Quote - I am kind of curious why SM implemented weight mapping on Poser.... I mean for what? They have no weight mapped figures apart from the very basic Ryan and Alyson and I don't see high end users being interested in those, hardly any users are interested in them.

And the export options to MAX etc, again I ask for what? If you don't have figures to export then what do you have.

Seems to me like they are not using joined up thinking over at SM.

 

 

Why?

1 ) Weightmaps are more or less industry standard, and better understood from a professional standpoint than the spherical falloff system they have been using. Look at the trouble multi-year Poser geeks have with fall off setup. And they've -learned- it. 

2 ) Weightmapping gives the user the ability to create and adjust joint behavior =from within the program=. Before you -had- to know a modeler well enough to export the body parts, create a morph, save it,  import it, etc. Now you can adjust all that in the setup room.

3 ) Now you don't have to be a mesh monkey to do a figure setup; if you have a tablet, you can paint the weightmaps onto the mesh. Or adjust them with the mouse.

4 ) Combined with the new animateable joint centers and dependant parameter dial system, all sorts of new rigging and figure  control schemes are possible. We can drop morphs and use WM for facial expression; with the dependant parameters, we can link separate morphs and maps and joints under one control (not as elegantly, but similar to the system Maya uses), with the ajc we can make the jaw actually -hinge-, instead of using 3 morphs and a pair of JCM's to get close to the same thing.

 

And I think the basic thinking amongst the Poser coders is to give us, the user, options. They've never been a content provider; they are tool providers. Yes, I agree they should have found a dozen of the geeks and sneaks in Poserdom, gone and contracted new lead figures, then thrown the poor thing to said geeks and sneaks until it is perfect for them. Then beta test it with as wide a pool of content creators as possible, say agreeing they get the new figure when released in exchange for X amount of content, minimum. If they do more, great, but at least X amount. That way you would have the expected pool of content to buy for the new dollie. From the plethora of community based projects, that may be happen......

 

But Poser has always been a 'Here's the tools we came up with. You can read the files. What can you do?' kind of company; and the community responded. Just like the community was effectively hobbled by a certain content company's refusal to use more than P4 level tech in their figures. And it showed. Now that stranglehold is broken by their own devices, and suddenly there is a surge of innovation happening in PoserLand. Personally, I hope they never get the G thing working in Poser. We have 12+ years of content that can be retrofitted and brought up to useable by modern standards once again. Tools that have lay fallow are being explored and actually used. People are learning, and innovating, once again. Not trying to find ways to McGuyver P4 level tech to do things it can't do. All that needs to happen now it for more and more images to be made using the new stuff.....and all those features we have that have been ignored for one reason or another. Things are looking up in PoserLand; and its the lack of ready made Vicky that's making it possible.