Shane?
Unfortunate for the native Poser figures, but I have to agree.

I love Poser but there are some things it could do better, then again that could be said for any peice of software.  Point is there are a lot of the things that make Poser even easier to use and available if you are prepared to pay out a little.  I know some have the sentiment that Poser should do everything they want it to for the price they paid and thats that.  They are free to take that route, I just take a different route and have number of scripts or add ons like the Advanced Figure Manager and Advanced Library mManager by Semidieu.  Light and Render Dots and, my favorite, Camera Panel Plus from Netherworks.

I have no problem with taking this route as it allows people who do not need these features, or have a restricted budget, to buy Poser at a stunning price for a piece of software that does what it does.  At the same time it allows me have the same functionality and add a litte here and there.  Someone here suggested Poser was a the Fiat of the 3D world, I accept that and all I have done is customise it a little.

Some Poser users users complain, with justification, that something does not work, does not work as described or could be better and that I understand.  What I have more difficulty in understanding is those who do not use Poser but seem to spend a trendeous amount of time in a Poser forum. 

There are peices of software I have purchased that I felt was a waste of money and not used but I do not spend hours on the forum stating why I do not use it.  Still it take all sorts and they are free to continue but, for me, it seems time could be better spent using and learning the software that, in their eyes, is so much better than Poser. 

Quote - > Quote -

I wouldn't worry about this end of the market - too many hobbyists that shop here appear to be aggressively unwilling to move beyond a Poser 6 flow.  That applies even moreso with the vendors.

More accurately, vendors are aggressively interested in making money, and that means building content for figures that people actually want to use, that are designed properly and don't contain missing faces or holes in their mesh, or overlapping UV maps, or geometry that was never mapped to begin with, or a-symmetrical inconsistencies that make much of their content construction a nightmare or simply impossible to do. If you're not a content artist then you won't understand this until you actually dig in and learn the process and the differences. 

For example, P6 James is my favorite figure, but he is unusable to me as-is. I've had to rebuild him just to make him viable as a figure, and there's no point in me wasting my time doing all that because I can build my own figure with less headache, and do whatever I want with the end results. Give it away, sell it, whatever, because its my figure and not someone else's mess that I've had to clean up and rebuild because they clearly didn't know what they were doing to begin with, or didn't bother paying attention to details. 

And that is basically the case with all the poser natives. Slapped together as an afterthought with no real quality assurance. When the majority of users have to modify the content just to get it to function the way it should have out of the box, they're just going to find someone else's models that are easier to use and better constructed. Or build their own, as I have. 

I blame that on DAZ, mainly, though. Admittedly, Poser took their eye off the ball there though. DAZ had no real competition in the figure department, and the one or two figures that did pop up that might give DAZ a run for it's money, I believe DAZ sued or bought them out. (I say "believed" because I can't remember what happened with The Girl and Sadie, but somehow they ended up being DAZ figures). Poser saw DAZ more as a partner, so they didn't see the same warning signs I did when DAZ first started building Studio.

Actually after posting in this thread that I was feeling very uninspired with Poser at the moment, I went and rendered some stuff. And now I feel like rendering more stuff.

Like a lot of people by now I have bucketloads of Poser content and I like making my own stuff. But mostly I'm less and less interested in the newer stuff. My goto figures are still the older ones - A3, H3, M3 - and even though I like newer figures like Miki4, once I load her up I really can't think of much to do with her. So part of that is I have a lot of stuff for older figures by now, but at the same time those figures have some of the least stuff. There's never been a huge amount for H3.

So maybe it's not just about the user base declining, but that a lot of users are fine with what they've got, or at least that they don't need to keep getting new stuff at the rate it's produced?

Quote -  I blame that on DAZ, mainly, though. Admittedly, Poser took their eye off the ball there though. DAZ had no real competition in the figure department, and the one or two figures that did pop up that might give DAZ a run for it's money, I believe DAZ sued or bought them out. (I say "believed" because I can't remember what happened with The Girl and Sadie, but somehow they ended up being DAZ figures).

DAZ can only buy figures that are available to be sold, so I don't fault DAZ for that any more than I would fault the creator for selling it.

