Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Asking for honest comments for my character

jamminwolf opened this issue on May 23, 2015 · 215 posts


Morkonan posted Wed, 03 June 2015 at 7:01 PM

The main thing is I want to know what customers think of my work, what I'm doing wrong, what I'm doing right.  I'm getting out with the people to find what they want and looking for in a character, also I'm getting help with technique stuff, such as lighting, clothes, morphs, and poses.

Again, I want to thank each and everyone of you for all the critics and help.  But people... read up with on thread, don't just read the first post on the first page and come here and repeat everything everyone's already said... sheeshh!

I want to address something that is easily overlooked and, in my opinion, you might need to think about - A potential customer will never, ever, know anything about your product until you tell them.

That means that no matter how great your product is and no matter what care you took with morphs, a potential customer will only know what's on the outside of the box.  That's really the only thing that you can truly get quality feedback about when it comes down to sales figures. When you ask why you may not have gotten the sales you expected and then provide details like good renders, closeups of unique features, detailed morphs, etc, etc,... those things are not why you didn't get the sales you expected and it's fairly useless to ask why people didn't like them unless you're examining what your product return-rate is. They only matter inasmuch as they were communicated to potential customer base, not as actual users experienced the product after purchase.

Your renders in this thread which highlight the details and the customizations that you crafted into the figure are the sorts of renders you should have included in your original product advertisements. You're somewhat demonstrating in this thread why you believe this product is of a quality that should merit purchase, right? The place to really do that which will get you results is in front of a potential customer and plastered all over your product page in the marketplace. You're doing a fair job of it, here, but that's the sort of thing you should focus on with your product page.

Don't beat yourself up on the "quality" of your morphs as being somehow a reflection on the lack of expected sales. Don't do it. (Except, maybe, for the lips, and you've gotten enough about that.) The reason is very simple - Potential customers did not "see" the quality of your custom morphs and dials in your ads, so they didn't even get far enough to experience them. IF, however, you were examining return rates, then this would now be the time to examine those quality issues, but only because those unique morphs were not adequately communicated to the customer before purchase and they really didn't know what they were truly getting in the first place.

On your renders - Just from the few I've seen here, the skin needs some more highlighting and specular. It's sort of flat in the above renders with the soft lights and taking some time to get some lighting in that will show off highlights (or, make material changes to emphasize those) will be what "shows off" the morph features and skin. Otherwise, it's going to look a little "flat." I'd also recommend trying a couple of hi-contrast light setups, to pull out some of those features for a "Illustrative" profile/isometric shot. For a good Glamor shot, since she sort of looks like a "70's chick", I'd make a light-gel with psychedelic colors in it and project that for a render, too, with appropriate clothing if you have any. (There's a decent freebie light-gel setup either here on or sharecg that has some nice psychodelic colors in it. IIRC, it was originally for DS, but you can rip the textures out of it and use them as gels in Poser and it's not difficult to set up. It won't be a perfect gel shot (no caustics), but it's "good enough" for a fun Glamor shot of your character.) By the way, the hair materials look pretty decent if they had a bit more punch to them, which I think a nice spot used for highlighting/specular would bring out a bit better. I assume you didn't author them, but if you did, you might try the ones BagginsBill posted not long ago. It's a decent material setup, true to form, that yields good, fast, results on transmapped hair, with a little tweaking, just in case you wanted to "pop" the hair a bit, for additional appeal.