Quote - Everybody knows that a "copy" of art is no longer YOUR art. You cannot just claim something is your own when it isn't. That is the crux of the issue - not whether these Poser renders are art or not, but rather that Poser renders are essentially institutionalized plagiarism. Like collage.

Who cares if you "posed" it - if it's not your creation, the pose is original, but the image is largely made of plagiarism - plagiarized mesh, plagiarized rigging, plagiarized materials, etc.

There's no refuting that. The question is does composing the scene (choosing costumes, posing, lighting, and camera, etc.), i.e. being a virtual producer/director of the photo shoot qualify you as a CG artist. I say it doesn't. It qualifies you as a producer/director. CG artist is not the producer or director - he is the guy who makes the assets from nothing.

 

Um....No.

Actually, oh Hell NO!! 

I take exception to the sometimes rampant misuse of the term 'plagarism'. My creative origins are in text and words; a plagarist is a thief, pure and simple.  You could make that claim of a Poser render if the maker of the render took some resource from another without their permission and claimed it was theirs (which would include using warez). Or any other application; the big boys are not immune to a lack of ethics in the user. The next level would be to take an existing image, recreate is faithfully, and attempt to claim it was yours. Neither of those circumstances occurs very often, do they?

 

The content issue is simple: the content creator makes it. Chooses to sell it on the open market. Sets usage terms, and retains the IP rights as creator. If I buy their product, I have -purchased a liscence- to use said product within the limits (or lack thereof) in the included readmes. Free content is exactly the same; downloading it is the same as agreeing to abide by any restrictions included. There have been more than enough incidents over the years to prove that actual plagarism or out and out content theft is =not= acceptable and responded to quickly and usually harshly.

Like it or not, the Poser crowd follows the professional production model regarding content; what you can't make or lack time to make in house you farm out to contractors. Almost none of the big houses can do it all....or do it all in the timeframe they have. So they outsource. Sure there is artistry in well made mesh. But without equally talented rigging, it is just a static thing. Without good texture and mapping work, it is just bland, monocolored stuff with no perspective, and nowhere near the depth and appearance. Without good lighting, it doesn't matter how sexy the textures are; how tight the shaders are coded. You either won't see them, or the clash of shadows and mismatched color ruins it. If you get the composition wrong, the output will be unbalanced at best; atrocious or actively nauseating at worst. That's one of the many reasons I prefer animation; I understand that the artistry is not in my chosen tools; It's in me, how I use said tools, and what I use them for. Yes, I purchase figure meshes and set meshes. I also do every other bloody job in a production pipeline, from scriptwriting to foley to scoring to post. Instead of wasting years to try and learn one fundamental step, I outsource it to those who do know it and focus my creative energies elsewhere. The output is what matters (unless you are talking solely about mesh engineering, obviously). No bloody mesh by itself will =ever= touch anyone other than another modeler with emotion. As part of a synergistic whole though, that mesh can be the framework for something that does. If my output gets the appropriate emotion out of the viewer, I did it. If not, I try and figure out where I went wrong and try another approach  the next time out. But a bare framework is not a finished product, any more than the world's best deco setup. It's either combined or nothing but parts. And there will be a list of credits at the end giving kudos to those contractors who helped.