I tried Daz Studio once and found it totally foreign, I know putting out products that only work in Poser limits their range of use. Are there any untilities that will convert poser files and materials to use in Daz Studio? I really dont want to have to learn Daz Studio!

Chris

I have both and really think Daz is easier..Well Daz3....Most items do work in Daz but will say tested in Poser only.  I found 'most' Daz purchases do work in Poser..

I'm sure a pro will be here to advise further.

Avoid making dynamics, don't use procedural shaders, don't do geometry switching as DS has never been very good with it, rigging needs to work in P6, no binary morphs, MAT pose files (pz2,mt5 & mc6) are pretty useless but they do save us from having to manually load every texture.

Pretty much everything else will go through our import plugin as is, with just the usual surface settings needing altered.

Quote - Avoid making dynamics, don't use procedural shaders, don't do geometry switching as DS has never been very good with it, rigging needs to work in P6, no binary morphs, MAT pose files (pz2,mt5 & mc6) are pretty useless but they do save us from having to manually load every texture.

If this is the best a Poser user can hope for why bother? It seems that it would just be easier to do the thing in DS to start with. No wonder vendors have been doubling their work effort so as to keep a foot in both camps.

Quote - Pretty much everything else will go through our import plugin as is, with just the usual surface settings needing altered.

What's left that works as expected?

Not out to start a war but it just seems like too much work to even bother.

pdg

Quote - Avoid making dynamics, don't use procedural shaders, don't do geometry switching as DS has never been very good with it, rigging needs to work in P6, no binary morphs, MAT pose files (pz2,mt5 & mc6) are pretty useless but they do save us from having to manually load every texture.

Pretty much everything else will go through our import plugin as is, with just the usual surface settings needing altered.

so basically create content as if it were still 2005?

If you want it to work in DS, yes.  Stay with Poser 4 abilities.

Bill

Sadly, both Poser 9+ and DS4+ each have some really nice features that just happen to be incompatable with each other. As I see it vendors really have 2 choices in the future, at least if they want to really use those features. One is to learn both programs and then built seperate, but possible identical LOOKING, products for each software that takes advantage of the specific features. the second is to choose the software they are most comfortable in and settle  into make software specific items.

Of course they could continue to make dual software products, with limited functions, but that is such a waste concidering the rich new featuress each program has, and will have as time goes on. or they can do double to work and settle for selling at a price that gives them, virtually, half the profit, a loosing business plan at best, better to sell 2 products geared to the individual markets and leave off the "waste", lower prices and faster/shorter downloads for the customers, and lower pricing per product. If you want to capture people that use both programs offer reduced price "bundles".

Certain items that don;t rely on the n ew features I suppose will continue to be made in a dual format, but I see those being reduced as time goes on. No matter what sort of importer either side makes they will always have limitations on the use of products built to use advanced features. THere has been a split in the market and, unfortunately, it really cannot be closed easily. I say this without anger, just making a statement

What Letterworks said. This is not just a good idea, it is a good marketing idea.

the problem isnt just major engine differences such as procedural shaders and dynamics. i would gladly take the time to make a second set of DS MATs for everything.

its the fact that DS still doesnt have support for simple things like PMDs, capsule falloff zones, dependant parameters, etc. and its unlikely it ever will because the whole attitude there is that the onus is on the vendor to make everything D|S compatible and do twice as much work.

I use Carrera 8 Pro which I purchased from Daz and I love it.

I downloaded and tried Daz Studio and just found the whole interface very confusing.

I just really dont have the desire to learn another piece of software. Guess I'm getting old and set in my ways (lazy)

I don;t know if that's true or not, then again I don;t know if we should expect DAZ and SM to limit themselves to making identical features to insure compatability, any more than vendors should be restricted to making only products compatable with pre Poser 7 tech in order to insure cross platform and backward compatability.

As I said I think the future really lies in either making a decision on which software to support OR making 2 seperate products that use the best features in both software to the best effect. Sure it;s double the work but if you sell 2 items you have a large user base and should therefore have more sales that the vendor that takes the hit to support a single software. Sort of like an aftermarlet seller of car parts that makes parts for ford and chevy as opposed to just one brand.

