Quote - I have often wondered, over the years, if there is a very minor conspiratorial agreement amongst software producers that the best toys only be in the hands of the establishment.  We get, at our "street" level, horrible rendering engine, figures that don't quite look real, and if you make them real, they no longer bend, and if you make them bend, they no longer conform to clothing, etc, we get a hair room that produces flax and takes forever to do so, etc.

All of these problems are solvable with current technology and programming know-how, I am sure.  I wish I knew how to do it, but I know there are people who do, they just aren't working on Poser.

Add to that the street-level user base who insist on backwards compatibility, and you've got something that's just lurching forward and succombing to entropy, like Darth Vadar crawling out of the molten lava, on fire.

At the end of the day, we ask "Does Poser (Or Even DazStudio) do what we want it to do?" assuming our wants and needs are reasonable, and I think the answer was "yes!" when Poser 4 came out, and on the decline ever since.  They've been taking the premise of Poser 4 and trying to make it better ever since.

They have not re-evaulated what it is people need and want. 

I seem to be alone on this, which really suprises me. 

You're not alone. I feel exactly the same way, maybe to a lesser degree on some things, but in agreement generally. LOL

I'm another one that wouldn't mind all that much if they didn't maintain backward compatibility if it meant much better results. But the SM powers that be cater to the people that will cry a river if they can't use their 13 year old figures in the new version.

I don't have much faith that we'll ever get decent standard figures again unless the project is sent outside of SM to someone that really knows what they're doing.

As for the material room. I don't think I wanna even get started unless I want to be pulling my hair out any time soon ;). Suffice it to say I think it's a dog and there's no hope for it other than to throw it out and start over. Make it more in line with the ease of the rest of Poser. Make it WYSIWYG so that the majority of folks who use Poser (usually not 3D nerds, but just end users) can use it without crying. Take a look at Vue's materials. Enough said ;).

I'll repeat what I said farther up the thread: we'll get the same dog of a material room with nodes that no one understands, except now there will just be more OF them.

Laurie