Quote - I'd rather have a focus on ease of use  features over striving for reality rendering

 

 

I thought Poser was easy until you tried reality rendering.  I don't know what you mean by this distinction. 

One example that comes to mind...  Why are there only two types of clothing?  There's a third possible type, but they've never really tried to implement it.  Why not a hybrid type of clothing that you would bring in as a solid mesh and position the figure inside, and simply click "bind"?  Then you'd have a clothing object that follows the figure's motion exactly, would work just as easily with most any other figure and wouldn't give the headaches of joints and grouping a conventional conforming item often does.  It should be so simple to lock clothing and props to an underlying figure at the vertex level for true conforming clothing.  The clothing we call "conforming" now only conforms properly if the clothing and figure's joints and groups (and poly distribution) are very similar.  This would just be auto transferral of joints, groups and morphs at a vertex level (use the bones to move the clothing vertices approximately, compare their new positions and adjust clothing vertices to maintain relative spacing). 

(edit:  This is essentially dynamic clothing without shear, stretch, friction etc.; clothing that simply follows the figure)

The fitting room is a start, but still seems to work best when you convert the prop to a default library figure before applying it to a specific character and transferring the morphs.  (For a good 50% of clothing we just want it to fit, cover and move with the figure.  Obviously dresses and scarves etc. need some kind of dynamics.)  Seems there's a lot that could be simplified there.