Quote - Hello RenderDog,

I'm a professional programmer and user of Poser, Carrara, Vue, and others. Personally I don't like working on the GUI part (too much effort) of any application but do consider participating in any Open Source project involving a replacement of Poser. Poser is outdated and would need to be reworked to get it ton an acceptable standard, something I don't see happening. DAZ Studio would have been great if they had opened it up more the available API is just too limited (an API should allow you to change the GUI in whatever you desire).
Currently looking into Blender3D as a possible environment but hating to have to use keyboard shortcuts (I work with too many applications to ever remember the shortcuts, have a hard enough time remembering the VI shortcuts). Initially I did consider if attaching to Blender made sense but I don't feel the GUI improvements are likely to be enough to convince me to use it.
When you have a proposal for the GUI and a bit of design for the development environment and interfaces I would like to consider if I feel like participating. Too many conflicting interests at the moment to commit to the project at this moment. When you have convinced me you are serious and it is developing in a way I believe is viable, I would be willing to invest time to study the requirements and actually code some part of it.
I have seen many great pieces of 3D programming both in demos and in actual code. A lot is possible nowadays and I would like to participate when I can believe there will be a result in a foreseeable future.

Hope you get going soon and hope to see something in writing.

Not to worry about the GUI part, I was already planning on tackling that myself.  Daz Studio I think is a nice enough idea, but I had some pretty good reasons for opting to code something from the ground up as opposed to doing something like plugins for DS.

First and foremost of course would be both to have an app that would run natively in Linux and second of course to have an app that is truly open source, and as such could benefit from a steady stream of "new blood" and "new ideas" as the project progresses.

Also the notion of paying a hefty sum for an SDK for DS, writing plugins for them and being more or less hamstrung into there UI just didn't appeal to me much, particularly since I dislike there UI on the whole.

So I thought a new open source project was probably the best bet all the way around.  I agree with you about blender, plus blender from what I've seen seems to concentrate more on being a "3ds Max" like application.  My goals for this project aren't so much aimed at the professional graphics artist and animator as they are at folks like myself, the hobbiest.  I want something that is simple to use and takes care of a lot of the heavy lifiting for me.  I want to be free to pose, create and render, and not spend nearly as much time tweaking, morphing and rigging.

Don't get me wrong, I think it will probably develop a following of professional graphic artists as well, but truly the design concept here is an app that is powerful and fully featured but easy to use even for people who don't have a ton of graphics experience. 

So my design philosphy is quite a bit different than Blender, again one of the reasons I decided to code from the ground up rather than make plugins for a pre existing applicaiton.  As to written proposal, I've already started one, more or less a guideline on project development, goals for various development stages - basicly features that i'd like to include and which stage of the project I'm planning on beginning implemenation for each, that sort ot thing.

It will also include coding guidelines and concerns, libraries that I'm planning to include in various project stages, etc.  It will be about half proposal and half notes that I myself can refer back to to make sure that things are progressing as planned.

I'm hoping to have it finished shortly, when I do I'll upload it to sourceforge and provide a link that you, or anyone else who might be interested in joining the project, can peruse so you can get  a better idea as to what the overall development plan is.

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