Quote - > Quote - within six months they will take their place in the forgotten

depths of hoarded content that are the runtimes of the average poser user

 

I don't think that will necessarily be the case moving forward. 

I think the reason that's happened in the past is in large part due to everyone using V4 and M4, and all their predecessors. But now, V4 and M4's poser days are numbered. There won't be a new generation of Daz figures to fall back on, and people want new figures. A handful of artists are trying to deliver on that. The positive side of that is that multiple artsts creating new figures breeds diversity, more selection for the users to choose from, and more styles rendered, giving the users more freedom to express their own vision. 

 

~Shane

I think part of this argument centers on what one may consider to be the best approach to figure design to allow users to 'express their own vision'.

Over the time I've been using Poser there seem to have been two main approaches:

• Single figures with lots of body morphs to shape individual characters and looks. 

• Multiple figures with very limited morphs out of the box.

I get the idea of diversity with the multi-figure/mesh approach - a wealth of possible mesh designs, rigs and shapes from different creators. That's great. But it's always struck me that this has certain disadvantages for the end user specifically, most prominently that it means they have to buy lots of different figures to achieve a variety of looks. I tend to notice that many of the less mainstream figures lack details like decent expression morphs (or shaping morphs of any kind), rendering them pretty useless to me. Content is less of an issue these days with various clothing converters, but there is still an additional cost that can spiral for example in the case of having to purchase multiple support packages for Wardrobe-Wizard. Textures are also a problem in a similar way. I'm certainly not poor by any standard but my resources are limited for any given project, and I'm guessing that many Poser users have even tighter purse-strings.

I've typically found it harder to break the specific look of any given figure that has less shaping morphs included with it to achieve the variations I've wanted. This usually results in spending much more time with the morph brush or magnets etc than I'd have liked, where with a figure like V4 I can achieve very different looks very quickly with a combination of included face morphs. I can get to know that figure and its morphs in depth, learning how to get the looks I really want.

Although I'd concede that there are limitations to what you can do with any given mesh, the main disadvantage of the single figure approach in my mind is to the creator - a much greater investment of time to design and craft a well balanced mesh with enough included morphs to make it a viable option, especially if you want any of those elements to be of a quality that will bear the test of use. 

My understanding is that with the inclusion of animatable joint centers in Poser we now have a viable route to achieving flexible rigs to accommodate big changes in morphed body shapes, much as genesis works. This may well need further development and my knowledge is as a non-creator, but the possibilities for making a decent all-in-one figure seems much more viable.

My preference will always be to use a single figure with lots of morphs that I can freely shape and refine - this to me is how you as a creator can deliver the means for the end user to 'express their own vision'. Just because Daz may not be putting out a Poser version of the unimesh concept we shouldn't necessarily give up on that formula, one that has proven very sucessful in the marketplace. Maybe it's just too big an investment of development time for any one individual.

But this is just my take on the issue.

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

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