1. have instancing ability like VUE to dump billions of polygons of content without the software shutting down. Then Poser users would not need VUE for nature scenes. This is the primary aspect of 3d that is holding Poser down... the inability to render big, expansive REALISTIC nature scenes with people able to be posed as easily... as ONLY as easy as Poser itself allows

2. Since Posette and Miki2, all your Poser people have sucked... focus on making very low poly people as background filler... OR... actually invest in a market viable figure to compete with DAZ Genesis... and that won't be in the budget... so, like I said... focus on very low poly background people who can populate massive scenes and be replicated with your new kickass instancing machine. Look at Predatron's successful low poly people. Consider the ability to clothe thousands of Posette 4 people who can be animated with very small computer processing. It makes no sense to offer heavy poly, heavy file size people who suck anyways compared to the competitor... right? Why waste the time and money investment? Offer a low poly medival knight and a low poly business woman and low poly clothed kid, etc... make the Poser peope actually something 100% of your customer base will use instead of like the what''s their names that only 10% of your customers use.

3. Please Please Please take a look at the Poser galleries here and stop listening solely to the Poser forums. How many "I want total photorealism" renders do you see in the galleries? THOSE are the people in the gallery are actually buying stuff. The people in the forums who post a lot mostly don't buy ANYTHING. I did not buy Poser pro 2012 and 2014. Why? Look at the damn galleries. I want the same things the people in the galleries want. How is Renderosity's store staying alive with Genesis products already in the 'clearance' category? Poser and DAZ have screwed the vendors. But buyers would love to be able to buy all a loved vendor's products. If the vendors lose interest, the buyers of Poser will lose interest. The buyers of Poser post in the gallery and rarely say anything in the forums. The galleries tell you exactly what Poser users are buying and using.

4. Either swallow your pride and work to make Genesis work fully in Poser or release a kickass product that gallery artists want to use. I am damn frustrated with all this focus on realism and a product that is worthless with practicality and usefullness in day-to-day

Actually, there are a heck of a lot of people who buy a lot but don't render all that much. The respond to sales, and buy stuff "just in case." A great market to appeal to. Sometimes, I'm that person.

Also, there are people who post in these forums who render images. I am very frequently that person.

I just don't post to the Rendo galleries because unless you have about a thousand followers, almost no one will see/respond to your post. I prefer to post elsewhere.

I wouldn't judge the Poser userbase by the galleries here any more than I would by the forum posts. They both tell part of the story. But only part.

Edit: Oops. As to the rest of your post, indeed. Instancing would be very, very cool. And a focus on low poly people for crowds is a pretty surprising, but probably very clever idea.

Edit again. Dammit. I mean to add, vilters has done some great work with the low poly P4 people. With the right work, they can look quite lovely.

Hello Coleman.

1; I agree, instancing would make life easy.

1. I agree, Poser should come with some killer default figures, AND with a TON of content to start them off. => First make your figures popular, then start thinking about making money from them. Not the other way around.

3; I partly agree.
You have the "forum gang", you have the "chatroom gang", and you have the "render gang". And the vast majority that does not come here at all.

"Who" or what "gang" is representative for the common average home alone Poser user that just wants to have some quality hobby time? ?

Let us not speak about the "porn gang".  They do not give a damm, as long as it sells.

4; I do NOT agree.
Some years ago DAZ choose its own path.
Genesis and DS belong together.
They left Poser at their own free will, and it is NOT up to SM to correct that at all.

How PP2016 could make a TOn of new buyers? In order of importance:
1- By becoming as end user friendly as possible.
2- By incorporating some killer figures with a ton of content at release.
3- By promoting the application and the new figures by filling up the freestuf area's with items showing off the new capabilities and figures.

I really hope this does not become another "Poser should support Genesis" thread that quickly repeats all that has gone before and gets locked.

Anyway, much of what you ask would be useful to me but I doubt I am an average Poser user.  I do buy a great deal from Rendo, every month, far too much in fact.  I do a number of renders and occasionally I upload to the gallery so that friends can see what I am playing with this month.  Is my gallery representative of my work, not really.  Is it representative of Poser users generally, who knows, most don't upload renders to any gallery.  Does it represent users who use galleries, clearly it is not, I generally don't do nudes so that is around 50% of any comparison gone immediately.

I don't want 'Photorealistic' as I have often said in the past, my aim is 'believeable, not quite the same thing but I have purchased the last two updates of Poser because of things like SSS and IDL.  They are a small step towards 'Photorealistic' but a nice step towards believeable. 

