Quote -
Don't forget to factor in  being tossed around a few times; that has kind of limited some of the the things that needed doing. Since they've multithreaded the whole app, I've been able to run cloth sims on a Vicky 3 mesh that didn't stall or crash the app. The problem hasn't been lack of common sense or intelligence; it's been lack of the same kind of in your face advertising that others have done. Plus the fact that in some cases, they were way ahead of the curve. Dynamics weren't that hot back when.....but there have been enough CGI examples that people are starting to get over the atavistic terror of the unknown, and finding it not so bad. Just at the baby steps, but you can't -force- users to use a feature, and by leaving it in, they got the idea across that it wouldn't bite them.

  I sincerely doubt it could be tied to "fear" - many, many, many people threw themselves at dynamics back when it first came out. It was one of the biggest selling points of Poser 5, FFS. However, it was the crashes, the ungodly (Bryce-like) lag, and the mediocre results in spite of tons o' effort that threw folks right back out of it. You admit part of it yourself right up there in that paragraph.

The only thing worse than not having something implemented at all is if it is implemented poorly. 

 

Quote - > Quote - If you want to survive long term, going vertical is going to be your best bet. Relying on one external company (and no others) to provide you with a living is a great way to kill your company.

And from everything I have seen to date, it isn't that easy to get off the ground in the regard. DAZ only did it because of the growing Poser user base, and the fact that they were spun off from Zygote, which was getting its professional business buried by the click and render crowd. I'd love it if they found another source for Poser specific figures that blew the current offerings out of the water. Maybe with the work the community is doing now, they will.

  DAZ started as a poser figure provider (because Zygote felt it wasn't worth the time and effort), but had to come to grips with the fact that (at the time), Poser's very existence was in doubt, coupled with the potential for Poser to to freeze DAZ out of the whole shebang. It's never easy to go vertical, but if you want to be around a couple decades from now, that's pretty much what you're going to have to do in this biz. 

 

 

Quote - Oh bullshit, Peng. 10 years ago, a -handful- of people were exploring and pushing and finding neato things. I was there too.....and you had the same 'I'm afwaid....!' reactions to JCM,s and the other alphabet soups the community created from the vast majority of the users.

Nice try, but not qute. On my own part, I was disgusted with P5's performance and ability to deliver even the basic features, which is why I (like most folks) took a fair shake at it, and then went 'yuck'. Also, back then I was using Carrara (1.1) and Vue (4) to do my final renders and tweaks, neither of which (at the time) supported the P5 dynamics anyway (and Carrara had a way better dynamic hair plugin even back then).

The reason you're only recalling a "handful" of people is because back then,was because  there were only a relative handful of people in the whole damned CG hobbyist community.

Quote - There has -always- been a small core of crazed cr2 hackers compared to the user base at large. But that was stalled by DAZ freezing their Poser usage at version 4. Now that no longer holds true, and the creatives are starting to come out of the woodwork again. Note the word 'starting'. This time there is no guarantee of a new Vickie to blow your money on, and a mostly quiet re-evaluation has been going on. Some of those old geeks have been talking to some of the new geeks, and things are being born anew.

  DAZ 'froze' it at P4 compatibility because insofar as Poser 5+ was concerned, they had no choice: They were 'frozen' out themselves. That's one of the two big reasons why they went the D|S route in the first place. Blaming them for "freezing" anything is like blaming a rape victim for wearing a pretty dress, and is too disingenuous by far.

As for 'frozen', even that isn't true. They've been rather busy on their own side of the house. SubD, a better magnet system, dynamic posing (don't want to move individual joints? no problem - PowerPose does the job), scaling that actually works worth a damn for conformers, a radical plugin and scripting system that plugs directly in, and etc. Then we can throw on direct yet independent integration into Carrara, which actually does have a kickass render engine.

 

Quote - Guess people will have to sift the chaff from the grain huh?

Yup. Now picture 100 Poser-only (not D|S) merchants, all of them scrambling to get noticed as The Next Big Thing with those dozens of retrofits. Instead of all of 'em centering around one figure, because the Poser folks can't seem to bring themselves to come up with one that works worth a damn for the job.

If SMith Micro had a brain, they'd (as mentioned about a zillion times before) come up with a decent mesh or two themselves, and not just crap out a subcontracted figure set that is about as morphable as DinaV on a bad day.

That way you (okay, the team members at Poser) don't have to dig through and clean up everyone else's mistakes, or pray that the next subcontractor doesn't push his/her 'vision' ahead of mesh usability.

Quote - DAZ makes good models, for the most part....but they also have been fueled by inertia. Poser users got the next Vickie because that's what they were supposed to do.

Oh, Dear Lord... most folks get "the next Vickie" because that's what has all the damned product support. Blaming the end-users for that is stupid, when you have merchants for miles happily making crap for Vicky version n+1 the nanosecond it comes out. 

Come to think of it, the vast majority of the whining, complaints, drama, and general BS over this whole Vicky 5 thing is coming not from end-users per se, but from the frickin' merchants. A few end-users want it in Poser, sure. OTOH, the merchies are screaming for it, and quite a number have (quite loudly) thrown their toys out of the pram when they discovered that getting a native Poserized Vicky 5 and the stuff for it is going to take more than just a little doing, if doing so is even commercially viable at all at this point. 

They're watching Vicky 5 spread all over D|S-land, and they can't do jack about it, profit-wise. 

Quote - DAZ has been planning this split since the P5 faceroom debacle.They pulled the trigger in a bad economic environment. Hope they do well.

Which explains why they've spent all this time working with the Poser devs to make an exporter, so that the Poser folk can get their Vicky fix, right? Seriously, if that were truly the case, they would (and IMHO should) have told all of Poserdom that Vicky 5 would be D|S only, and to bugger off after that. 

Quote - They are going 'What do we do now?' And answers are being developed. Antonia is one; they'll have the 'official' release versions ready soon (as in unzip to the runtime and go). Other projects are either picking up speed or begun.

"They" being who, exactly? The end-users, or the merchies? The end users will always download a free ($0.00) figure, no doubt and no sweat, so that damned sure isn't the big reason for the push behind it. Hell, I'll just as happily download it and put it to use. 

Quote - Hopefully SM gets the idea and goes forth and finds a good alternate source of Poser figures.

I agree, perfectly. They've needed to do that since Poser 5 came out. The odds of them actually doing it however?

Slim and None, and Slim just left town.

They'll probably just subcontract out another round of incompatible (with previous meshes) figures that are practically set in concrete, again, and you probably won't be able to do squat with them unless you want to dive into that buggified Face Room or Morph Putty, and even then no guarantees. 

Final nitpick:

Quote - ... memory footprint due to humongous texture maps...

You do realize you can use lower-rez textures and still have it work just fine, right? You just have to know how to build it for lower rez. If you want to blame someone for massive texture .jpg files being de rigeur, you can start with the merchants.