Hmmmm....

 

1. How many people are willing to pony up the $$$ for this? Instancing would require a near total rewrite of the codebase, as it would impact memory management, content management, render prestaging, etc. It would also require scrapping the lighting system as it stands, as studio oriented lighting is pretty worthless in open air environments. And such a system would never be that good; Vue works because they concentrate on environments. SM lacks the development team for this, so if they tried it we would have a broken Poser with a half baked instancing system that costs as much or more than Photoshop does.

2a) Instancing doesn't give you thousands of figures to animate....unless you are having all those figures do exactly the same thing. It is just a trick, not magic. You -still- have memory limitations; in this case, you would be limited to how many discrete 'real', textured characters you could load into system RAM and still leave enough space for the OS and the instancing tables. If the answer is 5 figures, then that is how many you can instance. So it would become very, very apparent that your crowd of thousands is just a crowd of 5, as there would be only 5 motion sets going on.

2b) Low poly figures can be good...but require some serious support work. Sub-d and normal/diaplacement maps are what make them look -good-, which requires some knowledge on how and when. The polygon heavy figures we have evolved in no small part due to the nature of Poser (close up rendering of the human form) and the demand of the user base to have enough polygons to push around to make changes with.

3. 'Look at the galleries'..... and what? Try and come up with a bunch of macros to make something look better with no work? Poser's dev team aren't art critics; they're programmers. The forums are the place where you are supposed to convert ideas to text so others can understand what you need or would like to say. The only other contact pipeline is whatever SM has up. I have not one render in the gallery, and my purchase list stretches back to just after PFO became rosity, and I really have no intention of adding up what the dollar value has been. But my 70+ gig runtime is a hint. And that really isn't fair, vilters. Some of the porn gang turn out excellent content (Davo comes to mind), and some are quick and dirty as you say. Just like far too much of the store here.

4. I've made my feelings plain here.

What SM needs to do is contract with a proven figure provider, stick with them, and =advertise=. It wasn't that DAZ's products were incredible, because they weren't. But they advertised out the yin-yang where it counted.