They can only sue over figures that use some portion of DAZ's models, when they can prove it. They don't own a copyright or trademark on the human form and they can't control who builds competing content. There are only so many ways geometry can go together to make a human shape and eventually some patterns are going to be repeated, kind of like car keys. 

Pretty sure the Girl was built by an indie artist and sold to DAZ. I never heard of Sadie, but I don't pay a lot of attention to all the female figures out there. Most of them look pretty much the same to me and V4 or G2F suits what I need in female figures. 

Quote - So maybe it's not just about the user base declining, but that a lot of users are fine with what they've got, or at least that they don't need to keep getting new stuff at the rate it's produced?

There is a lot to be said on that.  Why should I buy YAV4HO (Yet Another V4 Hookerware Outfit)?  My V4 Clothing runtime alone is over 50Gb.  Most of it has been run through either/or/and Xdresser, WW, and now the fitting room.  Nowadays, I am only buying DAZ gen4 content that is either clearance, prime, or below $5. - and it needs to be really good.  It is the whole "what is the economic value of the 2nd item".

People complained about vendors not making content for any figure not named V4, & the Poser Team gave us the fitting room.  They are providing tools, it is up to the endusers if they want to take advantage of them.

As a result of this, my purchasing here is starting to look like my purchasing over at DAZ - props, settings, and merchant resources, as opposed to more 20something Caucasians and lingerie.  I am still buying, but the content is changing.  Not to mention the fact that once I learn something new, it is one more thing I don't need a vendor to supply.

This is what I made today for Roxie. Not finished yet.

But like me,
I "feel", and that is very subjective, but I "feel" that more and more content is becoming "home made".

Build in Blender, baked AO and material zones maps. I did not paint a single pixel yet.

The user base is probably pretty stable, but like others have said before, sales can be slowing down, because the end users change, and find more pleasure in building their own stuff.

Best regards, Tony

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.

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

For me its pretty much all stuff i make in 3ds max are going to be used in poser, unless I ofc have to do something for a company. But i like making images and as you i dont want to spend so much time making characters, first of all i dont have the required skills to model them of the standard that i would want nor do i want to spend the time doing it, rigging etc. So Poser is perfect in that regard, there are a lot of very high quality characters available and working with them is very easy as well. So for me at least Poser is pretty much always in my workflow one way or another.

So if there werent a program like poser or Daz which made it so easy to work with characters i doubt i would use any characters at all.

1. Character Making companies exists already.  Just how do you propose to get vendor and end users to adapt new figures? Vendors & customers alike spend time & effort looking for reasons to avoid any new figure - most of which have been ridiculous reasons.

HiveWire3D has some fans.
but HiveWire3D or another Character company needs to work a lot faster.

If you want freakshow figures with unrealistic proportions like the DAZ figures, Dawn SR2 is being released this month along with Dusk - who is going to a LOT of morphs out of the gate. 

I and a lot of others like the genesis figures

If you are looking for a replacement for V4 & M4, your requests have been answered by the guy that made Victoria and Michael.

atualy I replaced V4,M4 with V5,M5 :)

If you want realistic figures with realistic proportions, you have the SM figures and most of the other 3rd party figures made over the past few years.

I like the characters that came with Pro 14 also.
but I'm a Fantasy Artist ,never really cared about rendering what I could take a picture of.

Those of you waiting for a Poser-Native genesis figure are just kidding yourselves - which if you had gone peeking inside of the PCFs over the last couple of years, you would realize by now.  In addition, DAZ has made it quite clear that they would rather go out of business rather than make Poser native figures.  This is a corporate ego thing - not a techinical issue, as the release of Dawn made quite clear.

Wich is why Poser needs a character making company to replace DAZ.

You can also refurb your legacy characters, if you are not too lazy to actually RTM.

I only work on my own Meshes .

What more do you want?

I want Poser to survive for another 20 years.
A CGI app without competition is nothing but stagnated.
Think it would have taken Poser 20 years to get SubD's if DAZ Studio was around in 1994 ?

Problem #1 - solved. 

We have different opinions about that.

2.  The Poser development team is making Poser the "wickedest app out there".  It is leveraging itself into more professional workflows. Which we can take advantage of, if you are willing to move beyond a Poser 6 workflow - which most hobbyists around here are not, apparently.

