"You have to decide yourself whether those are important enough to invest several thousands of dollars." vienastoks

I take it you are buying a comp with the figures preinstalled?

Before I get started here I'm going to assume most everyone know I am sure no freind of DAZ. I'm probably one of the biggest thorns in their side; at least till I got my fanges pulled by being banned.

Yes, the mil4 figure were a round for a comparativly long time. And why not, they worked well and were the state of the art at the time. They were around long enough for me to invest a fair chunk of change; but not even close to a grand, in clothes morphs and hirez skins.

When genesis came out and DAZ introed the autofit system, I was quite happy, I could move my mil4 clothes up to the next gen with no reinvetment. And the uvmap switching ment not have to spend $100 on new hirez skins. But Genesis and autofit had issues. There was new morphs to buy, and it seemed most characters were based off the V5 figure morph forcing people to buy it to use the other characters. That put me off. I'm not buying one morph just so another works, I just wont buy ether. 

While impatiently waiting for DAZ to fix the issues with genesis and autofit a DAZ PA released G2F; and why not? After 2 years of DAZ letting genesis wallow in it's own errors and issues, some one had to do something. Of coarse DAZ was more then happy to take 50% of the money G2F made with no effort on thier part.

So just what is DAZ doing about the issues with autofit? Collecting 50% of the money from PA workarounds for the issues. Which really takes away any motivation DAZ had to fix the issues. Why fix it when you can make a profit selling the workaround?

But much of G2F is just rinse and repeat of G1. So you get G1, toss a few hundered at it and before you have bought a good selection of items for G1, here comes G2F. About the time you start to see a sales slump for G2F items we will see G2M. Rinse repeat. Then when sales start to slump on that we may finally ; if ever, see G1.5. Then G2.5F and so on. I full expect to see new PA versions of the milG figures every time the sales slow for the last.

Now I think that autofit is one of the best features DAZ has come up with in a while. The UVmap swaping is also cool. Weightmapped figures are only new in the Poser/DAZ verce. They have been around for ages in most CG apps. DAZ was just the first company with a commercial release of one. Question is will DAZ ever update/fix autofit? No. DAZ realized real fast that autofit was costing them money, if it worked correctly it would still be costing them money. So no motivation to fix it.

But where does this leave Dawn? In the cat bird seat for people that are fed with DAZ's profit at the expence of customers or Posers locked in figures.

The battle with DAZ and Poser for figure superiority has cost both of them some customers. It seems in their battle they have forgotten what the fight is about, us. Dawn gives us a third viable alturnative. A figure designed by folks that are customer centric and not worried about making the rent for thier condo in floridia.

What we need is a third option to make DAZ and Poser wake up and realize they don't have the content figure maket cornered. Their customers are not captives. No matter how hard DAZ trys to strap customers to Studio with DIM and CMS, we have alturnatives. Alturnatives that don't fall under DAZ's careful screuteny. Alturnatives that don't need apps to help downlaod and install, or apps to actually find that installed content.

Having a third option where you don't have to get tired down to DAZ or buy Poser is a boon.