  The UI itself consumes an unreasonable amount of resources, and thats long before you start loading any sort of a scene or doing anything within the program itself.

As it is I think it might be feasible to get a fairly decent replacement for Poser going in less than a year, provided it was open source and you could get some other programmers interested in the project.  Their are numerous API's for opengl available and a lot of what you would need has already been done to a certain extent, providing a ton of roadmaps for various features.

I'm still seriously considering this myself, I'm working currently on a project that allows you to use alternative, open source render engines with Poser as well as give me some functionality that the Poser library desperately needs but currently lacks.

I'm seriously considering starting with this as a base and working it eventually into a full blown app, granted it will take time (good code always does) but I think in the long run it might be worth it.

There are even open source projects on cloth simulation out there, so even many of Poser's more advanced features could be worked in I think fairly quickly.  It took Poser a lot longer to get where they are because they didn't have a roadmap, they were working from scratch.  An open source project such as I described wouldn't be, a lot of the code has already been written, a lot of it would just be bringing it all together under a functional, usable UI.

Personally I'd love to see Poser continue to develop, it's a program I've used for quite some time now and really enjoy, sadly though having been on more than my share of development teams I just don't see that happening.  This has pretty much all the earmarks of a project soon to be abandoned or orphaned.

What little development I see happening from here is going to be going in the wrong direction, rather than fixing some of Posers stability and memory management problems I see them worrying more about porting Poser scenes to other applications and getting tighter integration with packages that cost $1000 and up, a total misread of the market I'm afraid.

While someone else pointed out that there are some out there who don't care what this stuff costs, I think we can all agree that such a market is EXTREMELY limited, it won't be nearly enough in sales to support Poser and keep it in development indefinately.  Most of us do really care about how much were spending, and particularly for those of us in the hobbiest realm programs like Maya and 3ds Max are simply too expensive to be a justifiable expense.

Most of those pros that do use Maya and Max effectively in a professional environment are not going to give a care about V3, V4, M3 or any of the multitude of clothes/options they might have, because they get paid the big bucks to develop there own high end content. 

These are the guys and gals with monster stomping hardware that can run cloth simulators and animation sequences that would take my poor little computer hours to chew through in a matter of minutes.  They don't care about spending a few hours modeling a mesh and running it through a cloth simulator to get it perfect because that's what they get paid to do - and they have no licensing problems to worry about when there done.  The content is 100% there own, to do with whatever they please, no worries about varying licenses and sources.

So no, I just don't see Poser making serious inroads into the truly pro market, which leaves it only a single niche now that they've applied the nose-bleed pricing.  All they have left is the small end, ma and pop style shops who do a bit of 3d work.  Sure, they exist, but there not nearly enough of a market to keep Poser in development.

Like I said, I like Poser.  I use it pretty much daily and enjoy it tremendously.  I've done a lot of really fun and interesting things with it and I continue to learn more and expand my own creative potential even after having used the program for qutie some time.  The people in the Poser community are top notch and the content that is available for it is truly wonderful for those of us who don't have full time jobs where we are getting paid to create our own content.

However it makes no sense for me and a lot of others in my situation to pay $200 to upgrade to Pro, considering that most of us paid less than that for a full version of 5, 6 or 7 and that most of the pro upgrades weren't really aimed at us.  All of that integration stuff is useless to me, I can't afford to buy Maya or 3ds Max or even Cinema 4d and justify that expense on what for me is little more than a hobby.

The network rendering?  Ok, neat idea, but in testing it doesn't appear to be all that stable and I certainly don't have a lot of high end server type machines on my home network just waiting to be used as network rendering ports, so again not a huge boon for me or a lot of other home users.

Nope, this upgrade was aimed specifically at a market that I and a lot of other current Poser owners are simply not in, and most of the new features are not all that useful to us.  I'm certainly not plunking down $200 to "upgrade" a program I bought originally for $150 only to pick up gamma correction and a 64 bit render engine that still can't match most open source projects for quality or speed.  Just isn't worth it to me or a lot of other current Poser owners. 

So what of Poser 8?  Smith Micro has given us every indication that their future development will continue along these lines, targeting this imaginary market of professionals who have been desperately wanting to use Poser content in there work because that's what programs like 3ds max are really missing.

But the truth is that market really doesn't exist, and unless SM spends a boatload of money to convince most true 3d pro's that Poser is still little more than a hobbiest app, it's not likely to be created anytime in the near future.

Hey Connie, a chicken is eatin yer cat ....

*I'm seriously considering starting with this as a base and working it eventually into a full blown app, granted it will take time (good code always does) but I think in the long run it might be worth it.

Hey Renderdog2000

Need original figures for your app?  I'm not talkin' icky Vicky characters or hollow Apollo characters but original figures.

*The UI itself consumes an unreasonable amount of resources, and thats long before you start loading any sort of a scene or doing anything within the program itself.

*Yep Yep! Anther reason some of us 3D professionals and semi-professionals would love to see the UI redesigned. It's a memory hog and major space hog.

