IIRC, Zygote became http://www.3dscience.com/. If you subscribe to their newsletter, they give away free models, things like cells, not the mega-expensive stuff obviously.

…trying to pose them back then, they turned into boxes, very hard to make the figure hold something.

That was the fast tracking(?) mode to speed up manipulation. It may still exist. I'm pretty sure even in Poser 2, you could switch to seeing the entire model move, it was just slower if you didn't have a fast system.

Actually, even before Metacreations, I think it was Fractal Designs. In addition to Poser and Bryce, they, or Meta had Painter (or was it Detailer?) and Canoma, the latter to create buildings etc. from photographs. I thinkthat someone, maybe Corel bought Canoma but never brought it back on the market.  Metacreations bet on their 3D web visualization system for retail etc. They were probably about a decade too soon - don't know what ever happened to them.  

 

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