Hypothetical question???

What would happen to Poser and DS, if Blender came with 4GB of content?

What if Blender came with a fully rigged human family?

It would need a simpler posing system...unless there is one that I don't know about?  Be a good plugin!

Hm.  There have been some whispers going around that someone is making a Poser to Blender plugin, which would allow you to use Poser figures natively inside Blender, and manipulate them as you would in Poser.  We were just discussing this, over in the 3d modelling forum.  Personally, I think it wouldn't do much to Poser or DS, because the people using those apps love them for their beginner level UI, and ease of use.  Blender would be little more than another rendering solution to them, and now that DS has Iray integrated for free, I don't think those users would care much.  Poser needs to make a move to integrate a modern, simple to use, and powerful 3rd party render engine, like DS has done.  Then their users would have no reason to leave the application for rendering.

guess theres a lot of dif viewpoints on this one ........... whole family of dolls - grab make human

posing is no harder in blender then poser - in some ways a lot easier ~ is fairly easy to add a rig with rigify (or the other couple of rigs that are free) can use empty's to aid posing then there facial rigs helper bones drivers etc  can even use DS/poser dolls with a little work and collada export

as for render engines I can export or use half a dozen dif ones from blender for free (well not octane lol ), just tried Lux again the other day wow at least 10 times better then poser (getting BB to do my mats would help ) was even better then cycles but took over an hour :-( cycles did its job in 5 mins  

it all depends on what you want from this annoyingly fun hobby ~ most poser/DS users are more in line with fuzzy felt then most blender users  

Hm.  There have been some whispers going around that someone is making a Poser to Blender plugin, which would allow you to use Poser figures natively inside Blender, and manipulate them as you would in Poser.  We were just discussing this, over in the 3d modelling forum.  Personally, I think it wouldn't do much to Poser or DS, because the people using those apps love them for their beginner level UI, and ease of use.  Blender would be little more than another rendering solution to them, and now that DS has Iray integrated for free, I don't think those users would care much.  Poser needs to make a move to integrate a modern, simple to use, and powerful 3rd party render engine, like DS has done.  Then their users would have no reason to leave the application for rendering.

Poser has always depended primarily on third party apps and figures, so I don't look for them to do anything about adding something like Iray or Cycles for at least another version after the next out. I think they've still thinking that Reality and Luxrender should fill the bill for most users. I can't really blame them though. They don't want to look like they're following the lead of Studio. Plus, Studio has a distinct advantage since it's free and always in perpetual beta.

I've been wanting to fully rig one of our open-source figures like Antonia in Blender, but have found Rigify (the rigging plugin for Blender) a bit daunting. Poser is still easier (for me, at least... your mileage may vary) to pose figures in. I so would love to be shown how Blender can be easier to pose figures in: it's the last reason I still use Poser and, for that matter, Windows.

It is interesting that maxxxmodelz mentions " I think it wouldn't do much to Poser or DS, because the people using those apps love them for their beginner level UI, and ease of use." personal since Blender changed its UI back with the release of 2.5 is why I finally took the dive into Blender and to be truly honest I have been playing with both Poser and Daz for more years than I can think of and find the UI in Blender easier to use and more user friendly to truly learn than Poser or Daz plus this community contributed to making it worthwhile learning. That being said I do not think much would happen if Blender came bundled with 4 gigs of content or not I think what would benefit Blender Poser and Daz is further integration. The Poser to Blender plug in's development has pretty much come to a standstill. The Blender Daz plug in Khalibloo Panel is showing allot of promise for making morphs for Daz and rigging. Just my thoughts  

It is interesting that maxxxmodelz mentions " I think it wouldn't do much to Poser or DS, because the people using those apps love them for their beginner level UI, and ease of use." personal since Blender changed its UI back with the release of 2.5 is why I finally took the dive into Blender and to be truly honest I have been playing with both Poser and Daz for more years than I can think of and find the UI in Blender easier to use and more user friendly to truly learn than Poser or Daz plus this community contributed to making it worthwhile learning. That being said I do not think much would happen if Blender came bundled with 4 gigs of content or not I think what would benefit Blender Poser and Daz is further integration. The Poser to Blender plug in's development has pretty much come to a standstill. The Blender Daz plug in Khalibloo Panel is showing allot of promise for making morphs for Daz and rigging. Just my thoughts  