I have Pro 14.

Poser has the frameworks available to add quite a bit and more of the frameworks become visible with every release - which a number of vendors are already doing - visit RDNA & take advantage of what is available - and get an idea of what is coming down the pike.

I like seeing venders making up to date meshes

It is amazing what you can find if you shop at more storefronts than just 'Rosity. 

I get around :)

Quote - So if there werent a program like poser or Daz which made it so easy to work with characters i doubt i would use any characters at all.

I'd just go back to drawing them.  How I wish Poser or some other program could build a character from a drawing...

PP2020 Pro Ultimate will be able to:

"Glass, take picture"
"Glass, wifi picture to Poser."
"Poser build model from incoming wifi picture."
"Poser send model to full size 3D robot printer".

"Model? One coffee, two sugars please."

One can dream, right?

Quote - PP2020 Pro Ultimate will be able to:

"Glass, take picture"
"Glass, wifi picture to Poser."
"Poser build model from incoming wifi picture."
"Poser send model to full size 3D robot printer".

"Model? One coffee, two sugars please."

One can dream, right?

Would love if it were that easy...  "Computer, run program 'Vicki in a temple with a sword'..."

:lol:

Quote - > Quote - So maybe it's not just about the user base declining, but that a lot of users are fine with what they've got, or at least that they don't need to keep getting new stuff at the rate it's produced?

There is a lot to be said on that.  Why should I buy YAV4HO (Yet Another V4 Hookerware Outfit)?  My V4 Clothing runtime alone is over 50Gb.  Most of it has been run through either/or/and Xdresser, WW, and now the fitting room.  Nowadays, I am only buying DAZ gen4 content that is either clearance, prime, or below $5. - and it needs to be really good.  It is the whole "what is the economic value of the 2nd item".

People complained about vendors not making content for any figure not named V4, & the Poser Team gave us the fitting room.  They are providing tools, it is up to the endusers if they want to take advantage of them.

As a result of this, my purchasing here is starting to look like my purchasing over at DAZ - props, settings, and merchant resources, as opposed to more 20something Caucasians and lingerie.  I am still buying, but the content is changing.  Not to mention the fact that once I learn something new, it is one more thing I don't need a vendor to supply.

Yeah. Pretty much the same here.

The only things I've bought at Daz for a few years now are when they have sales on some old M3/H3/A3 stuff that I haven't got yet and I've haven't bought anything here for quite a while now either.

I don't buy props or buildings as I make those inside Vue or in Blender, I make quite a bit of clothing in MD and convert stuff with XD, so really there's not a huge amount left. I think my last buying spree (except for old stuff sales) was a few things for Miki 4 and Anastasia when they came out. I did buy the Hivewire horse, but I've never even loaded it up, just used the tail on another character.

It's difficult to say what would actually inspire me to start buying Poser content again now. I really can't think of anything I want or need that I don't already have by the shedload!

Yep, the more I read here?

End users are changing from "to buy" to "to build".

And the market has reached a saturation point.

Subject: Is the Poser user base shrinking?

I think the answer is "yes". Years ago when checking out the renderosity gallery, I've seen more Poser posts than today. The amount of Poser posts have decreased a lot. You have a lot more photographs , DAZ and VUE pics these days.

Quote:
"@ Pumeco

For your issue with Roxie and the morph brush mirror?
It is not even a bug. It works as designed per specifications.

What you could do is file a objective and well documented "enhancement" report through the proper channels."

Vilters, I've already done all I'm prepared to do, they know about the bug and they haven't fixed it.  It doesn't work as expected because a mirror copy should be a mirror copy, not a bug-ridden effort with vertices missed out (still happening even in SR4).  I'm not after "enhancements", I'd be perfectly happy to get what I paid for - that's why I bought it.

I've seen a lot fewer posts on Poser Pros, too... :tt2:

Some regular posters from here have moved over to Hivewire.

There is a nice Poser Facebook group... https://www.facebook.com/groups/527852800622101/

I started going to RDNA forums when PoserPro 2012 was released.  I thought mentioning bugs/feature requests in the official forum would get them noticed faster.  Probably not (I've been told over and over only bug reports get noticed), but I still like checking in there.

