diogenese19348 posted at 7:45PM Fri, 17 August 2018 - #4334949

Now that raises an interesting issue. I work with an art contest site, and we are running into exactly the same issue - our members are getting old, and we are having problems attracting new members. I'm about tearing what's left of my hair out trying to figure out what younger artists are doing these days. And I'm talking all the branches - illustration, photo manipulation, photography (which appears to be the one bright spot), comics. So a reasonable question is what are they doing, where do they congregate, and how do you get them engaged in anything? Yes, I think the Poser community is getting older and smaller. I'm not sure DAZ is fairing any better there.

Instagram, Pintrest, DeviantArt (still...), Snapchat, lots of places. Bit of a diaspora, truth be told.

But, by happy circumstance, one of the few redeeming features about Portland, OR is that it has a thriving and still-growing art community. Now we're talking physical (not digital) media, but the art is there and thriving. Getting these kids interested in CG art? Bit more of an effort, unless someone manages to jam Poser or D|S onto a smartphone and/or tablet.

That latter bit is important for one reason: Outside of businesses and the gamer community, you don't see too many desktops anymore, let alone the overclocked and water-cooled multi-processor fire-breathers with massive GPU cards (and if its being run by a younger person, odds are good that it's busy mining Bitcoin, Dogecoin or Etherium, not cranking out a render.) Most folks around here, especially the artistic types, are mostly mobile - hell, laptops are considered serious equipment.

Now I'm not suggesting that they recompile Poser to run on a Snapdragon and display on a tiny OLED. I bet I could run Poser on my 5-year-old MacBook Pro, just not all that well. Same with iRay-based renders (because my mobile GeForce chip is too damned tiny, and the new high-end MBPs went with AMD GPUs, not nVidia... yay CPU-only! :/ ) I guess what I'm suggesting is maybe something friendlier towards the smaller (13" - 15") laptop screen, and something with a mode that works on lighter resources but still looks at least halfway decent?

Just an odd thought or two.