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. 

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...