Finally there are many users that do not buy from vendors but have not abandoned Poser but build thier own and little that SM do is going to change that.   For me SM have got Poser about right and it seems to be in good hands but I doubt much of that has come about from listening to forum users, it is too small a sample to be important.

I know Poser is big in Japan, as SM happened to buy the VS part of e-Frontier only while leaving the Japan half as it was, and as Poser has a Japanese version, and a lot of content definitely is Japan-oriented.

I know Poser is serious in France and Germany, as it has such versions as well.

From the shipload of galleries and artists I happen to be aware of, hardly any of the Japanese / French / German areas are into photorealism or anything alike, and a serious part of the remaining community is into Comics etc too.

When I open the Rendo gallery, showing 30 images on page 1, only one of them can be put in a Poser/Photorealism kind of category. When I filter to Poser-gallery, only 10 out of 30 fit in such a category.

So what's the basis for the assumption that a serious portion of the Poser user base does require improved realism? And what's the basis for the idea that SM doesn't know themselves so people in this forum keep on telling them? I'm just wondering, you kow.

From this forum, and others, I do have the impression that a lot of people have issues utilizing the vast amount of features to their desire. Which suggests that we could do with a set of wizzards guiding us through. Software ones that is, instead of the ones in this forum and around. And perhaps more (accessible) tutorials and manuals. So that's a big YES to Vilters #1 recommendation.

In the meantime, loads of functionality and content and anything else is developed not by SM but by other people. That's bought, incorporated, or available via separate routes. So I would suggest: when you want things to change, feel free to start up something yourself, get it sold around, offer it to SM and you'll get where you want. Like I'm using PhilC's wardrobe wizard, and D3D render scripts, and Paolo's Reality as well as Face-Off's Poserphysics and his Octane plugin as well. And as I did dive into Cloth and Hair Room for three month and published all my findings for free. And as I'm about to finish my first three months investigation on Material Room, and will publish all tuts on that as well pretty soon.

So that's my opinion on the other issues. Let's stop mourning, let's just kickass ourselves and get something done. Poser is worth it.

I don't know what "instancing" is so I will withhold comment until I find out.

As I understand instancing, if there are 20 identical items in the scene (say, lamp posts) it only loads one geometry and texture, and thus uses a fraction of the memory....

@EClark: let me try. When you copy an object in your scene, all those copies have properties of their own, so any adjustment have to be made multiple times. In material, pose, anything. When you "instance" an object instead, then all instances follow the leading object and you have to alter properties, pose, ... only once; the rest will follow.

The downside is that objects will look (too) similar and the result will look as computer generated. So Vue takes serious efforts to make variances when instancing trees into a wood.

Edit: Xpost with WandW. But in addition: the memory-save is in scene-building only. At rendering, all the surface elements need to be there... Watch Vue when rendering out a 1000 tree wood (or the 10.000 plant meadows as in my galleries at the moment).

Personally, I prefer Poser to be good at its own portion of the workflow, instead of doing all the jobs (poorly). When I need instancing, I use Vue. Like I use all the other tools for the trade. But that's me.

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.

1. '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.

2. 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.  

How many renders in the galleries use IDL?

How many correct gamma?

How many use dynamic hair?

How many use dynamic cloth? How many would use dynamic cloth if the folks at Poser actually worked on making it useful?!

How many animations are uploaded to the gallery?

What kind of renders are uploaded to the galleries?

I wasn't being flippant about pro forum users not buying content. Most of them have said themselves, even pushed people... not to buy content... they could make themselves. Then why have a store? Renderosity could close right now... then. Why is it needed?

Because 3rd party content keeps this entire market alive.

If 3rd party content stops... Poser sales drop and... stop. Because then it's only the Cinema3d and 3dsMax and Rhino folks who would Poser once in a blue moon project

I see no renders in the gallery of the bloodshot eye in raytrace using gamma correction. These folks posting in the galleries are the ones keeping Poser alive and the renders they do... do NOT require anything above Poser 6 to do what they do.

Poser - bring something useful to make people buy your next product

Thanx for that clarification, aRtBee.

One thing that needs to be improved or go away is the FaceGen part of the Face Room.  It is currently utterly useless for generating face shapes from photos, whilst the current version of the FaceGen demo gives decent results without much user intervention.

