Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Why aren't male figures more popular?

EClark1894 opened this issue on Apr 16, 2014 · 474 posts


AmbientShade posted Sun, 09 November 2014 at 3:48 PM

When complaining about the lack of content that's available for various figures, try to consider for a minute what all is involved in creating new content. It's not exactly a simple process most of the time. It takes a lot of work and time and attention to detail to create an outfit or a character set that is actually worth selling. Sure a lot of people use merchant resources for the base skin, but a lot of others don't. Just a skin set alone can take weeks to create, even when using the latest software that allows real time painting of the model instead of using 2D apps and having to match seams. 

This content is extremely cheap in comparison to other "high end" sites selling content - we're talking pennies on the dollar cheap - but the process to create it and the time involved is no lower. In fact, it can actually be more complicated and time consuming to create Poser content than it is to create high end content, depending on what it is you're creating. This is something most end users also don't think about. 

On top of that, a good number of the figures available have inherent design flaws that make building content for them quite a bit more challenging, and in some cases simply impossible, or at the very least not worth the headache. These flaws aren't always obvious to most end users, especially those end users who know nothing about creating content to begin with. It's not simply a matter of "such-and-such figure seems to bend and pose just fine, why doesn't anyone make content for him/her?" Those flaws are usually only apparent when you lift the hood and start to work on content for them, or start planning what content you'd like to create for them. 

I could give a fairly lengthy list of such flaws in just about all the figures that are listed here on this page, but if I did that then it would be interpreted as figure bashing by most who read it, instead of as an educational motive like I've tried to do in the past. There's a science behind how geometry works - it's not just a matter of throwing a bunch of polygons together to make a shape and running with it. If the geometry isn't designed properly then everything you try to do with it from that point on will be that much more complicated, if not impossible, just like building a house on a shoddy foundation. You're bound to run into problems and limitations if it's not built correctly from the beginning. Beyond just the geometry, many of those figures have rigging and mapping issues that also make building content for them more complicated and in some cases, simply not possible without first fixing the issues in the figure itself - which no vendor is licensed to do and redistribute on their own. 

Then there is the popularity of various figures, and the likelihood that content built for them will or won't sell. If a vendor spends a month designing and building an outfit for a figure and no one buys that outfit, or only a dozen or so people buy it, then that vendor has wasted a month of their time and effort that could have been much better spent building content for a figure that does sell in high volume and is used regularly. So all of these things have to be considered before a vendor decides to support or not to support this or that figure, because for a lot of these vendors, time is money, so they have to make decisions based on what they think will generate the most money for their time spent. There are however a number of vendors who will do private commissions, if you're willing to pay what they charge, which is usually a pretty fair rate for the amount of work involved in comparison to other content artists on the high-end side of this work, but it's definitely nowhere close to the prices most of the market places charge per item.