Poser has had spherical falloff zones for joints all along.  Adding capsule zones would have been easier than developing support for weight-mapping.  I assume that's why Poser went that way.

Why Daz has gone the other, I couldn't guess, but I'm pleased.  Rumor has it that Poser will follow suit, and having more options is good.  :woot:  Plus, weight-mapping can give much nicer joint results than we're used to, without as much struggle (IMO).

 

If you load a figure in Poser, select a body part, and open the Joint Editor, you'll likely see a couple of spherical falloff zones for the joint.  The zones are positioned to determine how the joint handles.  This can be unwieldy in some cases (all the trouble with legs bending at the hip) because the effect is approximate and can't be specifically edited on a per-vertex level.  You can just position the falloff zones.

Poser 8 added capsule-shaped zones and the option for multiple zones, which can apparently help a lot.  But the approach is still a bit awkward, IMO, and it hasn't really caught on yet.  Apparently Miki 3 uses these capabilities.

Weight-mapping allows you to specify the level of effect of a given bone for any given vertex on a mesh.  You paint a color on the mesh, indicating the level of influence.  (Or that's how it works in Blender, at least, and I think Blender's implementation is fairly standard.)  This allows more precise control of individual vertices than the falloff zones would provide.  You can weight-map a low res, poorly designed mesh in Blender and have it handle better than a high res, well designed mesh can in Poser 7.  The drawback is that you have to actually paint the influence levels onto the mesh, which can be tedious in some areas, particularly on higher-resolution geometries.

Or that's my experience, anyway.

 

I'm betting I've cross-posted with someone who types faster than I do.  :lol:

Edit: Huh.  :unsure:  No cross-post.

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.