 It was one of the reasons I first purchased Poser 7, and fortunately for SM, it wasn't the only reason... :glare:

PS Speaking to Coleman's point, I think that people who post in the galleries are also a small but different minority than forum posters.  (I have posted exactly two renders to the gallery here, and may post another soon) People who post there may be representitive of those who purchase content here, but I don't know how representitive they are of Poser users....

Quote -  

In the meantime, loads of functionality and content and anything else is developed not by SM but by other people. That's bought, incorporated, or available via separate routes. So I would suggest: when you want things to change, feel free to start up something yourself, get it sold around, offer it to SM and you'll get where you want. Like I'm using PhilC's wardrobe wizard, and D3D render scripts, and Paolo's Reality as well as Face-Off's Poserphysics and his Octane plugin as well. And as I did dive into Cloth and Hair Room for three month and published all my findings for free. And as I'm about to finish my first three months investigation on Material Room, and will publish all tuts on that as well pretty soon.

So that's my opinion on the other issues. Let's stop mourning, let's just kickass ourselves and get something done. Poser is worth it.

That's a fair point I love Poser but I would find it more difficult without the Camera Panel and Light, Render and Pose dots from Netherworks, the Library and Figure Manager from Shaderworks and a few others that helps make Poser fun and easy to use.  I have them load at start up so I tend to forget how much I have added from 3rd parties.

I also use the Batch Material Convert script, again from Netherworks, that way I can place all the Materials in the right folder instead of hunting MAT files in the Pose folder, where they are still placed by some vendors.

Quote

"If 3rd party content stops, Poser sales drop."

Perhaps, or perhaps not?

Blender is free.
Those that can manage Poser, can manage Blender to build their own content.
And I see lots of Zbrush, Blender, Maya, Lightwave etc users here.

Part of the "creativity", part of the "fun and personal satisfaction", is to build the content yourself.

@vilters: it depends, that's personal you know. I explicitely stopped modelling about 10 years ago, because it's not my cup of tea, it's a sheer disaster. I picked Poser, Vue and the Adobe kit as my tools, and I'm into scene compo, posing & animation (and hence dynamics), and into lighting / materials / rendering and the various facets of post-work.

So I buy stuff, and modify textures. Sometimes I buy because I like it, sometimes too to reward the makers of the freestuff I use as well. But making content is definitely not part of MY creative process (it would be a serious roadblock instead).

Everyone's different - well, at least I am :-)

Quote - Instancing would require a near total rewrite of the codebase, as it would impact memory management, content management, render prestaging, etc.

Total rewrite? That's what was also some said to be required for 64 bit, OpenGL, multiple undo, multithreading, OS X, Intel Mac, GI, weight maps and many other things.

Quote - Part of the "creativity", part of the "fun and personal satisfaction", is to build the content yourself.

That's what YOU say!

All teasing aside, Tony, I've spent over $1500 on modeling softwares that ***I can't begin to understand! ***And before everyone starts berating my intelligence, I'm not a dummy. I have degrees in mass communications and film, electrical engineering, and psychology. I've written books. I'm good enough at Poser that people hire me to illustrate for them.

I'm not an idiot, (contrary to popular opinion) but no tutorial I've run across has made Wings understandable to me. Sculptris... Blender... ZBrush... they all make no sense to me! All I wind up with after spending the money and hours and hours of grief is a shapeless nothing!

For my purposes, I can either buy content or go do something other than Poser. 

I doubt I am alone.

Quote - Actually, there are a heck of a lot of people who buy a lot but don't render all that much. The respond to sales, and buy stuff "just in case." A great market to appeal to. Sometimes, I'm that person.

Also, there are people who post in these forums who render images. I am very frequently that person.

I just don't post to the Rendo galleries because unless you have about a thousand followers, almost no one will see/respond to your post. I prefer to post elsewhere.

I wouldn't judge the Poser userbase by the galleries here any more than I would by the forum posts. They both tell part of the story. But only part.

Edit: Oops. As to the rest of your post, indeed. Instancing would be very, very cool. And a focus on low poly people for crowds is a pretty surprising, but probably very clever idea.

Edit again. Dammit. I mean to add, vilters has done some great work with the low poly P4 people. With the right work, they can look quite lovely.

I agree with this I am considering stopping posting on Rendo now and primarily moving to my own website , sharecg and Deviantart to show my work now 2 of my recent renders did not even get a single view the only ones where me comming to see if anyone had rated it or viewed it.

so this backs up exactly what you said at the start unless you have a 1000 subscribers no-ones going to see or respond.

Quote - > Quote - Part of the "creativity", part of the "fun and personal satisfaction", is to build the content yourself.