It's time to admit that the market will NEVER be combined again, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It sort of frees up both software creators to take differing paths that will give the end users a wider choice of what features are available.

Thanks for the input, I feel that points me in the right direction!

Don't know if it's a good plan ,but.
My plan was to get partners to make it work in what ever app for what ever characters.

No idea if you can do this in Poser or not, but if you take Aiko3 or one of the other Gen 3's, and convert it to WM using it's existing rigging to create the WM, does it bend better, worse or just the same as the original. That's the problem DAZ have had since day one with DS, they've been using WM engines right from the start, so they had to create a plugin that could convert Poser rigging to WM rigging and not have it bend worse than it does in Poser, they also had to make sure it didn't bend better than it does in Poser, as that would have caused the brown stuff to hit the fan with the Poser community.

As for capsule falloff zones why cater for something that none of their figures use, it sucks from a users point of view, but from a business view point it makes perfect sense, and is pretty much the same view point SM had over Genesis "it's not our figure so why the **** should we care if it doesn't work in our software", CEO rubs hands together just means the users have to buy from us in the future.

I tried converting the V4 stock rig to WM once and didn't see any real difference; YMMV.  Phil Cooke wrote a script to do it if you want to try it yourself... 

http://www.philc.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3676

Quote - its the fact that DS still doesnt have support for simple things like PMDs, capsule falloff zones, dependant parameters, etc. and its unlikely it ever will because the whole attitude there is that the onus is on the vendor to make everything D|S compatible and do twice as much work.

PMD is meant to be supported for figures - and can be made to work for props. What isn't supported, without a plugin, is PMD injection via a pose. The PMD call has changed over Poser updates, which has presented problems, and getting it to work with DS4 and the changed geometry handling has been iffy but it should work - where it doesn't, please make a bug report. Capsule falloffs aren't supported. There was an addition to the ERC types recently according to the change log, but I'm not sure if it amounted to dependent parameter support.

Looking at your description for Rosetta, wow, what a complex and complete character set (very nice too). I can't really speak to the conversion or usability of some of your morphs (don't have Rosetta to give it a try ..... yet), but obviously the dynamic bikini wouldn't work in DS.

To get shaders for DS of similar quality would take a bit of work. In DS you could use HSS (Human Surface Shaders) as a starting point for the shaders, but it would probably require quite a bit of setup time to get the results you want. If your comfortable with the shader system in Carrara, making shaders for DS4+ wouldn't be that big of a learning curve. Of course you would probably want to make a light set to go with the shaders like you have for Rosetta so the user can get as close to your promo images as possible (in leu of that elusive "Make Art" button).

Actually, it would be nice to have both DS and Carrara shaders for Rosetta. I've gotten used to setting up my own shaders in both, but it's nice to be lazy every now and then. Of course, the real question is would it be economically viable to do all the extra work to set up additional shaders? I would think for DS it probably would be, but it might not be for Carrara.

I've been dabling with setting up HSS shaders with SSS in DS and SSS shaders in Carrara if you have any specific questions I might be able to help. I've gotten fairly close to the results I want in both, but haven't been able to get that nice "waxy" look that Poser is doing yet. Though I find the waxy look of many Poser renders to be a bit too much and unrealistic, I'd like to achieve that result, and work back from there on my shaders. 

As suggested above, if you really don't want to learn DS, then you could partner with someone to create the DS specific products and promos. One thing I have noticed though is that many of the products that include both Poser and DS specific shaders often don't have outstanding promo renders from both. I always take this into consideration when I buy a product. Even if it has DS specific shaders, if the renders don't look as good as the Poser renders, then in my mind it fits in with the products that have shader and no-shader versions of the mat poses, because I will probably need to adjust the shaders if I use it in DS (the same is true if the Poser renders don't look as good, since I use both). So, possibly as also stated above, the best way to go would be to simply have a P4 compatible (or texture maps only) version of your shaders that would give DS and Carrara users an easy starting point to develop their own.