Perhaps my use of terms was inappropriate.  I don't know what else to call it by comparison though.  It's not so much that the UI in Poser is super easy right out of the box, but I'm thinking more in terms of the ability to fully customize it according to your workflow preferences, and assign any operation to hokey shortcuts.  I consider a UI where users can customize the appearance of the software through the user preferences, and make it fully modular to their own specific work preferences, an Advanced UI, and advanced software.  I would consider a software which limits you to a particular workflow, or the way you go about things, to be "beginner".  It's not so much how easy it is to learn, as much as how robust it is to customize, once you become an intermediate to advanced user of the software. Yes, I'm fully aware that Poser does have some limited use of hotkeys, as does Daz Studio, when it comes to certain operations like scene navigation, and I do understand that with some XML knowledge, you can customize the appearance almost any way you like, but those things are not exactly part of the preferences of the software, and more or less hacks of the existing interface.  Either way, it seems logical the more advanced and robust the software is, the more UI and workflow features are exposed to the end user.  As Blender progressed, and gained more serious user base, the more customizable the UI became in the user Preferences.  I don't remember all the way back to version 1, or earlier, but I'm guessing there were less UI options in Preferences back then.

I tried to learn Blender back when it was 2.49 and failed to the point I swore off the software. Thats when I was able to obtain Hexagon which was a reasonably priced software to learn on. Thru work was able to gain some experience on 3Ds Max and it made sense also and when I mean sense was able to learn the basics relatively painlessly. Well development stopped on Hexagon which is still a decent little modeler but it often crashes and development has stopped. Came back to give Blender another chance glad I did. I am still a novice but at least I can offer help where I can know where to find answers. Someday I may own another package but Blender will be with me for long long time 

 @ RV have you looked at other rigging "systems" ?? the cookie flex rig looks good and its free, theres lot of helper bones to make posing painfree (almost) guess the part about rigging I hate most is the weight maps but that's the same in poser lol

There's talk at RDNA about Python scripts that help pose figures in Poser. Maybe someone could adapt one to work in Blender.

In a Direct answer to the thread title my response is; Nothing would happen....absolutely NOTHING!!!!.

Consider this question:

what would happen is someone released a program That would natively support  99 percent of the content in your existing poser runtimes,( even my old Mac poser6 runtime simply copied over to my new win7 PC) 

And offered you native figures & Content that were an order of magnitude better than any native poser figure. and a thriving marketplace to support them

Implemented a native physically based internal rendering option that is on par with rendering solutions like the mighty Vray from Chaos group,in still image quality.

Gave you a superior nonlinear character animation system and made it all FREE eliminating the legacy software conundrum that plagues & impede the poser market,as anyone can always have the latest version at the cost of a download.

Well poser users ,for the most part would sit and demand that the most attractive features of said program be added to poser because they  prefer to "stay in the poser environment".

We have a plugin for Cinema4d called Interposer pro

INTERPOSER PRO

it supports ALL( non python dependent) poser formats

allowing Me to have a better version of poser running Inside Maxon Cinema4D

I am using it ,along with Daz studio,& Iclone to create a feature length animation film based in the marvel comics universe.

IMHO if someone created a similar featured poser content plugin for Blender
I predict less than 2% of the poser user would bother to try it

Why ??...because they want to "do everything within poser" and refuse to consider otherwise.

Also I would add that DS users  would likely be similarly disinterested in this "4 GB of content" version of blender

for slightly different reasons

But primarily The tight integration of the highly versatile Genesis Figure platform into Daz studio and the genesis content market

Iray sort of curbs the Immediate Appeal of rendering in Cycles

and the fact that DS is free just like blender trumps any Financial argument.

And before anyone dredges out the silly claim that "DS is not really free because you have to buy content for genesis"

Well poser pro cost a few hundred bucks and charges for upgrades and "game dev" versions and the only content worthwhile ( IMHO) is that of third party merchants and we charge for our products here and at RNDA

I mean really, even TV game show contestants who win "Free" Cars have to pay for gasoline & maintainance etc.

 there is NO 4 gig version of blender ~ although if I trawl the various sites that are blender related I'm sure I could get more then 4 gigs worth all free

despite the fact I did pay quite a few squids for poser and have ignored DS for a long while  AND haven't paid for one single piece of content since I got blendered

why the animosity ?? most blender users have NO interest in poser or DS (but that's untrue in reverse most USERS want to find a money making scheme and blender is FREE)

I still use poser/daz dolls now an then but my sculpting skills grow so that's gonna change soon

if you wanna knock poser goto that forum and do it 

And before anyone dredges out the silly claim that "DS is not really free because you have to buy content for genesis"

Well poser pro cost a few hundred bucks and charges for upgrades and "game dev" versions and the only content worthwhile ( IMHO) is that of third party merchants and we charge for our products here and at RNDA

I mean really, even TV game show contestants who win "Free" Cars have to pay for gasoline & maintainance etc.