If the users have indeed specialized over the years, it makes sense that there wouldn't always be one catch all forum everyone would go to. 

I imagine some of the Reality users check into that forum, and Snarlygribbly has a small forum too, I believe.  Plus, having figured out Poser by now, there may be users more active in the Marvelous Designer/zBrush/3D-Coat forums because those are the programs they have the most questions about.

There's also that site which can't be named...

I can believe the base is shrinking, just not on what seems to be anecdotal evidence.  Still, it's paid users and upgrades that concern me.  If SM keep developing Poser many of us will continue buying and using it.  I'm sure there were a lot of people over the years who bought a copy of Poser, asked a bunch of noobish questions, realized there was no "make art button" and moved on.  Maybe they play minecraft now, or went to Second Life.

My town used to have a great local music scene.  It's always had its ups and downs, but many of the more active bands playing now were formed by older musicians who'd dropped out of the scene to marry/raise kids and are now forming bands again because their kids have grown up enough that they can finally get away from the house long enough to practice/perform.  The decline in the local scene is a bit of a mystery...  Some people blame the resurgence in electronic music, assuming would-be musicians instead became DJs who only play at parties, or must make music on their computers at home and post it on SoundCloud/Bandcamp.  Others say there are just as many musicians as there always have been, but the scene became fragmented so there's not the buzz on the street that there used to be.  Or that local scenes as a whole are withering because of the internet/monoculture.  I've even considered that a whole generation (4 years in a college town) of kids played Guitar Hero or Rock band instead of learning real instruments and forming real bands.  But almost no one seriously believes it's because people just don't have any interest in music anymore (though some of what passes for music today could indeed be used to argue that point).

Similarly, I find it hard to believe that fewer people are interested in making/rendering/animating their own characters compared to just a few years ago.

Quote - I think the answer is "yes". Years ago when checking out the renderosity gallery, I've seen more Poser posts than today. The amount of Poser posts have decreased a lot. You have a lot more photographs , DAZ and VUE pics these days.

I wonder if that might be due to changes in the way people use the galleries, though.

PoserWorld supports Poser and DS, and their e-mail said they felt BOTH the Poser and DS user bases were shrinking, so I don't think DS is really the issue.  Though perhaps DS users are more likely to post their images at DAZ.

Taking a wider view...it seems like casual users (as I suspect many Poser and DS users are) have moved to social media.  Rather than posting in the galleries and in forums, they post on Twitter, Tumblr, etc. 

Renderosity also changed their rules at one point, and started limiting the number of images you could post to their galleries, and that might be an issue, too.

I don' know that gallery posts & views are a good measurement - I've been here almost a decade & I have yet to post or even look at the galleries.  My WIPs & freebies are over at Deviant Art.  Lots of Poser/DS stuff going on over there.

Places that stagnate tend to lose customers.

Quote - > Quote - I think the answer is "yes". Years ago when checking out the renderosity gallery, I've seen more Poser posts than today. The amount of Poser posts have decreased a lot. You have a lot more photographs , DAZ and VUE pics these days.

I wonder if that might be due to changes in the way people use the galleries, though.

PoserWorld supports Poser and DS, and their e-mail said they felt BOTH the Poser and DS user bases were shrinking, so I don't think DS is really the issue.  Though perhaps DS users are more likely to post their images at DAZ.

If you honestly believe a word Poserworld said in that email, well then....In short it was a cheap desperate attack to get customers to shop at their store.

I actually don't care , what Poserworld says.

I just think the big hype is over. When I got into 3d, it all seem to me like being close to an exciting new technologie. It was like:"OMG, I can draw in 3d now !!! "

Nowadays it all became normal. It has lost a bit of its sensational magic. Nobody is really blown away about CG in movies anymore today. Renember how the press went wild about the effects ,when Terminator II came out. Later it was OMG-great, that you could do something like that at home.

All those enthusiasm has gone lost for some. Others are still driven by their passion for 3d artwork.

Well, these people are still here. It seems normal, that the userbase is shrinking. There is nothing realy bad about it, it is just, as someone already said, a saturation.

I don't know what Poserworld has to do with it. If it is as I said ,they won't be able to change it anyway.

I am just curious to see, where 3d technology is going in the future and what I can create with it.

