EClark1894 posted at 2:22PM Thu, 01 November 2018 - #4338189

Out of curiosity, just what do you feel Poser has been left behind in? Even if I concede that Poser should have made significant advancements by now, compared to other brands it's not like they're leaps and bounds ahead of Poser.

Without saying who the other brands are, this is hard to dispute. It's true, Poser is not that far behind its main rival, D|S. D|S' main strength is that it works better with the figures people seem to want to use, and I often think that if Genesis magically began working in Poser many users would declare all is finally right with the world. I've fallen into the trap before of listing numerous things where Poser is lacking only to be told that those are high-end features I should not expect in a hobbyist program, and that I should only compare Poser to a few programs it directly competes with. For the longest time, that was pretty much just D|S. I think it's reasonable to say that Poser is also in competition with iClone, and if not then certainly Reallusion's Character Creator 3 is in direct competition with Poser (they pretty much say so in their forums). These discussions are almost impossible because the people who are typically the most content with Poser are the same ones Poser development has long been most focused on. I want to list things where Poser has totally missed the bus, but I know the apologies for most of them. So heck, I'll just try shooting them all down myself. Poser has an archaic viewport that doesn't represent either of its own CPU based renderers' materials correctly. It's bad enough that the preview doesn't support displacements (steep parallax mapping was introduced in 2005 and variations on this are now widely used), decent reflections, proper soft shadows, but it also fails to represent final output. iClone's viewport depicts PBR materials pretty much as they look in Marmoset or any other implementation, while also rivaling the fidelity of its Indigo and (soon) iRay output. IClone's PBR viewport isn't an exact match for its plug-in CPU renderers, but it's not a world apart, either. With Poser's viewport, Firefly and Cycles interpreting the same materials so differently, it would be interesting to see how Poser's viewport could be modernized without breaking all existing materials. I assume it would have to use the Cycles materials which are at least physically-based if not what would normally be meant by "PBR". But there's no good reason SM should waste resources improving the preview when its not meant for final output. Adding something like Eevee would take dozens of people many years to implement within Poser and would only benefit the small number of users who do animation, not the majority of Poser users who make high-res stills.
In the area of character creation, Manuel Bastioni Laboratory for blender offers a number of innovative tools that would not be unwelcome to Poser users. Among them are things like "Skin editor that automatically creates the displacement maps according to the character meta parameters (muscle, tone and age values)", "Fuzzy logic algorithm for interpolation permits to mix the parameters in real-time.", "Automatic generation of random characters:with special constrains, to allow the possibility to keep constant the characters heritage.", and "Algorithm to modify and finish the morphing in order to fit the expressions to the face shape." Experimental features include "Proxy fitting to automatically fit with one-click clothes to the characters and their poses, without needing of vertgroups, weights or skeleton.", "Automodelling system to create characters starting from a 3d draft. The user just provides a very rough model of what he has in mind, and the system automatically turns it in a realistic and coherent character.", and "Measure system to create a character just giving the body measures. Currently it supports 33 "classic" dimensions, as used in the most of anthropometric studies and researches." Of course, it's probably not realistic to expect a hobbyist program should have all of the features of a plug-in developed by one person over just a few years. While I don't know of any specific programs which implement implicit elastic skinning as described here (http://rodolphe-vaillant.fr/permalinks/elastic_implicit_skinning_project.php) in 2014, I can't help but wonder why there has been seemingly no effort to modernize Poser's archaic methodology. A proper muscle/body mass solution that could be adapted to existing figures would solve so many of Poser's problems. Instead people still ask for better figures, replacements for V4 or Posette even. Sure, JCMs and pose-handles can go a long way to overcome the deficiencies of a nearly 20 year old method of rigging figures, but wouldn't it be great to have figures that move like flesh and bone and not just bendy tubes with various kludges applied to make them look right? Again, this is another of those "what do you expect from a hobbyist program" requests. And my answer is the same as it has been for nearly ten years: The program is called "Poser", so posing is something it should do correctly. No more gravity defying breasts, no more calves cutting into thighs and arms intersecting rib cages, no more magnets to deform the buttocks of a seated figure. There are fixes for all of these, sure, but the underlying problem is always the same. If that problem could be properly addressed, then it wouldn't require a rocket surgeon to produce a figure that doesn't have a zip code in the Uncanny Valley. I think Poser is a great program for many things, don't get me wrong. But considering the aforementioned competition, is there a single thing Poser does better than all of them? I'm struggling to think of what it could possibly be.