Hmmm, thought I had already posted to one of these. Anyway, here goes some stuffs..

First of all, content is King. But, you need to get other people making it for you for free. When you're looking under the hood for improvements, and within normal operating functions, you really need to give content creators new, better, and different tools to draw upon. The more innovative or "brand new" additions you make and that you give the users/content-creators access to, the better the products you will see made for your product, which will help push sales. The very last thing anyone wants to see is that a new version of Poser comes out and the only product classes available for it are the same, old, tired, pose, morph, texture, lighting product types... What are you going to put in there that will create a **brand new product category **for this brand new version of Poser? That's a question that needs answering. (Yes, I know there are some nifty new rendering features. I'm talking about "content" though, that's makes a measurable new impression on the market and the capabilities for content generation. It's all about brand management, folks. You don't want the same ol' cracker to get stale after all these years.)

User-configurable Hotkeys and Mouse Controls: All the standard base menu functions available. The ability for the user to map their camera functions to the mouse, however they wish, so it matches other 3D apps they may use in conjunction with it. Multiple keys per function accepted, pls. ie: "CTRL-R", etc..

Better and more powerful dialogue options for saving Figures/Poses/Props- Poses, especially... It's about time, after all these iterations, that regular users can have easy, UI, access for creating Injection morphs, Custom Channels, Material Poses, Animations, etc. It's time to let the content creators move up a notch in the production cycle by empowering the normal user. By doing this, you will also help to generate content creation, because it will make it just that much easier for the potential creators.

Easy batch-access to nodes - "Scenefixer" is very nice. However, Poser needs to have better built in accessibility to certain commands. For instance, in the Mat room, I should be able to right-click on a Channel or a Node and choose to apply value settings, image settings or the entire tree to all Channels across all groups, instead of simple copy/paste-all functions. If I have a legacy AO node in a material set, for instance, I should be able to set that node to be IDL dependent, instead of calc'd, and then Right-Click on the node and choose to apply that AO node's properties to all AO nodes present in the materials for any or all groups of the object. The same goes for Channels, choosing either the base channel value, like a Difuse Value of .8, for instance, and have that Channel Value copied across all groups. But, I could also just copy that Channel's entire node tree, instead. (Yes, I do understand that, many times, nodes will have connections to other Channel node trees. However, you can "make that happen" by getting the Mat Room to read ahead and, if the same nodes in the same channels exist as they do in the source group, the connections will be made in the target group. You could also give that a toggle, if you're feeling sparky, if the user didn't want those connections made.

Particle/Emitter System - Where is it? Everybody else has one, why can't we? Yes, "Poser Physics" does a few nifty things, but it does not do particles/emitters that I know of. And, we should have some sort of basic system within Poser that content creators can draw on to make even better content to push Poser sales. Build in a physics system, under the hood, and give content creators good access to all the hooks, and you could get some really nice, free, content generation going on. Fountains, blasters, fire-hoses, fire, smoke, machine-gun rounds, bouncing all over the place... yada yada yada. Oh, and with a good physics system, you could have **everything **bouncing all over the place. (Softbody, anyone?)

Hair - Something, please, please, please,... Something other than that busted, crappy, ancient, Hair room, for the sake of all that is good on this green Earth! It sucks. It may as well NOT be in the program. Think about that, for a moment - You have an entire tab/room devoted to something that is virtually unusable. And, for those that can use it, it generally produces crap that isn't worth rendering, considering the progress you're making in every other area. The better your rendering capabilities, the worse anything made with the Hair Room is going to look, guaranteed. Poly hair just isn't flexible enough, in use, to render realistically or even render well, anymore. Revamp the Hair Room, if you decide to keep it, and give us some user-usable creation possibility.... Heck, dump the whole Room and rewrite a new engine for Hair, why don't ya? So, you'll orphan about FIVE darn Hair Room products in the entire inventory of every Poser content distributor... Doesn't that tell you something? It should tell you that the Hair Room is complete garbage and nobody wants to go near the thing. (OR, give us access/hooks to hair controls via new rendering apps.)

Face Room - OK, I get it. You want to have a locked-down selling point for Smith Micro figures. Well, guess how well that has worked for you? Go find the number of products created outside of the SM site for those figures and then get back to me... It's not working and it's not going to ever work. What "works" are good, quality, appealing characters with good topology for morphs and animation and good rigging. So, what's the deal with the Face Room? I know you may have contractual obligations, but if you're just going to ship it and write a check to Singular Inversions for virtually no reason at all, why not just write me a check? I'm fun to have around! I tell jokes, can write reasonably well, am a pretty cool guy and doesn't afraid of anything... At the very least, you can allow third-party products access to the Face Room by allowing for the creation of reference sets by third parties. Make an SDK for it. Open it up. (OR, sell a companion product that creates the references for the user. Encrypt them so they can't be redistributed without a license, if you want to protect it!) If SI doesn't want you to do that, then chuck 'em and find someone else. There's oodles of such products out there, now, and there's bound to be one you can use or buy outright for a cup of coffee or something. (Please, no, not Faceshop! Heavens, no!)

Smith-Micro Content - I generally like the content that SM puts together. Except for the human figures, though. Almost universally, they either look like they've just be scared by an alien or just been told they are one. Sure, you have ditched the "Heroic" model, favored by an unnamed competitor, in favor of human models that are properly proportioned. OK, I don't know where the intent strayed from the results... or vice-versa. The model's limbs/trunks/heads may be sort of realistically proportional, but that's it. In short, and just in general, they're ugly and deformed looking. They look like someone in their family knew someone in their family. IF you're going to tout "realism", then "do realism." No, they don't have to be pretty. But, they don't have to be deformed looking humans, either. (Further, on content other than "human" - Generally, everything is pretty decent. We could use some upgraded animals and a good, hi-res, horse. A bird or three, maybe something from that one creator, so long ago, that did birds? Put a stork in, too, and a raptor. A couple of new fish would be cool. How about a bear? Bears are cool! The rest of the legacy content is good, too, in order to round things out a bit. Also, STOP putting rigged clothing items in the Props category - You'll just confuse people.)

More, when I can remember the last time I banged my head on my keyboard when working with Poser. ;)