ssgbryan posted at 11:31AM Sat, 16 June 2018 - #4331828

If you want to keep up with Poser development, I’d suggest that you spend time at the SM forums. The ‘Rosity forums haven’t been the place to be for a while now.

AFA the heirarchy, have you submitted a feature request? There is a specific thread over.

They don’t look at random forum posts.

Groan, Actually Renderosity receives way more traffic then the official Smith Micro forums ever have for all of their graphic suites. And I mean like at least 10-20 times as much traffic daily. As far as I know Renderosity is a partner with Smith Micro and a distributor of the Poser platform and does plenty of marketing and support for them also. If it is too much trouble for the Smith Micro Poser team to read the main Renderosity Poser forum once in in a while, it would be a pretty clear indicator of what they think of the broader community and their Poser user base, which may be part of their current problems. It seems what you're actually promoting here is a contraction of the Poser community?Encouraging excommunicating Renderosity 'for who knows what reason this time' will help no-one but just overall further damage the Poser community. Renderosity has done nothing but support Poser for many years now and is still to this day the largest provider of Poser content. From what I can see their is no further information regarding the future of the Poser format at the Official Poser forums then there is here? Or am I missing something? Who is it that you see commenting at the official forums in any official capacity on Poser development out of curiosity? Because I can't really see anyone from the Poser team their?

By specific thread do you mean that long, long, long thread titled "Submit your Poser Suggestions", that nobody in any official capacity has commented in for close to 9 months now? The last official comment directed people here, for their Poser suggestions. https://my.smithmicro.com/software-suggestions.html which I suggest would be a better place to raise suggestions for the future development of Poser.

Anyways...

If you are truly interested in the state of Poser's future development I would suggest looking at the Quarterly Reports made by Bill Smith the CEO of Smith Micro. SeekingAlpha has all of the quarterly reports archived on their site if you're interested. When looking at the last two quarterly reports two things are pretty obvious, Poser plays a very small part in Smith Micro's overall business strategy, with most comments bundling the entire graphics department together as a whole. And significant cuts have been made to the entire Smith Micro Graphics department and their Research and development operations since the release of Poser 11.

Some excerpts here from the last Quarterly report from Seekingalpha.com - Q1 2018

Tim Huffmyer (CFO) commented "Our graphics segment reported quarterly revenues of $650,000 compared to $1.2 million last year. The decrease in the graphics revenue was a result of the termination of the Clip Studio distribution agreement and lower unit sales of legacy products. We recently launched a new product and expect additional product launches later this year. Bill will discuss this activity in more detail in just a few minutes."

And BIll Smith (CEO) went on to add "I'm very pleased with the progress of our graphics group across several fronts. We achieved some key milestones in the first quarter, as we continue to build upon the changes made last year. Firstly, implemented some significant and much-needed upgrades to our back end e-commerce infrastructure and digital content marketplace. And by adding an exciting new product to our portfolio, we expanded our existing graphics product line up."

"As I mentioned in the last earnings call, this activity is central to long-term strategic vision of this business unit, as it supports the expansion of the customer base and helps reengage the incredibly loyal users of our core graphics products, Poser, Moho and Motion Artist."

"As I'm sure you saw, we announced our strategic relationship with Escape Motions a few weeks ago. Under this partnership, we will resell for award-winning graphics products, Rebel 3, a market-leading paying application is the first product we've added to our graphics portfolio as part of this agreement. I urge you to visit our online store, mydotsmithmicro.com, to take a look at Rebel. It is an amazing product. Rebel 3 also works very well with our other graphics products, such as Motion Artist and Moho, as digital artists can use these applications to bring their work to life with movement and sound."

"Our graphics portfolio will continue to grow throughout 2018, as several more releases are planned. These additional releases will further energize our market expansion, as we seek to transform our graphics portfolio into our comprehensive toolkit for digital artists. There are some exciting content-based opportunities emerging for graphics business in the expensive online universe of digital comics and the emerging virtual-reality market. Needless to say, there are exciting changes on the horizon within our graphics lineup, so stay tuned for future announcements."

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One thing to remember is a fundamental change with the Poser development team has occurred over the last 12-24 months, with 95% of the people who have been working to develop the latest version of Poser being cut from the operating team including Larry Weinberg himself (The original creator of Poser) who now works as a part time consultant with SM only. So it may take some time, if ever, for Poser development to regain the momentum it has had in the past with future releases. One thing is for sure Poser and the Poser community are still in the picture with SM and the SM management team for the immediate future.

Other interesting developments by SM: 1st of May, 2018 https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/smith-micro-announces-exclusive-distribution-agreement-with-escape-motions-to-resell-portfolio-of-20180501-00193 This is a press release announcing SM partnering with Escape Motions to resell their graphic software.

If you just want the SM corporate feel good message try here. With this video posted just a few of weeks ago by Smith Micro: