wolf359 posted at 6:11PM Tue, 29 January 2019 - #4344480

Well they did release an update to "Pauline" but where is poor paul?? the "John Galt" of male poser figures.

They shuttered their "Content Paradise" store. And left the creation and marketing of poser content to a third party who subcontracts to a dwindling loose informal, confederation of lingering merchants who by and large seem to think that yet another set of Panda makeup for V4 is a sustainable business model.

When all that is done, then focus on improving UI, performance etc.

You make no mention of updating the animation tools to a functional IK system or nonlinear motion clip system or a spline graph editor with more than three interpolation methods and tension controls or key frame culling to cleanup imported mocap.

I see very little potential for Market growth in the area of still image pin up portraits.

Even with the updates to the characters, it is simply not good enough for a program which is based on working with characters. A lot of programs can use and render 3d objects, so at least to me when you shave off everything, character and working with them is the strong point off Poser and Daz3d (Maybe Iclone as well, don't know it that well). SM when they release Poser need to have characters in them, so potential customers look at them and want them and therefore buys Poser. The tools available to 3D artists capable of modelling humans (which are not few) are really good, so at least to me, there is no excuse for SM not to hire a good freelancer to do it for them.

The reason I didn't mention all the things I thought they should focus on, were just to keep it short :)

I don't think they should neglect animation, but I don't agree that there are no potential in still images. I do however agree that images of just characters standing there doing whatever have little potential, but honestly I think its more general thing and not just 3D, at least to me such images offers very little in terms of inspiration for the viewer as they rarely tell any story or have emotions attached to them.

In regards of Poser Dev version, them integrating it into Poser pro, doesn't really count as being their game dev version as I see it. But simply a way for them to make it vanish, and my guess is that the feedback they got, showed them that this is not something they want to support or expand on in the future. SM have a history of releasing a confusing amount of Poser versions, which is basically the same with features turned on and off depending on what name it should have. To me this is also a very poor way of releasing Poser. They should release a single version containing all the features available for that release instead. As I doubt they actually benefit from such way of releasing it, as it simply causes confusion for no reason and in general give off a bad impression I think.