I fail to see the analogy between that and how I choose to deal with SM.

I have nothing against filing a bug report with any company that has a fair system in place.  I've done it with DAZ numerous times and have no reason to stop.  I also do it for numerous audio products I'm on alpha and beta teams for.  Like I pointed out before, I'm not SM's dogsbody, you either stand for jumping through loops with systems like theirs or you don't.  I'm just one that doesn't.  I like Poser the product, and I appreciate the effort the developers put in, I just don't like SM the distributor, the way they handle things.

I'm entitled not to like something Clarkie, seriously, just forget about it, I already had!
What an odd thing to bring up :mellow:

You sounded like you posted to get us to guess at whether the image was real or not so I just gave my opinion; that it's either a photo with tweaked levels or it's the best CG human I've ever seen.  I was perfectly polite so I'm buggered if know where the SM comment came from :-D

Anyway, so is it a render?  Has the Holy Grail been met?  ... or can we expect Clarkie to step into those shoes in the not so distant future once he's perfected his skills?

It's surely cool to have that level of skill and I bloody wish I had it, but even so, all I'm saying is that personally, I don't think it's something that would make you as happy as you would be with "super-artistic" talents - sort of like a signature look that can only be attributed to you.  That's what counts these days Clarkie, because as time goes on and technology gets smarter and smarter, those people out there with no talent whatsoever can come along and still make you look like an amateur unless you have your own "thing".

Be honest, if you could bring one one of the famous painters back to life and show them a "painting" you did autoimatically in Corel Painter, wouldn't you feel a fraud if he shook your hand vigerously in appreciation for what you'd done?

Of course you would, and the situation is no different when you compare these masterpieces of realism with a pencil drawing.  No matter how good that photo/render is, the girl with the pencil will always have the most respect because her's is a direct skill, not a passive one where a computer did the math.

The classical artists are famous because they were either good at what they did or they had a signature style that is theirs, so ask yourself, or maybe make yourself aware of how hard it is to use a product like Poser and have a signature style which, if a person looked at the render, they would say, ah yes, that's definitely a Clarkie that is, I can tell by the way he did this and did that and whatever else.

That sort of thing is missing in the vast majority of CG art, and the smarter technology gets, the harder it gets to shake it off.  Photorealism in a render is even worse, because not only are you using identical creation methods, you're also intentionally aiming to 'mimic' something perfectly by using them.

If that image was a render and you were responsible for creating it, you'd rightfully be euphoric about it (and so would I).  But then what?  You can't do better than you already have, you achieved perfection and a massive thumbs up to you for that, but what are you going to do with it?  Did you get any practice in getting "art" to flow from your imagination all those years you were surgically analysing a photo to recreate something that already exists?

Will you sell it as art?  - Photographers already do that.
Bloody hell, I have got to shorten my posts.