Quote - In your proposal I am missing information about when you propose to tackle the dynamic features (hair and cloth) and the material nodes. I do assume you do not intent to handle this in the first stage but you will need to address these issues. Furthermore a lot of people would like to know if you would be able to handle collisions in a friendly way and things like fluid and soft body dynamics. These are areas where Poser is very weak.

The dynamic cloth simulation will be handled hopefully between the alpha and beta stages (apologies, thought that was mentioned somewhere in the proposal, have to go back and reread it and see if I can fix that)  Dynamic hair probably won't be addressed until some point after the beta stage, possibly not until after the first release depending on how well other areas of the project are going.

The collisions and dynamics portion is also somewhat up in the air at the moment, I'd like to include some powerful, easy to use features in this regard but this is one area of the project that will be something fairly new to me, so more reading and research will be required before I can truly give a complete answer on that question.  Its something that will be worked into the project, just can't tell you exactly when as I haven't yet had the opportunity to research it properly and make a determination as to just how difficult that will be to code.

Quote - I understand you don't intend to develop a fully fledged modeler and I do expect that such a modeler will probably be available quite soon in the project as a plug-in (several are available so it is likely that someone would integrate an existing one) but should provide a capability to create morphs and design clothing as soon as possible as these appear to be common wishes of all initial users.

I'd like to give it it's own modeler eventually, probably after the initial release, but to start with I'd like simple model applets that are pretty much focused on there own individual tasks.  If done properly it shouldn't be cause for much duplication of code, all of the modeling funcitons for both applets and eventually the main modeler can all be built on the same classes.

But the smaller,  more specialized modeling features I think would be of huge benefit to a lot of people.  A lot of folks want to be able to model clothes or make minor adjustments to them, or model characters and make minor adjustments to them, but no everyone really wants to go through the time consuming process of learning how to do all of this in a full blown modeler application.  In this way you can make such adjustments on the fly with easy to use, built in tools specifically designed for this purpose. 

Quote - Personally I would not spend effort in developing a renderer in the early stages but instead use a renderer already available. Any developed renderer should always be just another available renderer as you should strive to support as many available renderers as possible (including whatever material setup they require). It will be important to understand and correctly handle the materials (with all nodes) used in both Poser and DAZ Studio and to convert these to the materials as appropriate for the different renderers (this will likely be one of the major challenges). In the first stages only support for the most basic materials is required.

Well the rendering engine is the lowest priority item in the earliest stages of development to be sure, since there are already a lot of other rendering engines out there in the open source realm, but provided there is time I would like to focus at least some of the initial development in this area so that hopefully even for the alpha release there will be a basic rendering capability available internally without the need for downloading and installing additional packages to make the program truly functional.

Quote - Animation is a nice to have but most people using Poser have no need for animations as they mostly produce stills only. Currently within Poser it is required to set up an animation for the calculation of dynamics, I would prefer to remove this requirement as it is unclear to many users and would propose to handle this in a modifiable draping (which is in effect an animation but can be provided in an easier way).

I'll have to give that one some additional thought, on how a modfiable draping system might be implemented for animation purposes - the keyframe technique is pretty straight forward from a programming perspective and is pretty well roadmapped already in other apps, but the second technique might be interesting if I can get it to work right.

Quote - Cloning of object is also important and should happen automatically, when another copy of an object is added it should become a clone. The system should also be intelligent enough that common materials should actually be shared unless specifically disconnected. This means that if you add a chair to your scene and than add another of the same chair, they be become cloned objects, if you then add a table using the same basic wood material, the materials become shared, so changing the wood will automatically change both chairs and the table.

Interesting - so in the "material room" have it so you can list items and there associated materials, or list materials and there associated items, and associate or dissasociate them as needed.  I'll have to give some thought as to how to make this fairly straightfoward from a UI perspective, but I love the concept.

Quote - When defining the GUI make sure you include the dials as they currently exist in Poser (although people complain about them, they equally complain about other applications not having them) together with some other options like numeric entries only and sliders, for angles a clock face with a line would be convenient. Please allow model developers to provide a capability to hide specific variables and to allow only specif values or value ranges for specific variables.

Content developers will have complete control of the final output, being able to easily group items, change the names of or add/delete any of the dials, etc. 

Intiially I was looking at the slider controls more akin to those in 3ds max, where you can either type in the value or use the up down arrows to slowly increment or decrement it.  Also rather than using posers scale of 0-1+ I think I'd prefer a percentage system for all dials/controls (0-100%+).  I suppose I could make this a selectable option for others.  I think it might also be possible to make dials/sliders a selectable option, allowing the end user to use whichever he/she prefers, have to give that a bit of thought and see what can be done there.

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