Quote - Just a remark:

As someone else already stated, Poser Pro was planned before SM aquired Poser. So all the talk about "don't know who the customers are" or "left their niche" should be targetet at EF IMHO. We ´know nothing about SM's plans for Posers development at this time.

Renderdog, good luck to you. I will look into the application when it is ready. The hard part could be implementing Posers rigging system, which isn't well documented to my knowledge. A better rigging system would be great, but that also would mean that no figure would be usable without reworking the rig. Same for the materials, same for the lights. The hard part, aside from choosing the right libraries and make them play together will be Poser compatibility.

Actually the rigging system isn't a huge hurdle really, I already have the source code for another rigging system that someone else has written so I've got a pretty good idea how to handle rigging.  I'll have to play with it a bit and make adjustments here and there but nothing too terribly complex.

I don't plan on "redoing" posers rigging system, rather I plan on extending it in certain places and on the whole giving it a much easier to use UI.  If you've ever seen Easy Pose it will give you some idea as to just how much functionality is missing from Posers internal rigging interface.  The actual rigging data won't change - it's how the program allows you to access that data that will.

So you won't have to re-rig anything, it will all work as it did before, but the rigging system in the new program will give you the ability to rig much easier than poser does, it's one of the primary focuses of the project.

Your right about Poser compatibility - that's going to be a big hurdle, the file formats are not all that well documented in many areas and that's going to be a lot of trial and error.  Same with Daz Studio, though I'll concentrate on Poser compatibility first and then see what I can do for DS files.

Most 3d rendering projects use the same basic technology though, you load an obj file, deform the mesh based on various parameters, and then display - so hopefully it won't be too bad.  I may not have things like binary morphs working in the alpha release but I'll do what I can to get it as close to 100% poser compatible as possible.  It's not much good to me if it can't use Poser content, since that's mostly what I've accumulated over the years.  So it should be able to use Poser content "out of the box", no "importing or converting" necessary.

As to the libraries, on someone elses suggestion I've looked through OGRE, that will satisfy a great deal of my requirements right there.  He also suggested ODE, which may not be as prevalent in the first release, but boy there is a ton of really great stuff in there which will greatly benefit later releases.  Most of the physics/gravity/force effects you can think of, all in one nice easy to use library.  Gotta love it.

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