ssgbryan posted at 9:26AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318494

Using a g figure/DS comparison is a good way to get a flame war going.

...then perhaps it's time for all of us to stop emoting and start looking at the 'why', instead of the 'what'?

We have in-app, simple to the customer, means of utilizing every bit of clothing made in the last 12+ years. It's called the fitting room. Before that, we had Wardrobe Wizard and/or Xdresser. The tools are there - it is up to the end user to use them. It's like the cloth room - once you muster up the courage use it, you kick yourself for not using it sooner.

Question - is this automatic, or does it require the user to get in and beat things up to make it work? I'll go look it up, but if the latter, that's gonna be a disadvantage for most folks (not for the prosumer crowd, but for the consumer crowd).

If you are in a hurry, (or need to convert 50+Gb of V4 content) Lyrra made the Fit Room Magnets for Dawn, Dusk, Paul, and Pauline (I am hoping for more when Orion, Venus, and Project E are launched.), they automagically position the clothing so that a fitting room session is 30 second process instead of a 60 second process (On my computer, anyway). It isn't rocket science. It does however take 3 or 4 clicks. Which apparently is much too difficult for some users.

1. Magnets. Ugh. (Don't move your knee just yet; I detest D-Form just as much, no matter how useful either one may be.)

2. 30-60 seconds... compared to 5-15 seconds. Forget preferences and it's not bashing - the comparison is to point out what SM is up against. Maybe moving it to a dev rig isn't a bad idea after all? On the flip side it does remove a lot from the prosumer user.

My prep workflow is "convoluted" because too many vendors are still living in Oct 2007. They are unwilling to leverage any post-Poser 7 feature, even if it would make their lives easier.

The reason why is that vendors (at least the business-savvy ones) don't want to lock themselves into one market, when they can make something that will sell in two markets.

I promise, from this side of things, I get irritated that something cool still comes in only .cr2/.pz2/etc format, instead of .duf/.dsf - however, I fully understand the reason why, and as a result I still keep a small(-ish) Runtime-style directory hierarchy in my on-disk DS dir structure.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors drop character body morphs from clothing for example - it would make life easier for them and easier for the me. The reason they don't is because they cater to the rank beginners and folks that are aggressively uninterested in learning how to make the software go. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors at 'Rosity actually follow the sales guidelines for materials (material files in the materials subfolder, .mc6 required, .pz2s optional - Poser native PCFs for g content. DSON is a kludge); They don't, again because they cater to the folks that are still using a Poser 7 workflow, instead of leveraging the power of the current version (Even though 90+% of us are running Poser 9 or later) . This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

As alluded to earlier - the underlying reason isn't laziness, it's maximizing sales to more than one market and minimizing time spent doing that. Vendors aren't dumb, and unless they can get enough ROI on such changes, 'good enough' is going to be as far as they want to get. Make things easier on them programmatically, and problem shrinks.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors leave DOS naming conventions behind, so I don't have to restructure/rename nearly every d@#$ed file and folder (and as an added bonus, the search function in Poser would actually work). This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Heh - that ain't just a Poser thing (why do you think there's an actual Postgres DB (for CMS) involved on this side of the software fence?

This is something that's more akin to the honor system than anything you can enforce, and the moment you make it too onerous for the vendor (subjectively, from the vendor's POV), the moment they decide that one market (or the other) might not be worth catering to.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors actually THINK about how their product will be used by the end user. Example - hiding everything in an ego folder insures the customer can't find it. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Again, nothing new here, and nobody has a monopoly on avoiding that. This (and the fact that OSX is still, eons later, bitchy about auto-merging files) is why I normally install stuff by hand when I can, renaming or rearranging as I go (and when I cannot, I dump it into a dummy folder, copypasta wholesale into my main dir structure, etc.)

Tools are there, but for some, it is easier to whine than learn to use them.

Perhaps, but remember: The customer may not always be right, but they're still the customer.