They have to pay taxes on what they win, too. but it's not a "silly claim". The whole reason DS is free is BECAUSE they make the money up in content sold for it. You don't see them handing out free copies of Carrara willy-nilly, do you?

"if you wanna knock poser goto that forum and do it "

Not knocking poser or its users.

Just addressing the apparent mindset of the"hypothetical"question that seem to indicate that the OP thinks that Blender is somehow missing out on a huge base of potential users due to some lack of gigabytes of "premade content& posable figure families".

This is not the case at all IMHO

Blender IMHO is a complete CG/Visual Effects solution for people with a mindset to learn to produce the CG/animation /VFX, without having to spend $$thousands$$ for an Autodesk,SideFX or Maxon solution.

I have observed that any poser user who is inclined to at least partially leave the familiar environment of poser,to learn other apps, has already done so 

without the need for  gigs of "premade content& figure families" to lure him away.

"but it's not a "silly claim". The whole reason DS is free is BECAUSE they make the money up in content sold for it. You don't see them handing out free copies of Carrara willy-nilly, do you?."

You are correct sir 

This is a long existing business model called "loss leader" which is perfectly legitimate in western economies.

Consider that Samsung & Amazon etc. sells mobile devices at way under unit cost (sometimes "free") based on the calculation of recouping the loss in Data fees or content purchases.

But IMHO it seems that some wish to imply that DAZ's implementation of this same business model is somehow "deceptive" or "bait &switch"

..and BTW it is theoreticaly possible to get Daz Studio& genesis figures  free and create your own clothing content with some free external modeling program with powerful tools... like Blender perhaps.

..and BTW it is theoreticaly possible to get Daz Studio& genesis figures  free and create your own clothing content with some free external modeling program with powerful tools... like Blender perhaps.

For that matter, it's theoretically possible to get Poser free and create your own content as well. I did.

 wish I knew how to get poser free ;-)

on the basis of fun per hour its been the MOST expensive thing I bought rofl mind you it might help if I opened it more often 

 Well, I got lucky and someone sent me a copy of PP2014.

 opps I didn't mean anything underhand ............ sorry if I caused any offence

 Actually, it never even occured to me that you might be trying to be offensive. :)

It is interesting that maxxxmodelz mentions " I think it wouldn't do much to Poser or DS, because the people using those apps love them for their beginner level UI, and ease of use." personal since Blender changed its UI back with the release of 2.5 is why I finally took the dive into Blender and to be truly honest I have been playing with both Poser and Daz for more years than I can think of and find the UI in Blender easier to use and more user friendly to truly learn than Poser or Daz plus this community contributed to making it worthwhile learning. That being said I do not think much would happen if Blender came bundled with 4 gigs of content or not I think what would benefit Blender Poser and Daz is further integration. The Poser to Blender plug in's development has pretty much come to a standstill. The Blender Daz plug in Khalibloo Panel is showing allot of promise for making morphs for Daz and rigging. Just my thoughts  

Perhaps my use of terms was inappropriate.  I don't know what else to call it by comparison though.  It's not so much that the UI in Poser is super easy right out of the box, but I'm thinking more in terms of the ability to fully customize it according to your workflow preferences, and assign any operation to hokey shortcuts.  I consider a UI where users can customize the appearance of the software through the user preferences, and make it fully modular to their own specific work preferences, an Advanced UI, and advanced software.  I would consider a software which limits you to a particular workflow, or the way you go about things, to be "beginner".  It's not so much how easy it is to learn, as much as how robust it is to customize, once you become an intermediate to advanced user of the software. Yes, I'm fully aware that Poser does have some limited use of hotkeys, as does Daz Studio, when it comes to certain operations like scene navigation, and I do understand that with some XML knowledge, you can customize the appearance almost any way you like, but those things are not exactly part of the preferences of the software, and more or less hacks of the existing interface.  Either way, it seems logical the more advanced and robust the software is, the more UI and workflow features are exposed to the end user.  As Blender progressed, and gained more serious user base, the more customizable the UI became in the user Preferences.  I don't remember all the way back to version 1, or earlier, but I'm guessing there were less UI options in Preferences back then.

