Quote - Which translates as "She had a face like a bag of smashed crabs". ;)

Living on the central California coast in a town with a thriving commercial Dungeoness Crab fishery, a bag of crabs is indeed a thing of beauty; smashed, not so much. :)

I posted over on RDNA in a thread about the Fitting Room about the challenges of developing content in parallel to developing an application, with critical features that may not be quite baked at an early stage creating challenges in the content pipeline. The post is here if you want to read it in full: Rex and Roxie Dev challenges

The basic premise from that post is that it's really challenging to develop a new version of Poser and in parallel develop new figures that take advantage of new features which may or may not be ready in time for us to use at points in the project's timeline where we were hoping to put them in place. My analogy in the post? It can be like digging a hole with an awesome new shovel that doesn't have a working handle yet. :-) The content team needs to rerorder tasks and adjust milestones to ensure a parallel deliverable. The steps are lengthy roughly lining up like this:

• initial design, sketches and base shape feedback (prior to rigging which is tough)
• generating UVs for the texture work to start
• retopologizing the shape with a new mesh tailored for good subD
• setting up the faceroom data
• working on creating new morphs or transferring morphs from the intial shape
• rigging and magnets, advanced body controls and dependant parm set-up
• proofing textures and material nodes (and tweaking UV flow if needed)
• proofing bendability
• walk designer set-up
• polish/organization of morphs and expressions
• polish of channel organization, naming, and any tweaks to rig

Also happening in parallel are marketing efforts that include tasks like renderings for the hero image for installers, printed materials for the physical version of Poser, box images with a range of uses including our website, academic resellers looking to list the product in their catalogs and the 600 pound gorilla with pages to build - Amazon.

That hero needs to look awesome. And artists who know Poser and rendering need to be able to pose and render that art in advance of when we need to put it in use. For this version, we tasked a team at RDNA (Syyd, Traveler, Nightsong) to help us produce those images. Early tests with Roxie showed awesome promise. She's spunky, cute and well textured, but at the time, there weren't enough finalized facial morphs to get enough expressiveness to make me happy. BTW, her inspiration is the actress Valorie Curry .

The job we face? Balance working with the tools at hand, the resources we have access to, the things we know artists will want to do down the road, rolling in new features we believe will produce better results when rendered or animated, while trying to complete time-consuming and interdependent steps that we hopefully won't have to undo, unraveling weeks of other people's work... It's not a perfect process by any stretch, but hopefully you'll get a better understanding of the juggling act (that we love) that is releasing Poser and cool content for it.

Cheers,

Cooper