That's what YOU say!

All teasing aside, Tony, I've spent over $1500 on modeling softwares that ***I can't begin to understand! ***And before everyone starts berating my intelligence, I'm not a dummy. I have degrees in mass communications and film, electrical engineering, and psychology. I've written books. I'm good enough at Poser that people hire me to illustrate for them.

I'm not an idiot, (contrary to popular opinion) but no tutorial I've run across has made Wings understandable to me. Sculptris... Blender... ZBrush... they all make no sense to me! All I wind up with after spending the money and hours and hours of grief is a shapeless nothing!

For my purposes, I can either buy content or go do something other than Poser. 

I doubt I am alone.

Nope, you are not alone.  I have tried some of the Digital Tailor tutorials and that has been the best for me, that and Silo.  However the most I have done so far is to modify items purchased for my own use.  On the whole I purchase content and then modify the materials either within Poser or, for figures, I use Paint Shop Pro and layers.  I have added scars, tattoos and freckles that way and I enjoy it, good as Silo is I don't get the same buzz from that.

I just cannot see me spending the time to build something that could take me a week (plus the year gaining the skills) and yet I could buy of $10.

Quote - > Quote - Instancing would require a near total rewrite of the codebase, as it would impact memory management, content management, render prestaging, etc.

Total rewrite? That's what was also some said to be required for 64 bit, OpenGL, multiple undo, multithreading, OS X, Intel Mac, GI, weight maps and many other things.

Is this a hint....? :P

And I know it probably wouldn't be a 'total' rewrite; but for what people want whenever they mention instancing (Vue 2014 without the cost and decade of development), it runs a significant chance of being a nightmare to hammer out into a functional feature. Or else an encoded splash screen that pops us with 'You Can't Do This In Poser, Dummy!'.

Which might be a neat easter egg..... 

[ ]  Instancing would be nice for populating a terrain with trees and bushes.

[ ]  I didn't know that one could upload animations to one's gallery.  What formats are accepted?  (SWF?  GIF?  AVI?  MPEG?)  To the point, I do use Poser for animation - a lot.

[ ]  The trend seems to be toward more complex scenes, rendered with more raytracing tricks, as Firefly is developed and the average computer is more powerful (64bit is now fairly common).  Since processor speeds have plateaued, I'd like to be able to spread the load among all my computers, i.e., give me networking for a single render.

there's another spectrum of poser user, lol more than a hobby, wanting to make movies, but no money to buy the high end software.  i buy the content that i can, and model when i need something that i can't find pre-made or is too expensive.

iz a temptation to give up on the movie idea, and spend the rest of my life sipping martinis and watching telly. lol

Quote - there's another spectrum of poser user, lol more than a hobby, wanting to make movies, but no money to buy the high end software.  i buy the content that i can, and model when i need something that i can't find pre-made or is too expensive.

iz a temptation to give up on the movie idea, and spend the rest of my life sipping martinis and watching telly. lol

I hope not; your new look is quite Gabor-esque...

hey, not bad!  SM can add instancing that easy?  

purpose of poser gallery here: display renders of items recently purchased.  when you gotta rush out renders in poser to share with friends, there ain't time for all those arcane render settings, but I still hope they keep improving FFRender, even if caustics are not in next version.

Quote - purpose of poser gallery here: display renders of items recently purchased. 

Good point. And it actually works for Renderosity. If I see a product that I want that looks pretty good, even in a crappy render -- particularly if it looks good in a crappy render -- I'm very likely to buy it. But the real temptations come when my favorite artists credit a product. Then I'm like Pavlov's dog on the internet: salivating on my credit card.

Quote - 3) Please Please Please take a look at the Poser galleries here and stop listening solely to the Poser forums. How many "I want total photorealism" renders do you see in the galleries? THOSE are the people in the gallery are actually buying stuff.

That's a lousy metric, if for nothing else than this isn't the only place people post images. In the last two years and a bit, and I just did a count from the gallery on my computer, I've posted over 2700 images online, none of them here. There's maybe a hundred images that haven't been posted publicly (they've been done for someone). And a few I did for commission (under another name). And they use subsurface scattering, and indirect lighting, and all the other "photorealism" tools you apparently are insisting are a waste of time.

