Hmmm...

Poser was the program that made me most envious back when I was still using the Amiga in the late 90s.  I never wanted to model people, I prefer to make mechanical things and their environments.  I had tried making people to put in my scenes, and while not bad for their era, it was consuming time I wanted to spend making other things.  As a sci-fi/SFX guy I look at props as something you build, whereas I see "actors" as something to audition.  It never bothered me that some people looked down on using premade figures and content, I just didn't want to spend years modeling and rigging a figure just to have someone standing in an image for scale.

After getting a "proper" PeeCee I got a chance to mess around with Poser 4 a bit and promptly bought version 5 at launch.  I've bought every version since, except for skipping 2010.

Initially I just wanted people in my scenes.  It wasn't long before I started thinking about characters, and unique props and clothing.  But I found it all very daunting, almost as if it were designed to encourage use of pre-made content and to keep people like me utterly baffled.  Then Poser6 came out, and being that it was a much more polished release than P5, I found myself doing all kinds of thing with it.  I used it as a renderer for the models I was making in nendo/Wings, and created a number of interesting (at the time) images that no one would guess came from Poser (mainly because I wasn't putting any figures in them).

Somehow, and the story still seems strange to me, I recommended Poser to someone working in a (government) research facility close by.  A few months later I was asked if I'd like to meet with a group who were looking to use Poser to illustrate their study data.  The second time I was asked if this would interest me I decided to see what they were doing and somehow got myself a nice contract to produce a substantial number of short animation clips.  I created an environment with office props, tweaked casual guy into an acceptable looking humanoid and began cranking out a seemingly neverending series of clips.  I learned some valuable organizational skills in the progress and put in more time with Poser over a couple of years than I had using it just for fun up until then.  I got my check around the time of the PP2012 release, and it seemed only fitting to upgrade (having skipped PP2010).  I'm still amazed by this good fortune...  (What are the odds that someone in my town would need my precise skillset, and I'd also be in a position to take on their project for what I imagine would have cost them a great deal more had they approached a production studio?)

I checked out iClone and it was like a flashback to Poser4, everything I'd want to do would require a purchase and to make anything myself I'd need programs that were way out of my budget.  Poser 2012 was a big step up for me, and I decided that I didn't need iClone or even D|S.  If I wanted to do something bad enough, I was pretty sure I could figure out a way.  I made a ton of stuff when PP2014 came out, but lost about a year of work when a drive crashed (apparently I'd been backing up stuff to the same physical device thinking a partition was on a drive that it was not).

Now I'm using Poser to make 2D images for a mobile game.  I haven't had time to play with the fitting room, EZMat, Reality or even re-visit my old projects.  Yet I still use Poser almost daily.  I'm rendering something right now...

There have to be others who've found themselves in a similar situation.