"However, there has to be a large incentive to buy upgrades to make this model work; this apparently didn't work for DAZ Studio Pro 4.0, for instance....."

I don't remember what the Pro version added but, probably not enough things that a lot of people felt they needed. I would have made a free version that only worked with male figures - simple :-)

"Instead of simply rolling the mesh around, you could run a figure or prop in an online instance of Poser or Daz or Vue for a few minutes, with a watermark over the resultant images."

I don't know if it's still up but DAZ had an 'online' version of DS4 that let you play a bit with Genesis - try different morphs, add some clothing etc. The link was in the thread where one of their folks (Randall?) was trying to discuss DS4/Genesis. I'm not sure if it was intended as a demo or a proof of concept for a real online service. Something like that might tie in with asset rental, giving you access to their whole catalog without having to buy or download anything. I don't see a reason offhand why they couldn't use that technology to create the type of demo functionality you describe. That would be one huge freaking runtime - probably not much bigger than what I've seen some folks here describe though :-) * *

 

 

 

 

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