1.  http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/movie-sets-81-city-blocks/95693/  This links to dreamlands 81 city block prop at this store.  I have used this in Poser Pro 2012 and it works great.  The neat part is that it is nothing but a bunch of billboards.  RWBY also uses the same trick for their forests.  While it may be neat to have a system that allows a billion/million leaves to be on set at the same time if you make a scene full HD (1920x1080) that is only 2,073,600 pixels so if you have a forest with a million leaves each leave will only get 2 pixels.  There is not much detail in 2 pixels.  The time required to compute those leaves will be hours for what result?  BTW the 81 city blocks prop is about 3.5 miles/5Km across.  How many Poser figures could you get in that scene?

1. There is never going to be a figure that can compete against the IDEAL of V4.  Pay very close attention to the word IDEAL.  The reality of V4.2, notice they had to make three versions of her before they got it right, is it is a so-so figure.  Her only claim to fame is that everyone is on broad with the mantra “Vicky is Perfect”.  This coupled with the notion that a figure can only wear cloths custom tailored to them all feeds into this mindset that we all need to rally around a single figure. 

If you are familiar with Samedi by Netherworks he is a rag doll that somewhat looks like a person.  He has a very large head and fairly small body.  I had to take three Samedi’s and make them walk out to Viper space craft.  I could have tried to convert the spacesuits to make them fit the doll or what I did was conformed the suit to the doll and had a walk cycle created for each pilot.  The bodies were made invisible so there was no poke through.  The scene worked very well and not a lot of time was wasted trying to find something for Samedi that never existed.

My point being that content suppliers and customers need to wake to the fact that custom tailored clothes are becoming less and less needed.  If the clothing is a normal day to day item like pants and a shirt that do not need to be skin tight then with very little work any piece of clothing can be made to fit any figure.  There are some exceptions but if you look at most pictures you will find that to be true.  For skin tight outfits the texture should probably be painted on the figure.  Most of the items that need to show the underlying figure (the item of clothing needing to be translucent) would most likely fall into the bellowing items like haram pants.  Items like the haram pants could be made to fit any figure.  Most of the items I buy are not for the figure listed (unless they are for Poser supplied figures).  I buy items to use with my Poser figures since they can be made to fit.  The added benefit is that my pictures do not have that look and feel as what is posted in the galleries.

If you break it down and step back a pair of pants is created in almost then same manner as a figure.  The biggest difference being that the pants are meant to follow the movements of some other figure.  I can take a pair of pants and make them move around, bend and twist just like the invisible man is wearing them.  So like in the case of Samedi they are conformed to him and the pants move to the commands given the base figure.  It really is as simple as that.

Where does that leave vendors?  In the real world cloths have a very small range of actual patterns, however that is made up for with a wide range of colors/textures.  My need for two dozen pants is small, however my need for different textures for the sets that I do have is much greater.  The vendors that can create a pair of pants and make them fit a wide range of figures with a large selection of textures will probably do OK.  And before we get the argument that you have to put all the morphs into the cloths ahead of time, the same could be said about a new set of morphs that come out after the clothing was created.  That set of clothing will not work with the new morph so what is to be done?  If you have Poser Pro 2014 you can inject those morphs yourself, or wait for the vendor to do it.  That is if the vendor even supports your figure.  Or use the morph brush, or make the figure invisible. 

3.  How many people do you think come to the gallery here?  Maybe 10 thousand? That is probably a very high number.  Go look at Youtube and look at the number of views for RWBY, 2.4 million and that does not count the number of views at Roosters Teeth website.  At the end of each RWBY episode is blurb saying made with Poser.  Which group do you think has a greater impact on the perception of what Poser can do?  Especially if most of the renders here are done using Poser 6 techniques.

 4.  No comment. 

Quote - > Quote - there's another spectrum of poser user, lol more than a hobby, wanting to make movies, but no money to buy the high end software.  i buy the content that i can, and model when i need something that i can't find pre-made or is too expensive.

iz a temptation to give up on the movie idea, and spend the rest of my life sipping martinis and watching telly. lol

I hope not; your new look is quite Gabor-esque...

Aiko 3 luv :wub:  she looks so sad in photographs but i absolutely luv herrr ... whe she smiles

V4.2 is simply the version that DAZ stopped with. It is by no means perfect or ideal.

seach, they often post animations in freestuff, which may be links to youtube et al.

I useta do anims (gifs) to post here, some in gallery but mostly in forum msgs.  I also stored them as swf on various defunct sites.

I love you Coleman, but you haven't really thought this through. 

To address your items:

1.  VUE is a lanscape program - Poser isn't. Adding instancing would probably require leaving every single bit of legacy content behind - good luck in selling that to the Poser user base.  I would suggest that you open a cr2 or a pp2 file in a text editor and read it sometime. 

