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Most of the end users aren't willing to move beyond Load, Conform, "Make Art".  There's a poll up on RNDA asking what they used Poser for and over 70% said they used it for making stills with 1 figure.  And there is nothing wrong with that; this is a hobbyist market after all. 

Forum users aren't an accurate representation of actual Poser users, so poll data should be taken with a grain of salt. The majority of poser users aren't active in any of the forums. They come to the MP, buy what they need and leave. 

 

Quote - However, I am moving beyond NVIATWAS and I am tired of being held back by the luddites.  The correct answer to "Can you help me with this Poser 7 problem?" is "Yes I can - get a copy of Poser 10 or 2014 and RTFM."  Lots of tools have been added to Poser to address common items like poke-thru, but the users won't use them.

 

Why are you being held back by what other people use poser for? I'm honestly confused by this statement. How is what anyone else does with Poser holding you back from what you want to do with it? If they're not willing to learn the tools that are available to them in the software they're using, then their work will suffer for it, not yours. If you mean in terms of content that's available, have you considered hiring a content artist to do custom work? There's plenty that would if you ask, for just about any figure. Granted, it is a good bit more expensive than what you'll pay in any of the MPs, but in turn you're getting exactly what you need, and since its custom, your renders won't have the same content that dozens or hundreds of others would have. PLUS, in most cases you own that custom content (depending of course on what your negotiations with the artist are), to do with as you please. Resell if that's what you choose, whatever. You bought it, you own the rights to it, it's yours.  

 

 

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How many people use the cloth room?  Not enough - once a user realizes how easy it is, they do tend to kick themselves for not going into the room sooner.

On the other hand - I didn't know I could use the walk designer to have a character walk around a set, save each of the frames as a universal pose until last month.  SHAZAM! I now have huge library of poses available for any of my characters in less time than it would take me to make more than 1 or 2 poses.  It is amazing what you can learn from others, or god forbid, crack the manual.

 

As far as the fitting room, you are as wrong as a soup sandwich; SM has stated repeatedly that they added it for end-users to separate clothing from figures. 

I understand what SM's intention with the fitting room was (I knew about it almost a year prior to its release). That doesn't mean that's what it's actually being used for by most (hobbyists), which is why I asked the question about the cloth room, as an example.

I don't think it will have that big of an impact on clothing vendors. Over time perhaps, but not until a lot more people move to PP2014 and above. It's only available in 2014, remember? P10 doesn't have it.

Poser Pro is mostly geared towards vendors and the more serious-minded / less hobbyist oriented users. Most of its features cater to content artists, whether that content is intended for resale or not. There are a lot of artists that use Poser that you never see in the galleries or at any of the major sites because they aren't active in the communities for one, and because they customize their base content so heavily that you'd never even recognize it began as poser content to begin with unless they told you. Example: I have a friend who makes tv commercials for a living. Half of what he does starts out in poser. Its not always organic figures he's using either. A good chunk of it is cars, inanimate objects, animated lettering, etc. Poser has tons of uses, and is utilized in the workflow of just about every field of visual communication out there. It just depends on the artist and/or studio and what their budgets and goals are.

Keep in mind, a large chunk of the work you see on TV and in magazines is done by freelance artists, often working alone, who don't have the resources for huge state of the art studios. They use whatever they have available to them to produce the results they need for the jobs they bid on.  

 

Quote - I am willing to pay for native content for the figures that I use.  The problem is that for the past 9 years vendors have whined repeatedly in this forum and others:

"I am a artist.  I only make what I am interested in making - which is skankwear for Victoria 3/4.  Why isn't every one buying what I am making, don't they understand that I am an artist."  They are aggressively unwilling to do market research to find out just what the marketplace is actually looking for. 

  So again, I ask have you considered hiring a content artist for custom work? If you're building a graphic novel, you would likely benefit from custom content. 

