wolf359 posted at 9:19PM Thu, 24 January 2019 - #4344109

I miscounted I meant this post further down:

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"Sorry to say this my fellow Poserites,

but the posts I do read here do sound more and more like the passengers on the "Titanic" who discuss at what moment the "automatic anti-sinking" mechanics will stop the ship from going down.

Yet we have no messages from the bridge, and the officers we knew and trusted have already been tossed over board. All we have left are some Portugese stokers who heat the boilers for their first time, wondering what all these odd gauges (sp?) are for.

In the meantime we keep discussing ways of improving the promenade deck and the dining room, or how to fine tune the steam engines to get another 2 1/2 more rpm on the propellers.

What we all disregard is that this isn't 1912 anymore, and that other ships have long since overtaken the Titanic, whatever we try.

So either build a new ship which is up to today's standards, or let it sink right here and now, decently.

Then hand over the plans to a new construction yard who, maybe?, will make something better from them. This has happened in the past already, so why not again?

And how much of that 'new ship' would be useful and not just cleaver marketing gimmicks to lure in new users to buy features they'll rarely if ever have a practical use for?

Sure Poser has a lot of areas that could use improvements and streamlining to make content creation easier on both creators and consumers, but is it really necessary in order to achieve satisfactory results? I'm all for new features and improvements of older features - absolutely. I have my own (rather lengthy) itemized list of things I want and wish Poser could do, but at the same time I've still managed to do fairly well with the set of tools that Poser does provide me, and - unlike other similar software - I'm not bound to anyone's terms and conditions for what I use those tools to make or what I do with it once I make it. Posts like the above just tend to get tired and often come from people who haven't even used Poser in 2 to 5 versions yet for some reason seem to think they're experts on what it's currently capable of. It's one thing to point out where and how Poser can be improved in this or that area, but there's a lot of "poser can't do this or that" misinformation floating around that needs to be corrected.

I don't use V4 or M4 anymore, and haven't in a long time, even though I do have a somewhat sizeable collection of content for them. They never quite suited my needs/wants in a set of figures, so I made my own.

Sure they aren't perfect - what figure is? But they suit my needs, and while it's taken me much longer than I'd like to get them to the stage they're currently at (mostly due to procrastination and a mild to moderate case of adhd), I built them to my own needs and expectations. And at roughly 28K polys they're extremely easy to work with and low on resources, with a mesh that's optimized for detail and can be cranked up for HD morphs if I want. I could have made them half that, but I personally don't like working with extremely low poly count meshes because they tend to be difficult to work with and all the characters wind up looking like their family tree doesn't fork. But best of all, they aren't loaded down with a million plus one JCMs to fix their rigging. 90% of it is pure weight maps. I think I have about 4 jcms in each of them right now. They'll get more of course as I improve their rigging and add in extreme bends, but even at their current state they make content creation damned near as easy as it gets. And they take any morph and scaling I can throw at them. It took longer to model the clothing in the above image than it did to rig it, and the entire process took a couple hours one afternoon. Granted it needs refinement, as there's a few areas around the bends that need to be smoothed out, but that's just a matter of a few strokes with the smooth brush in the weight painting tools.

Sure, I'd love it if Poser was able to swap out UV maps, and auto correct poke-thru areas (though that can cause its own areas of irritation at times and isn't always best when automated), and a whole list of other added features I wish it had, like I mentioned before. But it's not the ancient relic that some folks around here try to pretend it is. The tools exist in Poser to create just about anything you want, if you're willing to learn how to use them. It might not be as stream-lined and 'make-art-button' as other programs might be, but it still gets the job done. I think the biggest issue Poser has going against it right now is a serious lack of effective marketing.