Well, Khory_D, I would say the same of you. The workflow process in Poser has fundamentally changed over the past few versions - not that most vendors would be aware of this - most are unwilling to let go of Poser 6 and it's way of doing things. Many are working under the default assumption that everyone MUST work with a Daz figure. That isn't actually the case. Furthermore, vendors today have no clue as to what figures their clothing is going onto - I have dozens of outfits for V4 that have never been worn by V4, but have been worn by Dawn, or Olivia or Mariko or Roxy or Anastasia - get the point? Nor do vendors know if a V4 character was bought for the sole purpose of harvesting the skin textures for use on other figures - I do that all the time.

Poser has changed, even if vendors haven't - mainly due to SM listening to the customers. The reason we have the fitting room is due to vendor intransigence about making content for any figure NOT named V4. There are numerous other examples. The Copy Morphs From command, for example, means that vendors needn't bother with PBMs in clothing anymore. It would certainly save me the time of stripping them out of every single piece of clothing I own. And don't get me started on material files.

There is a rather valid reason why they are "unwilling to let go of poser 6" tech. It is because the poser user base is so fractured due to the ownership of a wide variety of versions and the size of the consumer base for those products that they need to support the least common denominator. Nor do they really care what final figure a product is used on. They sell a product for V4 and it is a V4 sale for them. What you do with it in the privacy of your own computer is not of interest to them overall. A beautiful render with the product used as sold is always a plus but not common enough to really be a big point for the vendors.

Figure fragmentation is what the thread was originally about. (Time to leave V4). As a Poser user, the issue is irrelevant. I can pull in both Poser compatible figures and the 1st 2 generations of genesis figures. Granted, I can't use the new fat chick, but I can live without her. BTW, just what is the difference between V7, Arabella 7, and Karen 7 - the promo's don't show me why I should buy it. And Josie 7 doesn't' seem to do anything that Josie 6 couldn't do, other than be a drain on my wallet.

As far as figure fragmentation happening.. Obviously from the vendor perspective they have two choices. One is to stick with the customer base that they have catered to and hope that the sales volume holds. You yourself have made the case that they don't need to support any figure other than v4 since people like yourself are using products on other characters. That way they can at least hope to maintain a similar income to what they are seeing today. The other option is to branch out into the growing Genesis market. That is evidenced by the increased support and continued support by vendors in this market place. In other words they see the income there that they need to make and so they continue on with those products. It boils down to continuing to support the generation 4 figures and hope that they maintain an income or move to the newer generations and increase income with that.

Of course there are some who are going to say "oh but the next big Daz killer is just on the horizon". It is possible that for the first time SM will hit it out of the park with a new and included as part of poser figure that will answer all the poser users prayers. Then all they have to do is get every poser user to upgrade to the newest version of poser so that they can have a broad enough market to make support for that figure viable for content providers. And then they have to hope that that market is as large as the current market for genesis products so that this new figure will be able to take a dominant stand in this market place. Should that actually happen I doubt it would be a Daz killer because unlike so many other players in this game Daz tends to be very pragmatic. If there really were a compelling figure that had the sales volume potential of genesis I suspect that you would see products in the Daz market place for it. No its never happened before, but then there has never been a compelling figure that had the base customer support to make that an appealing option for the Daz PA's. I don't actually expect that to happen of course because the odds of any character achieving the necessary numbers so that genesis content providers to move over long term are pretty low.

DS doesn't support capsule rigging or Poser's weight mapping (or any Poser 5 or later feature other than the ability to read .mc6 files), so I am not real sure how to get newer SM figures working DS. If there is a way to do it, I certainly wouldn't mind learning. I like my Asian characters to have black eyes as opposed to blue ones and be short, so just how do YOU get Miki 3 or 4 working in DS? Do tell.

Laughter.. Seriously you think I would pay for Miki anything? Are you under the impression that the only way to get an Asian character is with her? Because there are maybe a thousand other ways to whip up a short Asian woman with black eyes.

Whether or not a product is old doesn't prevent it's use - Which would you find more useful? - A new male suit with no movement morphs and only a couple of texture sets, or an old suit with many movement morphs and many texture sets. As an example, IMO, the Casablanca suit for M3 was the best suit ever made for Poser figures, as was the clothing made by Utilize for M3 (still being sold at Daz). Which is why all of my male figures are wearing them. Does Autofit work with Gen3 clothing? I haven't been successful, but it would not surprise me the least if I was doing something wrong - it isn't like there is a usable manual to go with DS.

Yes it works with gen3 clothing. Those are the suits I would use on Genesis. I've never found it difficult enough to require a manual though.

Nothing made for genesis comes even close to those "old" products. And those "old" products have texture templates - I have no idea where Daz is currently hiding those nowadays, I just know that before genesis rolled out the door, they were together with the clothing product, so the customer could download them in 1 go.

Then by all means use the old products if you want. I use them and everyone else I know falls back on them at times. I think though that sales numbers indicate your quite wrong about the newer products sold here and at other brokerages.

As far as templates for Daz products, I'm guessing you have not looked in your account/product library at the products. The templates are all downloadable there.