2a.  The SM figures aren't designed to be supermodels - they are designed to be NORMAL people - wearing normal clothing.  The biggest difference between V4 & Sydney - V4 has a cottage industry of mesh fixes - Sydney doesn't. 

I prefer the SM figures - but then I am not a third rate Elvgren wannabe.  I have progressed from NVIATWAS.

2b.  Any new figure is going to be met by people deliberately sowing FUD.  Some will be doing it because their business depends on supporting a different figure. * Others will be focusing on making mountains out of molehills on any percieved flaw (In all seriousness, how many people here are making renders of a figure's armpits?).  Still others will be yammering on about how none of us actually need new figures, because any of us can adjust Posette in (modeling program of your choice).  These folks have yet to figure out that most Poser users not only do not have those skill sets, but have absolutely no interest in aquiring them.

2c.  Any new figure success is completely dependant on vendor buy-in.  I'll ask again:

HOW DO YOU PROPOSE TO FORCE THE VENDORS TO SUPPORT A NEW FIGURE?  "I'm an artist, I only make what I am interested in" is the Vendor's battle-cry both here and in other storefronts.  Right along with "I once made a piece of content for <M3, Apollo Maximus, Jessi 1 etc>.  I made a very niche product - it didn't sell (the fact that it was both more expensive and less capable than my other products is irrelevant), therefore I will never make anything for any figure not named V4."

HOW DO YOU PROPOSE TO FORCE THE VENDORS TO SUPPORT NEW FEATURES?  Most vendors are aggressively unwilling to move past the Poser 6 feature set.  The fact that almost the entire user base is using Poser 7 or later is irrelevant to them.  Which btw, is also an issue for your 1st item.  

3.  Why should anyone pay attention to the galleries here?  I have been here almost 10 years now, and today was the first day that I actually spent time in the galleries.  Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crap ) applies.

4a.  As far as "Native DSON in Poser" - your suggestion means that DAZ would make the money off content and SM would be stuck with all of the support costs.  This is precisely why SM refused to add DSON to the Poser code-base.  As it currently stands, it only takes about 15 minutes to convert genesis to a Poser native figure - No DSON necessary.

4b.  What does genesis actually add (other than access to Dariofish's HFS aliens?)  All of the characters made for genesis over the past few years look just like their Gen4 predecessors - as does the clothing (idler168 shoes for genesis look great - I have the exact same shoes he made for Miki 1 and P6 Jessi about 8 years ago).

Quote - hey, not bad!  SM can add instancing that easy?  

purpose of poser gallery here: display renders of items recently purchased.  when you gotta rush out renders in poser to share with friends, there ain't time for all those arcane render settings, but I still hope they keep improving FFRender, even if caustics are not in next version.

That would certainly cover off the reason for some of the posting in my gallery.  Not sure on the recently though as it can be months, or years, before I use some of my purchases, particularly if they were sale items.

Quote - 2b. Any new figure is going to be met by people deliberately sowing FUD. Some will be doing it because their business depends on supporting a different figure

It's interesting how a person that hasn't sold anything has the insight to tell vendors how they should conduct themselves and sell things when vendors have sales reports and trends to tell them what sells and what doesn't. And you are very incorrect about who should accept the blame on how things are done... And it isn't the vendors mainly... It's those with the purchasing power that dictate how things done.

A vendor can very well set up things to use latest features, but if they only sell 10 copies, guess what? They'll go back to the old ways because they have bills to pay. So it isn't what the vendors should do, it's how you get the customers upgraded to the new tech so vendors can use it.

I've seen quite a few Poser vendors over the years proudly proclaim that they were going to use the features in Poser 9+ and then the customers shut them down by buying nothing, and they're back to Poser 7 compatibility to keep their lights on. So please, focus your rage properly where it needs to go... And figure why most of poser is still stuck on old figures instead of new weightmapped figures. But take the blame off the Poser vendors, they'll only make what the masses want, the incentive to move forward has to come from elsewhere.... I'll leave that to you to figure out. Meanwhile my customer base is on the latest tech, because the company I sell through has figured it out... Don't begrudge me for that.

Anyway, I gotta get off this ship and go through immigration so I can get in my comfortable bed.

Good luck.

I think Poser is pretty amazing as it is.  I use it at work for short animations for aircrew training, and at home for all manner of filthy, sleazy, wierd, perverted and just plain messed up stuff that NO ONE ever sees.

Genesis?, V3?, good ole Vicky 4?, Dawn?....who cares.  Use the one you like and ignore the rest.  Even V3 can look pretty great if done right.

The one failing in my opinion is the lack of a fully detailed, comprehensive and complete manual for both the general user AND content creators.  I've had to buy a few books, download a ton of videos, and scrape together endless tutorials from all over the net to learn how to make my own stuff.  

Just load a prop or a figure, define it in the octane plugin as a scatter object, specify the number and randomness (scale, rotation and offset) and optional provide a distribution map. You can do this for multiple props

In the attached image I used a 100K grass objects, 1000 patches of flowers, and 2 different trees (300 and 600). Render time around 2 minutes (depends on your videocards), memory usage for entire scene around 600MB.

But - like Vue - it does come at a cost (for the Octane and the plugin)

It is not just the instancing in vue it is the easy to create outdoor daylight& GI renders,in vue ,that dont require some silly "envirodome" prop etc.

"Since Posette and Miki2, all your Poser people have sucked..."

Well that is subjective,P6 James and particularly jessi had great potential.
However much of the user base here IMHO,felt so secure that the latest DAZ Figures would work in poser for eternity,that they largely dismissed the P6 figures and some took much joy in deriding them thus they were never fully realized.

For the first time since its advent I Just spent the last few days experimenting in the poser faceroom with jessi , James and Miki2.
The poser faceroom is  truly the "undiscovered country" IMHO.
It is unfortunate that a "BODY ROOM "of similar capabilities was never developed for the native poser figures but  Oh well another misstep by the owners of poser.

"hey, not bad!  SM can add instancing that easy?  "

I honestly dont see much of a demand in this community
for the ability to render render 400 identical copies
of the that same tree,rock or figure ( see attached)

Even the instancing feature we have in C4D
is somewhat limited.
A "replicator" function like I have in MODO is better better as I can at least VARY the scale and  rotation of the Duplicates for variety.

There are instancing solutions for Poser using PoserFusion.

In Vue, check to see if the version you have has PoserFusion included. Not all do, but some. Vue's instancing is quite good, but its pretty much focused on trees and plants. And its awesome! I use it all the time in rendering natural scenery.

Shade 3D also has PoserFusion, and it has its instancing implemented in what are called Replicators. There are two types: surface replicators and path replicators. Surface replicators are great for anything you might also do in Vue. Path Replicators are great for replicating objects along a path, like chain links, for example. Because you can use offsets too, you aren't limited to just random stuff along surfaces but distributions in space around the object.

What makes PoserFusion so clever is that since you are hosting the scene within Shade or Vue, you can go back, make changes to your Poser scene, then updated it directly within your other project.

Quote - "hey, not bad!  SM can add instancing that easy?  "

I honestly dont see much of a demand in this community
for the ability to render render 400 identical copies
of the that same tree,rock or figure ( see attached)

 

A tree or rock is fine. Merely having a rotation and slight scaling in some of the instances would do find as a cheat to pretend they aren't clones, and most of the time someone won't notice.

People however... humans are evolved to be very good at recognizing humans. You can't vary scale very much because it will look wrong. You can't merely rotate the figure because, well, humans have a defined front and a back and a top and a bottom that are instantly recognizable, so rotation doesn't help you much.

The ability to recognize people is why Photoshopping of, say, crowds to look bigger at political rallies don't usually stand up to scrutiny because people will quickly pick out the clones.

Quote - > Quote - Part of the "creativity", part of the "fun and personal satisfaction", is to build the content yourself.

That's what YOU say!

All teasing aside, Tony, I've spent over $1500 on modeling softwares that ***I can't begin to understand! ***And before everyone starts berating my intelligence, I'm not a dummy. I have degrees in mass communications and film, electrical engineering, and psychology. I've written books. I'm good enough at Poser that people hire me to illustrate for them.

I'm not an idiot, (contrary to popular opinion) but no tutorial I've run across has made Wings understandable to me. Sculptris... Blender... ZBrush... they all make no sense to me! All I wind up with after spending the money and hours and hours of grief is a shapeless nothing!

For my purposes, I can either buy content or go do something other than Poser. 

I doubt I am alone.

Basicwiz, have you heard of or tried Sketch-up? I've been using it to build sets and props since Poser 7. It's very easy to use- you litterally draw and drag your object into 3D. There are two versions- the pro version that you buy and a free version.

