I've been developing figures ever since I got my first copy of Poser in 2000. But after a lot of fruitless endeavours with the default Poser figures, the dissapointment that were V4 and M4, and finally the indespensable PoseMorphLoader by ColorCurvator, I started earnestly on my current set of figures three years ago.

So, personally, there is not much I need from Poser anymore.

My figures look and bend exactly like I want, and they are perfectly optimized for Poser. Some of them even weightmapped.

My big wish for Poser would be real instancing, so that I could have real forrests and meadows without slowing my i5 laptop down to a crawl.

 

But not everyone is as lucky as me being able to create exactly the figures I want by myself.

Most people have to rely on dialspinning to make the figures look like they want.

So those folks need a figure that has an extreme flexible mesh topology, lots of realistic morphs and anatomically correct joints right out of the box.

And right now, I don't see any other figure offering that kind of versatility to the casual user except Genesis.

Given Poser's basically broken single-axis scaling, I very much doubt the "new" Poser male figure in the works by Phantom3D will be anything close to be as flexible.

All I can say is that, even though they are definitely nicely bending, neither Antonia, Antonia WM nor V4WM do scale well at all.

On the contrary, they scale exceptionally bad. (Although I think this is not so much Phantom3D's fault, but Poser's.)

But the result is the same: Even at it's best, Poser's rigging system is now woefully inadequate compared to Studio 4 PRO.

(Not to mention what is possible with Geografting and "Snap To" joints in Studio)

Oh, and of course each of my custom figures needs manually converted clothing, too, whereas Genesis can use V3, M3, SP3, David, V4, M4 and of course Genesis clothing without any need for lenghty and often error prone conversions.

 

So, sorry, while personally I still quite enjoy using Poser and its still superior render engine, the only thing I think Poser really needs....

.....is for Smith Micro to back down, say "Thank You very much for your generosity" to the kind people over at DAZ and integrate those evil Genesis tech into Poser without any further questions asked.

At least then they could earn enough time (and perhaps the funds) to develop a true "Genesis killer" by themselves over the next couple of years.

If they don't, if they think just another refurbished old figure would do or that a single person could sort out their mess again, I don't think we're going to ever see a "PoserPro 2014".

 

Happy Posering.