I don’t know what need Dawn was created to address, but I assume at least part of it was to bridge the DS/Poser divide with a figure that would work well in both applications. That’s a significant and possibly a commercially valid motivation. Why create another figure – what’s the motivation and the business case – (‘business’ being something that gets used, whether for sale or free)? Ticking off all the boxes and addressing every perceived shortcoming of what’s currently available sounds great – it sounds rational. The problem is that the market does not necessarily behave in a rational way – ask Greenspan. There also is no single market. You have everything from people who aren’t going to touch anything that requires tweaking, conversion etc. to those who can field strip a figure blindfolded.

About the only things you can depend on in general are obvious and have been mentioned. Content, content, content. By now, people should have learned the folly of assuming that simply creating a ‘great’ figure is enough. If Dawn succeeds, it will be less because she’s a great figure and more because they were smart enough to bet a boatload of content creators onboard from the beginning. Compatibility through conversion is very important but a lot of people probably want new dedicated click and load content. Don’t be too taken with the ‘I can convert the whole cast wardrobe from Oklahoma in 20 minutes’ thing unless you think that’s what the majority of customers will do.

Pretty, pretty, pretty (and sexy). Apply a substantial discount to the ‘I can take her into Zbrush and make my own if the mesh is right’ yada, yada. For everyone that will do that, there are probably ten or more who want pretty out of the box and buy premade characters. Add in all the morphability you want, but for the basic package, forget any calls for the fat, the lame, the old, the ethnic and the everyday plain (even from me). Those can be created but the base needs to be a young, attractive, single, white female. I don’t endorse, I only observe.

I agree that you’re better off creating for your own tastes and hoping that people will like it. Some will, they always do, how many is the question. It might be informative to look at Antonia and follow her trajectory. Someone really should write up some of these figures’ history like a business school case study. I’m not sure how much of a following Posette has, but she’s still getting work when she could be collecting Social Security. Maybe people have been too seduced by the siren song of the latest and greatest. I think that a well made, relatively lightweight, pretty figure with a ton of content, easy to work with and useable in as many versions of Poser/DS as possible would do better than some of the stuff out there or being contemplated. If you want to push the envelope, be state of the art etc. fine but you’ll move a lot more Corollas than super cars.

“Everyone is concerned about the next generation Poser figure, but I wonder if there will be a next generation of Poser users?”

Interesting question. I think the things you mention will remain the case as long as it is driven by obtained content. The revolution on the web came with user generated content, blogs YouTube etc. Technology would have to take a huge leap to make creating Poser content easy enough to be widely done. Think easy, good quality, create my clone from my Xbox cam, easy, cheap mocap etc. And very important, an easy way to create clothing, preferably from photos or patterns. The former are on the way. The latter, probably not in the foreseeable future. Maybe a service using sweat sh… excuse me, inexpensive 3D labor to create clothes on demand would work. Of course, it would kill the content creators, but people might feel more free to use any figure that came along. And no, I’m not talking the Poser forum definition of easy or existing tools easy. I think that falls under the heading of ‘My grandma installed RedHat Enterprise in an hour so why does everyone use Windoze?’

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken