I hope Boni doesn't mind, it's certainly not intended to flame, but I just wanted to get my reply in to Razor and Zev :

@Razor
It's easy to see the Blender interface as hard or confusing, but you should bear in mind how powerful it is.  And I'm certainly not knocking DS, I think it's an awesome package, but blimey, if I had just come across the DS interface for the first time, that would surely be more overwhelming than Blender!  There's no denying that Poser is best when it comes to general interface design, in fact I think it's the only thing it has going for it at the moment, because the hair, cloth, and animation system are all laughable relic-tech at best.  I only hope for the programs sake, that Nerd's animation improvements aren't some new presets for that antique Walk Designer!

And don't worry, that was actually wrote in a friendly manner.

But I'll tell you how bad it is, cause I went into the field the other day playing with the detector.  Had it switched to 'Relic' mode and got an almighty bleep.  Thought I'd struck gold and had visions of getting my Luxury Catamaran sooner than I'd envisaged.  But no, turns out some clown had buried a copy of Poser 10 in an act of fury, and the Relic detection mode was triggered due to picking-up on Poser's Walk Designer etc.

Damn thing!

@Zev
If DS is aimed at small studios with the skills (and you're probably right), something is wrong because I don't see DS (or Poser) getting used much in a commercial environment.  For stills, yes, ok I suppose it's all over the place in a commercial sense, but neither of them are what I'd call a 'solution' for a small studio.  That said, I admire DAZ's efforts in that department more than SM's, mainly due to it having a half-way usable animation system, the puppeteering and aniMate/aniBlock system it has.  I doubt it would be wise to rely on DS or Poser as a software studio souition for a large-scale production though, one that included any form of animation.  I see DAZ and Poser figures in use here and there, but when they're animated, it tends to be very small projects.

Anyway, this wasn't a question due to the OT thing, just something to make you think over, cause as I said to Razor, I'm certainly not knocking DS, but I think people give it credit for something it doesn't generally do (even if it can do it).  DS is a dedicated figure tool yet it deosn't even have a way to clothify custom clothe meshes (unless something has been released since I last looked into it).  If they spent as much time dealing with obvious shortcomings as that, as they do messing around with the content manager, the program would be a lot better off for it (and so would the users).

One very unfortunate thing is that I read G3 is heavy on polys, and what a shame, cause if they'd taken the other route of making it even leaner, they would effectively be able to compete with iClone if they caught up on the animation features (which for DS, shouldn't be too difficult because the system is already half-way decent).  But yup, I reckon DAZ shold give the content manager crap a rest, and make, say, a clothes design system for it that works like Marvelous designer does.  Something like that built into either DS or Poser would have people falling over themselves to get at it - especially as Marvelous Designer pricing is so high.

I mean how hard can it be to create a pattern-based simulator like that!
Anyway, no replies please, like I said, it's just something for you both to think over.