Torquinox posted at 2:00PM Thu, 05 April 2018 - #4327501

May I ask a question? Why is it so hard to develop for Poser now?

From what I've read in many PA's quotes, it's not that it's necessarily HARDER to develop content for Poser, but the fact that fewer and fewer people are BUYING content for Poser... to the point where many PAs no longer consider the extra effort involved in making things fully Poser ready worth the effort when that same time could be devoted to making more content that sells more than well enough even though it's for DS only.

I have my own thought about V4. She will be around as long as her stuff sells. She has a lot of stuff, and a lot of it is really good. As an executive at FB once said, the winner is not the best product. It's the product everyone uses. If people still use V4, V4 will stay. Compatibility goes both ways and there are V4 clones for all the Genesis figures. V4 content may live forever. And why not?

Absolutely true as long as everything you've just mentioned is meant to be a correct statement for users of DAZ Studio. The options are a lot less clear for Poser users and it all goes back to the original major rift in this hobby, which was when Poser's owner at the time, Curious Labs, introduced a major change in the way Poser materials were handled in Poser Pro Pack and Poser 5. Ironically, DAZ's older renderer, 3DL, actually uses the same basic material setup that Poser used up through Poser 4, whereas any items made for Poser and not sold through DAZ after that date may use materials and other programing tricks that simply didn't work in 3DL. With the introduction of Iray as the new primary DS renderer, we're seeing the opposite situation - many Iray materials simply don't work properly in Poser's firefly renderer, so, to make a product that works properly in both DS and Poser means having to make not one, not two, but three different sets of textures just to cover the basics. And keep in mind that that's before we even get into the fact that DS and Poser also use different weightmapping systems, dynamic cloth systems, lights, etc., etc. In the end, it's a lot of extra work to support to support both and we've hit the point where many artists at DAZ aren't even bothering to support 3DL anymore and only doing Iray textures because that's what sells.

Whereas, apparently, we've hit the point where product that is being made specifically for Poser is no longer selling well enough for many PAs to keep making it. Of course, the fact that many PAs are switching to DS only means that they're going to be supporting the newest generation of DAZ tech. So, we've come into what's almost a complete inversion of the market ten years ago when almost everything worked in Poser and DS users were often left out in the cold... a situation that has Poser only users feeling the burn of being the less desired part of the market.

I have read a lot of arguments for why the new figures must ultimately win, and I'm not totally convinced. All these figures are globs of geometry with bones stuck in them and textures stuck on them. I've read some say, Dual Quaternion Skin. Yeah. I found some white papers. That's not inherent to the figure. It's a feature of the 3D engine. Mathematically, it's a different way of handling bone-driven geometry. There's also a spherical method. Same with SSS, It's not a feature of the figure. It's a feature of the render engine. If you load V4 geometry and rig it in a program that has a DQS engine, V4 will have DQS. If a figure has a problem with articulation, one can correct that through a combination of morph, bone adjustment and mesh smoothing. Right?

Well, first, there's also weight mapping, which is different between the two systems, and some other technical differences that simply don't play together. Up through Genesis 2, DAZ took it on themselves to produce DSON files that let their DS dedicated products work within Poser, but with Genesis 3 DAZ finally decided to stop trying to pander to the Poser market. As far as V4 lasting as long as there's a market for her... basically true if you ignore the fact that DAZ owns and controls V4 and, if they really wanted to stick the knife in and twist, they could just raise the price on her to a crazy amount or even pull her from the market. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if the only thing that's kept that from happening so far is the fact that Hivewire's Dawn would probably just fill that void in the market, and by keeping V4 and her kin so cheap DAZ has effectively kept Hivewire from gaining a more dominant position in the hobby.

Let's move on to clothing fit. I expect any item of clothing, prop, or accessory can be fitted to most any figure. I'm researching and experimenting. So far, seems to be true. I >don't know what other people are doing, but I looked for info on fitting clothes and I learned how to unhide the scale tools and how to apply mesh smooth modifier to make >clothes fit, no poke-through. Once I had the controls, making clothes fit was easy. I put V4 stuff on G3 figures, I put G3 stuff on V4. I know. G8 is the now. I'll get there. I have >stuff

It can be done in either program and there are some third party programs that also allow you to refit items, but there's nothing else as fast and simple as DS's autofit. More than anything else, the convenience of being able to put the same outfit on any figure with just a couple of mouse clicks was what got me to switch from a Poser user who occasionally used DS to a DS user who occasionally uses Poser.