Actually, Blender's hotkey shortcuts drive me crazy. I can't remember a third of them and as a result I don't use a lot of them. But now that I think about it, I think I'll find out all the Blender hotkeys, and what they do and write them all down somewhere so I'll have a quick reference book close by. Right now, I usually have to call up the Blender manual.

 hit spacebar and search ......... works if you spell rite lik I don't (theres a dynamic addon for spacebar that only gives context sensitive tools)

for me going back to Poser ~ Ds ~ Bryce ~ Carrara I hate the way you navigate NEVER know what camera I'm going to render from , I used to use hex and it would take me 3 times as long to do anything in blender but then it clicked can do stuff in blender that hex will never do

 How can you not  know what camera you're rendering from in Poser? The name appears in the Preview screen. :)

If you find the hotkeys confusing, and hard to remember (as I once did), then I HIGHLY recommend installing the Pie Menu, and Dynamic Spacebar Menu addons.  They take the place of virtually a dozen hotkeys, for switching modes, and screens, and displays, etc., and really take the burden away from memorization.  The Dynamic Spacebar puts everything in the Mesh and Create tabs and menus in one place, making it much easier to access those things.

These two plugins, which someone else had recommended to me, really made the difference in my getting along with Blender's UI.

 lol not in poser in Carrara or Bryce ........long time since I used either so forgot which, mind you I don't remember when I last did a render in poser

Methinks someone needs to create a Sticky that lists where people can find Blender add-ons. :)

Methinks someone needs to create a Sticky that lists where people can find Blender add-ons. :)

This is the ultimate resource for Blender addons, so might wanna bookmark it. http://blenderaddonlist.blogspot.com/

The addons I suggest for reducing the complexity of having to memorize hotkeys are already included with all Blender downloads, in the Blender User Preferences / Add-ons tab.  I highly recommend to enable the following addons to anyone who hates memorizing the blender hotkeys and UI layout:

1. 3D View: Dynamic Spacebar Menu (This will create a handy little menu containing all kinds of readily useful features in Blender, just by tapping on the spacebar of your keyboard.  Then you can select any number of tasks or features without having to navigate through tons of UI clutter)
2. Development: Icons (this will create nifty little visual icons in your popup menus that aren't there by default, and serve as a way to quickly reference what you need through graphical representations of the features, instead of just text).
3. User Interface: Pie Menus Official (This will create pie menus when you click on standard hotkeys, like TAB, and the Z button, allowing you to choose from a heads-up display of different navigational arrays and features that otherwise would require memorization of yet more hotkeys to call upon).  Keep in mind, this does indeed replace the ability to jump directly into edit mode when you press the TAB.  Instead, you'll get a heads-up button selection menu of about 7 different "modes" to choose from in blender, like "Edit", "Sculpt", "Vertex Paint", and "weight paint".  You simply click the mode you wanna go to from there.  The convenience of this is that you only need one "hotkey" to jump to any of 7 different modes, instead of memorizing 7 different hotkeys for them.  Also, the Z key will open up pie menus for all your different display modes, like "Solid", "wireframe", "rendered", "flat shade", "smooth shade", and others.  This allows just one key to become the jump point for what otherwise would be 7 or 8 other hotkeys you'd need to remember.  You can get more info on Pie Menus, and how they work here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.72/UI/Pie_Menus

They saved me so much headaches.

Related to all this, I actually started a thread here in which I point to a really incredible addon for 3dsmax that I would LOVE to see the equal to in Blender some day.  Imagine an addon, which when installed, would automatically assign almost every common modelling task where you would create new geometry in a mesh into one single hotkey command!  For example: cutting an edge between any two or more selected vertices, cutting an edge loop through a ring of  existing edges, cutting a new edge through two selected edges on a ring, with any number of existing edges between them (like the knife tool in Blender), capping holes in a mesh, creating a polygon bridge between two selected faces or edges, creating a spline between two selected vertices of an existing curve, etc... all by pressing just ONE simple hotkey.   Sounds impossible, but that's exactly what this addon for 3dsmax does, and it works perfectly!  If we had this in Blender, I think it would change the user base for modelling practically overnight.