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I am using characters for the following meshes in my graphic novels:

Female Characters: All SM figures (P4 - P10), Miki 1,2,3 & 4, Mariko, Dawn, The Girl, Antonia, Kez, Maya Doll, Michelle, Terai Yuki 2, the DAZ figures have a few walk-ons.  Oh, and maybe Eroko, if she isn't tied up for someone. 

**Male Characters: ** All SM figures (P4 - P10), Adman, Apollo Maximus, Koz, Rikishi, along with with the occasional DAZ Gen 3 & 4 male figures.

Without the fitting room or a WW/Xdresser/morphing clothes combo, I couldn't do this - I would be stuck with the DAZ Gen4 figures - everyone would be the exact same height, and would all look the same - mostly caucasians with large mammalian protruberances.

Or you could hire an artist to modify or build the content you need that you can't find. If you don't have the skills or time or knowledge, a freelance artist can be your best friend.

 

When it comes to vendors and what content they're producing, the only thing I can recommend is to contact your favorite vendors and ask them to support other figures more often. Most are only a site mail away. They will likely be honest with you and tell you why they do or don't support said figure(s). Some may even be willing to do custom work for you if you're willing to pay what it's actually worth. 

Most vendors make very little profit on each sale, so they have to make items they think will sell. If the notion is that content for male figures or 3rd party figures doesn't sell, then why should a vendor spend the hours and weeks and months it takes to make content that's just going to sit there taking up server space and eventually get deleted?

On the same note, why should a vendor suffer through the added frustrations of working with poorly designed figures to begin with, especially if that figure isn't very widely used? Dealing with stray verts and parts that aren't mapped and symmetry that breaks a rig or a morph set, for the 2 or 3 bucks that a dozen sales might make after the MP takes its cut? Definitely not worth it. Most of the DAZ figures don't have those issues. Most of the SM figures do. 

I don't know if you've ever been a vendor, but items have to continuously sell in order to remain in the MP. If they go a period of time without any sales they get dumped in the clearance bin at a reduced price. From there the item has to make enough sales within a certain period of time or it gets deleted. That's not always the fault of the vendors, its the policy of the MP. Even if its a quality item, if it doesn't sell then it gets deleted.

Granted, there's a lot of vendors who don't approach the situation in the most logical manner so they wind up making more work for themselves. Tons of content from years past could be repurposed and updated to work with newer figures instead of just dropping out of sale altogether. It's usually easier and faster to rework an older piece than it is to build something new from scratch, since a good chunk of the tedious crap (UV mapping, for example) is already done. 

I'm sure some vendors do this, but it's not very apparent. 

I don't blame vendors for not publically supporting 3rd party figures that are so obscure or so old (or so poorly constructed) that no one uses them anymore, or few ever did to begin with, or their creators fell off the face of the earth 10 years ago and haven't been heard from since. That's too big of a risk for a vendor to take. As it is, poser content is priced so ridiculously, disgustingly cheap, the hours spent building the content makes sweat shop laborers look like high paid executives in comparison. The ends have to justify the means in order for it to be worth it for a vendor to make something. Which makes me wonder again, why more of them don't repurpose the stuff they built years ago that's no longer available, or designed for figures no one uses anymore. As an artist, they should be able to make it look and feel like something entirely new. 

When I first came back to poser, Apollo was one of the figures I was considering building content for, but his restrictions are too high and the risks are too great. His creator has nothing to do with Poser anymore, who knows how much longer Apollo will be available for download. There have been a few occasions where his hosting site was unavailabe for extended periods. 

The point is, if a vendor can't make enough sales on each item to at least eventually recoup the time costs that go into building that item, then it's not worth it for the vendor to make said item. Not if they're trying to make a living from it. 100 sales over the MP lifespan of an item is not making a living, not at these prices. 100 sales a week is a bit more in the line with making a living. So a vendor who has to eat and pay bills, has to support figures that the majority of their customers are using, or find another job. 

 

~Shane