AFA "dig on studio" - its more like a dig on Daz's software "development" process such as it is and what there is of it. I am one of the many customers Daz cheated out of $150 out of with Cararra 6 upgrade fiasco and I have neither forgotten nor forgiven Daz for refusing to refund my money once they admitted that they lied to all of us about getting it to work in OSX. Or the fact that my copy of Hexagon wouldn't run in OSX for 4 years.

A shame about Hex. It is still my go to. When exactly was this Cararra 6 fiasco? Sometime around 2007 right? You are aware that the people who ran the company then are no longer with it any more and have not been for several years right? In fact it is a much different company since around 2011/2012. If you have a gripe that goes that far back your need to gripe against a whole different brokerage now.. or a comicon.

DS lacks features of Poser 5, never mind newer versions. The easiest example is the cloth room, but it isn't the only one - just the one I use the most - closely followed by the Fitting Room - the ability to easily update rigging (rigging got a whole lot easier in 2014), adding subdivision and weight mapping to legacy figures leverages the products I already own.

Much of what Studio "lacks" are things most users never bothered with anyway. I'm not sure why there needs to be a special "room" for fitting when it can be better integrated and that integration is hardly a lack. And I am sure your fully aware that Studio has done subdivision and weight mapping for years so there's that. Just as there are a few bits and bobs Poser has that Studio does not there are things missing from Poser that Studio does do. Different strokes for different folks really. I doubt those things are the real driving force as far as software choice goes much less character choice.

So tell me, using my example above - how would YOU get Miki 3 (capsule rigging) or Miki 4 (Poser Weight Mapped) (or a legacy rigged figure like Eroko - when she isn't tied up) dressed in a genesis 2 outfit? I haven't been able to figure out how to do it, and needless to say, there is nothing in the "document center" that explains how to do this. That is kinda important for what I do - I need all of my Star Trek characters in the same uniform (V4 Courageous & M4 Valiant is what I standardized on - that may change if I can figure out how to get some genesis 2 clothing working reliably in Poser - I will figure it out - there can only be so many wrong ways to do it.)

Well I wouldn't be dealing with Miki as I never wanted her but I could certainly use courageous and valiant on any of my genesis 1,2, or 3 characters. And um..wouldn't you just take which ever figure you wanted to use them on into the fit room and work it out there? I would assume that it replaces what auto fit does right?

AFA that 3 to 4 hundred dollars - you can start with Slosh's UV products and then get a full collection of Dimension3D's GenX2 products - that is right at 185 right there, now add in DraagonStorms texture Batch Conversion products. If there is a cheaper way to do it, I wouldn't mind seeing some documentation on it. (There's that pesky word again.) I probably did spend too much money on add-ons, but I couldn't get a handle on what I needed and what I didn't.

You don't actually have to buy those products. I've never bought GenX1 or 2 because I don't need to carry over exact morphs from one generation to the next. If I wanted to avail myself of exact copies of the thousands of available generation 4 morphs it would be money well spent or if I had a character in say a comic book that I needed to look identical it would be worth it. I'm just never needed that sort of exactness myself.

Sloshes products are a wonder if you have heavily invested in say Hero or Aiko etc, or if you just can't let go of some of those old skins from 10 years ago. It makes more available for expansion without question and I know that many people have taken advantage of that that had huge back stocks of characters from the past. For people heavily invested in previous generations it is actually a big money saver.

DraggonStorms batch converter is a wonderful time saver if you have scores of characters your moving over. But if your doing one or two its not really that complex to do if you have a general understanding of surfaces. Again it is money well spent if you have an extensive library of gen 4 products.

All three were product lines were huge sellers. Not because they were required but because they were time savers or pulled things out of the way back that people wanted to be able to continue to use. It was however choice based and not a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. They saved time or money and clearly many people found that more than worth the cost of the products.

AFA moving textures - yeah, I already own all of those products (TC1 & 2 and TT, and I work them like a rented mule). But that doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, a Daz character is pretty easy to pick out with it's freak show proportions (Height wise the V series make up less than 5% of the population - didn't help that they killed their realistically sized figures). That was the whole reason I started migrating from Daz figures to SM figures. The goals for the products are different. SM figures are realistically sized and realistically proportioned figures - they are not runway models, nor were they ever designed to be. Because my fictional worlds are full of people of all sizes, that becomes an issue.

Yes Victoria's are tall girls.. and Aiko's, and the younger characters and Stephanies tend to be short. So a few out of dozens are model tall. Which actually does not make her freakishly tall as models are not the tallest women nor are they freaks. It isn't as if she is pro bball tall, or even tall club tall. And I will let you in on a secret. Victoria's are scalable just like every other shape.. that means that can be as short or tall as you want in the end. And by the way, in my not so fictional world women are allowed to be tall and impressive. Tall women are not in fact "freaks".

Speaking of textures - where to get a wider variety of them? The pron industry maybe?

Only if you can convince them to do detailed photographs of the whole body under ideal lighting systems and forgo the cash that they would see from the sales of real porn. I seriously doubt the world of porn is going to step up and take an income cut just so we can have more texture resources.

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Daz studio and Poser content creators