Quote - Scaling should have been resolved over 3 years ago when I reported it first. In a recent release, conforming wasn't working properly for some items.

Those are both very BASIC functions that should never be broken in any release.

Here, I assume you mean body part scaling - aka smoothscaling (?).  I can see wholely why it is such an issue.  Not that Daz doesn't have some very competent brain power doing the design and development, but it is exceedingly difficult to 'reverse engineer' non-standard, proprietary algorithms and replicate them completely and accurately.  I know this from experience. :)  The Poser smoothscaling body part system is very complex (because it has one-to-many dependencies) and I've examined it several times coming out of it with not much less confusion than when I started.

For instance, I'm still amazed that Daz was able to get any IK solution into D|S, let alone the nice 'pin&drag' solution used therein.  From David Eberly's (PhD in mathematics and computer science) book "3D Game Engine Architecture", I quote:

"Inverse kinematics (IK) is an intriguing topic, but a very difficult thing to implement when you have to reproduce what a modeling package produces. ... If you have no idea what algorithm the modeling package uses, it is nearly impossible to reverse-engineer and match it."

One of the reasons that Poser's IK is so insidious is that 'real' IK solutions use Jacobians which output quaternions or matrices whereas Poser's rotation system is strictly ordered Euler angles - and there are no reliable ways to extract Euler rotations from quaternions or matrices (note 'reliable' here).  Remember some of the IK fun in previous versions and the once odd 'arm salute' issue?  So, whatever the developers of Poser have done to stabilize the IK, it took them a very long time and several versions to do so.  Now think about trying to do something similar but blindfolded.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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