Thats the great thing about 3d graphics it evolves all the time, i do agree that the sensational magic as you call it might have gone for some. But think a lot of people would enjoy being able to make such things if it werent to complicated. Which poser over time could help do, but with poser and any other 3d software out there, applying the newest technology is not very easy and also require that the end user have the computer needed to work with it.

But as computers gets more and more powerful and software gets more and more advanced, i dont see any reason why these new thngs shouldnt just be integrated into any software package in the future, its just a matter of time in my opinion.

Here are some examples that are pretty interesting i think:

GPU Technology Conference 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XISqvBVyASo

Realistic character hair 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cECnvJeXXE8 

There could be an additional reason, that makes the community shrink:

Since the show "The Big Bang Theory", more girls could be interessted in Nerds and geeks and might feel attracted by them. So some guys now prefer to to pose "real life figures" instead of digital Poser dolls. That could be indeed very distracting. They might also feel encouraged to sign a contract in a gym.

In that case I'd see some runtimes rusting.  ;) ^^ :D XD

I've not been visiting the stores (or really using Poser very much) for quite a while now. At the moment, I'm in need of images again and so here I am but I'm still not buying much.

The truth is that I've been buying for so long now and have so much material in my runtime that I just don't need to buy much any more - if I'm asked to make a book cover or illustration, then the chances are that I have something that I can use to get the job done. I did buy a bunch of Dreamlands models when they were on sale and then there have been some odd little models like the Russian Dolls that turned up at the store recently.

I'm sure that I'm not alone in the community in having reached this point. If I can do the job with what I have, I need a good reason to part with the money for something new. That reason could be that nothing else will do or that I see certain possibilities in a model that are worth my time and money. Unfortunately, much of what is new in the store is just a variation on stuff that I have already purchased before and probably more than once.

Perhaps if I had taken up Genesis then I might feel the need to buy more, though I suspect that would just involve buying much the same as I already have for V4 & M4 all over again. But there it is.

Last I looked, Poserworld hadn't done much of anything new for months.

Quote - There could be an additional reason, that makes the community shrink:

Since the show "The Big Bang Theory", more girls could be interessted in Nerds and geeks and might feel attracted by them. So some guys now prefer to to pose "real life figures" instead of digital Poser dolls. That could be indeed very distracting. They might also feel encouraged to sign a contract in a gym.

In that case I'd see some runtimes rusting.  ;) ^^ :D XD

So when they learn Vicki is actually a lot cheaper in comparison, they'll start coming back?

"So when they learn Vicki is actually a lot cheaper in comparison, they'll start coming back?"

Between the NDA's legal fees no doubt

Fractured or sundered are perhaps  the words to choose between but are we talking Users, community merchants or marketplaces?

Quote - Fractured or sundered are perhaps  the words to choose between but are we talking Users, community merchants or marketplaces?

Yes - to all.

Thought of two more choice words divided and riven

Well I can't give a valid answer to the question from the OP but with three of the major Poser/Daz content sites having sales with 70, 80 and 85% off and some with vouchers on top I can believe Poserworld might not be selling as much content as they used to.   Assuming any of the sites are of course.

Quote - ....with three of the major Poser/Daz content sites having sales ...selling as much content as they used to.   Assuming any of the sites are of course.

That would assume a Site Sales centric world view

What ever happened to all the exciting stuff over at Poser Place?

People tend to think that because they are doing okay, then their neighbors are doing okay... until they're hit with irrefutable prrof that they are not. I lost my job in 2009 and had to cut WAY back on what I could afford to buy or do. I couldn't afford the Internet anymore and could only post online when I went to the library to check online for jobs.

I'm doing better now. Have a steady though not substantial income coming in and can afford to be online  all I want. But I'm still not buying stuff like I used to. I haven't bought anything from DAZ for months. Plus, I'm making a lot of stuff for mayself now, so I don't really need to.

Basically, what I'm saying is that over time, things should bounce back. The question is how many of our favorite vendors can survive until they do?

Quote - Basically, what I'm saying is that over time, things should bounce back. The question is how many of our favorite vendors can survive until they do?

Unless of course, this is the new normal.  Which I suspect it is.

Vendors believe that "If I build it, they will buy it."  In spite of all evidence to the contrary.