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The joy of art and creativity is the work you put into it and witnessing the improvement in your own skills. Poser and therefore Renderosity and the artwork displayed by members on this site have a history of not showing a great deal of improvement over time. I mean that's fine, people do this for fun, I get it, but somewhere lost in the mix is the inspiration to do bigger and better things. Individuals who aspire to be artist must challenge themselves to get better! That does not seem to be a common thread here. You look at zbrush art and you are just blown away by the artistry and skill. Poser users are lacking this level of inspiration and I believe it is hurting the entire brand. Whats the solution for a hobby based endever ? I'm not sure. Part of the history of Renderosity is allowing amateurs to present their work and that's a good thing! On the other hand it doesn't represent whats possible to achieve. I guess the only solution is for everyone to work to improve their work, that's where the fun lies. Stop posting really crappy embarrassing stuff. Take pride in what you do. Compare your work to really good stuff before you smear it all over the internet.

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I always find these posts a bit rough, because i think some of the things you say are correct, such as its important for people to challenge themselves to do better. But I think its a poor comparison to pick out pieces of stuff made in Zbrush and say look at how good it is. I have mentioned it before, Its a completely different program with a lot more people approaching it with a different background than an average Poser or Daz user. The goals might not even be the same in what they are trying to achieve, Zbrush is a professional tool, used in many huge projects such as movies, games, commercials and so forth. So its not really difficult to find very well made stuff all over the place, because there are so many users and these come with a completely different background than Poser/Daz users. So I did a search and found an image at random which I think looked well made.

So I looked the person up to check their background, The person have 3 years experience in the gaming industry and his main focus is modeling and texturing with some experience in rigging and animation. He uses the following applications... 3ds Max, Zbrush, Photoshop, xNormal and Quixel suite

I hope you see my point, a lot of people posting Zbrush stuff are people that have some sort of experience working with it professional, because its being used a lot in the industry.

I know that you make it clear that Poser/Daz users make stuff for fun and you are ok with that. But comparing what they do with a professional and say that there is no progress is wrong, if you ask me. Because most people that uses Zbrush and post all these very cool images, have spend hours upon hours learning it, not only the program, that's just a tool. But you have to learn anatomy, either through some educational background, drawing classes etc. You have to know how to model correctly, color theory and how to apply that to a model and so forth. What im trying to say is that its not just a matter of moving from Poser to Zbrush, or assume that its because of Poser/Daz and that this is where people go wrong. Most people can't spend 8-10 hours a day learning and improving their skills, so it would be wrong to assume that they could make stuff like you see the professionals do and that they are not improving. Poser/Daz hobbyist should not try to or be compared to these people. If it were the case that they could be, the professionals would use these programs like crazy, as I have mentioned before, people that make 3D from scratch do not care how it is made, what programs are used, how many they have to mix together to achieve what they are trying to do, if it gets the job done, its more or less, from what I can see, a Poser/Daz user issue, that it have to be either Daz or Poser..

I do agree, that not all images that people make should be posted and that they should try to challenge themselves in order to improve, but it depend where in the process they are, remember there are lots of very bad Zbrush stuff as well. But I have said it before and will say it again and by looking at the person's program list above as well, you shouldn't simply stick to one program. Use whatever you need to do what you need. But to me, assuming that the average Poser/Daz user don't have enough time to learn all required programs at once, the program that I think would help or benefit them the most, if they want to take their stuff to the next level is Photoshop or Gimp. Its almost impossible or not even worth the time trying to get a perfect image out of any single program, whether thats Zbrush or Poser, looking at his image above, its very obvious that Photoshop have been used to create the final image, not that he did a bad job or anything.

But when that is said, I overall think that people should keep posting what they make, but others shouldn't compare it to stuff made by professionals and judge it based on that, its just not fair, you wouldn't do that in any other discipline either.

Besides that, the true art of Poser/Daz is to make it not look like it was made there and a lot of things, like that comic that I can never remember what is called, is made using V4 and M4 and yet with a bit of Zbrush you can't tell, so some images might use Poser/Daz without you actually knowing it. But you rarely get anything interesting out of using only one program. Even looking at the image above, obviously the model is very well made from a technical point of view, but its not very interesting as an image I think. if it doesn't have some emotions to it, a story to tell and so forth, then it doesn't really matter from an artistic perspective I think. To me its purely interesting due to the technical skills of the person, but I will forget such image very fast, despite how well made it might be.