  I've been doing a series of graphic novels since Poser 7 and I've found that you can get close to beleivable and real through simple practise and Poser's gradual improvement. I don't see the need for alot of the plug-ins that are being pushed right now.

Quote - Is this a hint....? :P

It is not.

Coleman:

There are two places where I strongly disgree.  The first, your defeatist attitude toward figures, along with you assumption that company unmentioned will forever be the number one.  The Poser Roxie and Rex are both darn good figures, bending well, not horrid looking, and not as your company unmentioned, something resembling what Vargas did for Playboy as a cartoonist.  I use them over and above the company unmentioned figures. 

EClarke and now Vilters are making darn nice stuff for Roxie, and the other figures that you say should be reduced in resolution and relegated to background.  No.  They should not.  Far better they continue developing and improving them.  the V thing and M thing have run the gamut, reached the end of usefulness, probably soon extinct.  I really could not care less.  P6 James is a far more believable character than anything done on the M thing base.  I don't like Jesse, she needs a complete workover and refinements.

THe DSON thing, daz grew it, daz can chew it.  It's not SmithMicro's responsibility to crawl to that standard.  Daz made the mess, let them figure it out.  I see some reference to the "G2" in reference to daz software, G2 is Alyson, period.  It was a long  time before the gene thing came out.  And even Alyson requires no more than a few dial spins to look pretty realistic, same cannot be said for the V thing. 

My guess is most of the complaints about the Poser figures are the result of one two minute look and it not meeting what you wanted.  Get used to it, there are dials, there is the face room.  There is also my first choice of clothing, Poser dynamic.  9 times out of 10 I'll choose a dynamic cloth over conforming.  And it is usable as it is.  There is somewhat of a learning curve, but not much.

Doric

Competing with Vue is a bit of an unrealistically tall order, but on the other hand support for decent sized scenes would be really nice. I'd love a built in skydome and the option to switch the small ground square for an infinite plane. Of course this requires LOD support and more non-trivial improvements to the render engine.

I do believe this makes business sense. Not because I egocentrically assume that my wishes are the same as everybody elses in the community, but because it boosts the Poser eco system by giving vendors and buyers more content types to generate.

Quote - Competing with Vue is a bit of an unrealistically tall order, but on the other hand support for decent sized scenes would be really nice. I'd love a built in skydome and the option to switch the small ground square for an infinite plane. Of course this requires LOD support and more non-trivial improvements to the render engine.

I agree - I just don't see it happening. Poser is character software rather than character driven software. Maybe what we know as Poser can become a "character room" in a next generation product - but that's really what PoserFusion is.

the instances used in vue are each unique.  butyou cna import several poser people or groupos fo people and replicate them lots of times in vue without overloading it.

There is another feature that vue has..  someting called xstream where vue can work within some other 3d  application, so you can have plants, water, terrains,r ealistic sunlight etc inside of your other 3d software, llike C4d or studiomax. unfortunately xstream doesn't work in poser.

I have to admit that one of the areas that Poser truly disappoints me in is the creation of woodland areas and nature in general.

Quote - I have to admit that one of the areas that Poser truly disappoints me in is the creation of woodland areas and nature in general.

I agree.  there are some workarounds, but not with any kind of realism.  Problem being, I have several tree generation programs, for Povray, which can make quite realistic trees.  Some can export .obj, but more than a couple and poser is going to choke.  Lisa's Bottanicals are pretty good, but poser doen't have a way to say you want six and randomize their size, location and rotation, and trace the ground level while you're at it.  I have both the cyclorama and daz environments, don't have much use for either.  Billboards and they look like it. Doric

I would already be sold for a PP2016 version, if it's cloth (and hair-) room would be more "MD-ish", so to say =)

if walk designer could support vehicles with front wheel drive, tire rotating & turning for trips round the corner

4legged, winged creatures

Quote - if walk designer could support vehicles with front wheel drive, tire rotating & turning for trips round the corner

4legged, winged creatures

It's atle time consuming, but you could always just turn the tires and advance the car the distance it would actually move in a quarter turn. Do that our times for one complete rotation and save that to the library as an animation.

walk designer could be so much more totally rocking awesome !!!

Well, I personally want a UI option that looks like a FPV game engine. I want to be able to walk my figures around a fully rendered 3d scene, find a spot I like, change the camera to 3rd person, pose my figure, and render.

Then I want to be able to go back into first person view, equip a weapon, and kill all the monsters in my runtime. 

And I want to be able to do all that with an Xbox controller.

One can dream, right?