hornet3d posted at 6:47AM Sun, 17 January 2016 - #4249614

@Dustrider

Your reading of Poser 11 is very close to mine and I too have not upgraded. I am also not very happy with the deactivation service and I notice that the promised Internet portal for activation still appears to be missing, probably in the pipeline along with the EULA for Pauline and Paul.

Yes I am being critical and some will say that is why Poser is dying because the users are ungrateful yet when they introduced Sub Surface Scattering it was very different. I still remember the renders that were being shown weeks before the release and BB going into depth on how it could be used. The thread at RDNA ran for page after page and most were far from critical. I for one could not wait to get my hands on the upgrade. Compare this with what was shown for Superfly, there really is no comparison, even now the number of Superfly renders do not exceed what was shown for SSS before launch.

The cost of the upgrade was higher than usual, despite the fact that Paul did not make it into initial launch. I am very much in a wait and see mode but there will need to be changes both to Pauling and Superfly before I am really tempted. Mind you I did not like Dawn when she was first launched but now the figure is very different from when launched so improvement is possible, but then Dawn never had a $200 price tag.

Guess I'll co-sign Hornet and Dustrider on their opinions. There's obviously a shift in momentum and mindshare away from Poser and towards Studio. Even if you plan to continue using Poser as I do, you'll have to take into account the issues in the Poserverse from the parent company down to the final product and on to the vendor support. You have to consider that Poser's gone from the king of a relatively small niche market to a struggling contender in a growing consumer 3D market. That market consists of cheap 3D printers, free software like Studio, Sketchup, and Blender as well as alternate content markets like the Unity store, Mixamo, etc. Throw in simplified animation tools, free game engines and the like and the landscape looks very different than it did 5 or 6 years ago. There is nothing to suggest that Smith Micro is willing or capable of adapting to the challenge.

The solution in my mind, especially after watching Adobe gobble up or outperform its competition, then implementing an "eff you, pay me" business model, lies along what Wolf359 alluded to in a previous post. Diversification. I'm no more inclined to throw all my eggs into a Daz3D basket than I am to pay full price for the latest version of Poser. I'm very much interested in the workflow Daniel Eskridge and others have created where multiple softwares, many of them free, are integrated into the whole. It gives you a lot of autonomy and more flexibility to produce better art in my opinion. I plan to create art for many years to come and don't want to be at the mercy of any one company or their vendors.

________________________________

My DeviantArt Gallery

My Website