Oh here we go again.  It's always depressing when I read everyone's requests and realise how out of step my needs are with everyone else's.

1. Freaking soft bodies.  I know everyone reads that as "better boobies", so I'm surprised it's not the top request every time.  Truth is, I want it in hopes it would solve the joint bending problems.  I'd love it if the calf could deform to the sides when the leg bends severely, or if the pec could be moved inward by the arm.  Some kind of bullet-type mesh elasticity would fix so many posing related problems.  And way better than figures with hundreds of morphs and magnets could ever hope to.

(Never mind what soft-bodies would do for conforming clothing!)

1. Shadow maps and bump/parallax in preview.  Again, it seems everyone else is going for realism and working on high-res stills while I'm trying to knock out quick serial type movies.  With smart texturing and careful lighting, the preview renderer can occasionally output some nice clips.  However, without shadows or even the most basic of emboss mapping, my best work still looks like a video game from 1998 most of the time.

2. A transmap hair generator.  I can't believe no one's ever made a specific program for this.  I want to be able to take a figures head, soft select an area and extrude double sided, non welded edges outward from it.  Once these edges were formed, they should be individually selectable so that I can continue extruding them, styling and tapering them until the hair mesh is created.  Each strand should have the same UV coords, and each hair mesh could use the same textures, ie any hair tex with vertical strands covering the whole image.

4.  Real collision detection.  This would best go hand-in-hand with the soft bodies, but not necessarily useless without.  Think how nice it would be if we could use the hand grasp dial on a cup and have each finger stop automatically when it contacted the cup's surface.

Really.  That's all that I could want.  Everything else I am already pretty happy with.

moogal, there was a request for partial soft body dynamics on the first page of the thread. And I'd say there's pretty strong desire by a wide variety of folks for it. Not sure if it's a realistic wish, but I sure hope so.

Quote - moogal, there was a request for partial soft body dynamics on the first page of the thread. And I'd say there's pretty strong desire by a wide variety of folks for it. Not sure if it's a realistic wish, but I sure hope so.

I'd hoped it was on there somewhere.  It's a realistic wish if enough other people want it.  Hopefully they do.

Still say that Poser's biggest weaknesses are the very things it purports to exist to do.  (joints bend wonky,  no muscle/fat behavior at all, bodies overall seem like mannequins) Then again, I haven't used any of the recent (overly complex?) figures from the past couple of years. 

oooo yeah i like that idea a UV window would be awesome.

really should incorperate something lke uv mapper I am suprised they overlooked that in poser 8.

Quote - oooo yeah i like that idea a UV window would be awesome.

really should incorperate something lke uv mapper I am suprised they overlooked that in poser 8.

Why be surprised? They overlooked all kinds of stuff in Poser 8. ;-)

They didn't overlook it anyway. UV Mapper is already out there, free for anyone to use. At least the regular version is, and Smith Micro isn't about to buy a license to incorporate UV Mapper Pro into Poser.

But my suggestion was for something more like what Maya, Max and so on have, where you can have your fully textured figure in one window and the UV map in another, and be able to drag points around in the UV window to compensate for texture stretching due to deformation from bending and morphing.
If you've never used a 3D program that has that ability, you don't know what you're missing. If you have, you will miss it greatly in 3D apps that don't have that ability. ;-)

I'm only seeing two poser developers (SM employees) in this thread, but it's possible kupa (a.k.a. thinkcooper) is also reading this thread, in which case I would request a new set of beta testers for the next release.  it's not the big things (that cause poser 8 to be non-functional for some users) that I'm concerned about in re: beta testers.  instead, it's all the easy little things like typos, wrong language labels and such minutiae that indicate to me the beta testers just didn't pay attention to detail when they got their free copies of poser 8 beta.  nor do I wish to be a beta tester, as there's a chance that some of 'em actually reported various easily fixable errors, but they weren't fixed.

Quote -
....but it's possible kupa (a.k.a. thinkcooper) is also reading this thread...

I don't know about that...
I don't think anyone has mentioned wanting a Super Ultra Pro Runtime Debloatifier for Poser Pro 2010, and I don't think he'd be interested in these mundane and unrealistic suggestions for more actual program functionality. ;-)

Quote - > Quote -

....but it's possible kupa (a.k.a. thinkcooper) is also reading this thread...

a Super Ultra Pro Runtime Debloatifier for Poser Pro 2010,

No way is he reading this thread.

I'd like to see better animation tools. Tangents for splines, better graph editor. IK turned on and off during animation. Possibility to select any bodypart for IK.
IK which doesn't twist the figure in all kinds of painful poses.
Implement Bullet Physics (the SDK is free under FreeBSD license) or Physx (from NVidia also free).
Better styling options for dynamic hair (look at Carrara for example, where you can pull guidehairs mid way). Paint zones instead of selecting polygons to better control the shape of the zones.
Change parenting during animation. Animation:Master can do this.
Real subsurface scattering (a tool which is specialised in human models should have this right?)
Muscle tool (blender has it, look at blenrig http://www.jpbouza.com.ar/ESP2/descargas/blenrig-3/id/en).
Ragdoll physics where you can specify the ending pose.
Moveable pivot point during animation.
Walkdesigner for 4 legged creatures.

Ability to add tags to items in the library for a more powerful search. Ability to reorder things directly in the runtime, rename folders, etc.