I have to admit, BB: I'm of two minds about your well-written (and very pointed) response. You're right: most of the forumites are so far into the program that it makkes me wonder why they havent moved on to the higher end ones, since it seems that what they want simply cant be fully addressed by an inexpensive little proggie like Poser (and I say that as a Poser devote with a decade working with this thing). Maybe it is time they moved on to a more serious software like Maya.

At the same time, you have to admit that some of the big advances came about because of the geeky faction: ERC, for axample. No one at Poser (or DAZ, for that matter) thought of it: it was some user who saw something missing. The clothing converters — there's another place where both software packages missed the boat. Users had been complaining for years that you couldnt shift a favourite outfit from one mesh to another, that every upgrade of the Showgirl meant you had to make the choice of staying one generation back because of the investment in content or moving forward because of the improvements in the mesh. The users got stuck in the middle of an impossible situation, and neither Poser nor DAZ chose to do anything about it. So that left it to, once again, the geek fringe to come up with a solution, something that, quite frankly, should have been part of the software if we're going to be catering on the basis of content.

I guess my point is: dont dismiss the folks who ask for the sort of thing that you think no one in the MAJORITY will care about. Those two examples above demonstrate pretty handily that sometimes even your sense of the "majority" misses the mark by the proverbial country mile.

And as a side note: about the interface. Yeah, maybe it's too late to say anything about it, but I'd happily bet my next week's paycheque that the "majority" are perfectly happy with the weird little Krause widgets. It's part of what makes Poser enjoyable, and, to be frank, it's why Studio just doesnt cut it for me. Studio comes across as trying desperately to prove it's high end when it's not. Poser invites you to come and play. Yeah, I use Poser as a professional tool for my illustration work, but it's that element of playfulness in the interface that keeps my job from becoming just that: a job. Other 3D packages I work with — ranging from FormZ to 3DStudio — all emphasize the technical, so much so that the style gets lost in the process. Poser, to date anyway, has refused to let go of that intrinsic charm that I suspent many of the users love.

You're right in that this is, in its essence, a toy. It has enormous potential that it's realized over the years, but it's still a wonderful, engaging toy. And there's nothing wrong with that: even the cheapest plastic chess pieces are just as capable of elegant gameplay as ones cast in gold and silver.

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