Gas going over $5 a gal will kill off poser quicker than SM.

Intel Q6600, 8GB ram, GeForce 8600, Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit

 If I had a nickel for every "Poser is doomed" thread.

Quote -  If I had a nickel for every "Poser is doomed" thread.

You'd have yourself a get rich quick scheme :lol:

Poser and DS weigh the same. Pros and cons balance out. Do not need those plugins for DS. DS does good, and awesome renders with out em. I am staying at Poser-6. 

Haven't heard that many owners of PP complain it was bug ridden so far. That could either mean it's pretty solid or not that many folks have bought it and know how use it to break yet. Hard to believe nobodies having problems with the high end plugins.

dogor,

About those high-end plugins: it's Reiss BodyStudio 2.7, unchanged. Which is infamous for its instability, lack of features, and overpricing.
Don't buy Pro for the Max/Maya/C4D plugins.
I bought Pro, but for other reasons: full 64 bit rendering, network rendering, and Collada.
The 64 bit render engine works as it should. I am now able to render scenes that were impossible under Poser 7.
The network rendering is less useful than I hoped: it is not possible to network render a still (like Vue can do, for example).
I haven't tested the Collada functionality yet. The P7 beta exporter works, but is extremely limited.

I started using DS at version 2.1 and it's starting to be a serious rival to poser (or at least Poser 6 the last version I have used).

I find their "material room" interface to be much more intuitive than posers, plus there are some very nice free shaders out there for it that make it very easy to produce photorealistc renders.

Aside from a few broken ERCs in a few figures and lack of dynamic hair and cloth DS is definitely becoming a contender.

*I started using DS at version 2.1 and it's starting to be a serious rival to poser (or at least Poser 6 the last version I have used).

I find their "material room" interface to be much more intuitive than posers, plus there are some very nice free shaders out there for it that make it very easy to produce photorealistc renders.

Aside from a few broken ERCs in a few figures and lack of dynamic hair and cloth DS is definitely becoming a contender.*

I agree, although......

Everytime DS fixes something, they tell us, and available for download. When Poser has fixes, they charge $200.00 and name it Poser (something). Only three updates (Maximum) per poser version (Sr1, Sr2, Sr3). The interface is still the same as Poser 5, Poser 6, Poser 7, now Poser-Pro.

Quote - *I'm seriously considering starting with this as a base and working it eventually into a full blown app, granted it will take time (good code always does) but I think in the long run it might be worth it.

Hey Renderdog2000

Need original figures for your app?  I'm not talkin' icky Vicky characters or hollow Apollo characters but original figures.

Lol

Well, my "app" is more in the notion stage really than anything else.  I'm making some rough guesses here on time table but I'd say it would probably be 6 months at the earliest before I could have something servicable enough to be considered an alpha release, thats assuming I can get some other coders interested in working on it as an open source project.  If not it might be a while longer in development if I have to do it solo.

At the moment my current project was a replacement for Posers internal library that also added a few other bells and whistles - such as an interface for some better rendering engines like sunflow or yafray, the whole project uses a small, lightweight python server that runs inside of Poser and gives an external C++ or Java program access to all of Posers internal methods. 

However after giving it some thought I'm seriously leaning towards doing an open source replacement for Poser.  Nothing against Poser mind you, I still think it's a great program, I just don't see them going the right way in development and honestly I don't see their development proceding much beyond the next two upgrade cycles.  I could be wrong of course, but I doubt it.  I've been on one too many development teams myself, and if you know what your looking for the signs can be pretty obvious. 

They have pretty much abandoned the hobbiest market, and I don't see them reversing that decision anytime soon.  They don't really have a niche in the pro market and aren't likely to carve out one that's big enough to survive on, so all that leaves them is upgrades from previous Poser users.

Since I and a lot of other previous Poser users won't be upgrading because the features they do offer aren't really all that useful to us, well, suffice to say they pretty much shot themselves in the foot.  I know I'll get the old "doom and gloom sky is falling" responses but it's the truth, even if people don't want to hear it.

So sure, I'd love to have some original figures for "my app" - Just be advised that its going to take a while to get it going so you'll need ot be patient.  This isn't going to happen overnight, a lot of components need to be coded and brought together properly in a decent UI.

And that believe it or not will be the toughest part, not the internal coding - most of that has already been mapped out by other open source projects.  Heck you can even get a couple of open source cloth simulators for goodness sake.

Nope, hardest part will be keeping the GUI as intuitive and easy to use as possible while allowing the app to be easily extensible, that's going to be the tough part.   That and figuring out all the eccentricities of both Poser and Daz Studio file formats so it can effectively use either, that way you have a world of premade content at your fingertips. 

*So sure, I'd love to have some original figures for "my app" - Just be advised that its going to take a while to get it going so you'll need ot be patient.  This isn't going to happen overnight, a lot of components need to be coded and brought together properly in a decent UI.

Excellent!  I'll hold back the mark 3 mesh for you.  Question,  do you want the figures separate or an adroginous one like makehuman?