erogenesis posted at 6:29PM Sat, 22 June 2019 - #4354233

Rendo have a fantastic opportunity here and they CAN do it. They do need to be careful not to promise too much, but if they just focus on Poser's qualities, refine them, they should be on the right track.

Agreed, but they don't have a whole lot of runway to work with... Poser is barely earning enough to keep a very small dev team going (3-4, tops), so they're going to have to either donate some extra cash from the store profits (which will be a bit tight for now, given that they probably have a bit of debt to pay down from purchasing Poser... unless they saved their pennies and paid cash?), or put the feature requests through a very tight-meshed priority filter and pick what will have the most positive impact.

You do kick-ass work (though the blonde up there looking like a very tall version of my ex-wife is creepy as hell), and your concepts look cool on the surface (and I like how you think),BUT... you do realize that world+dog is sniffing around trying to push Rendo to do X or Y (and yeah, often to prefer their products or favored products, but c'est la vie.)

So, well, keep all that in mind.

Although dynamic simulations such as cloth and soft-body is obviously attractive, not many Poser users will have the processing power to facilitate such features on a daily basis. For my comic work it would be hell on earth. They would do better to combine those technologies to make and bake morphs that achieve the same thing but then more efficiently.

Kinda. I find myself not liking DForce all that much on the DAZ side... not for the tech (it's real kick-ass for what it does), but because now I gotta toss in simulation time into the workflow, and that can often rack-up to be as long as (and sometimes longer than) the render times. Collision Detection, well, I have a strong loving bias for that one in DS (for my own reasons), and all these years later, I still enjoy watching it respond in quick-time in most instances. :)

So, yeah - kinda agree with what I think you're shooting for. BUT (you knew there was a 'but', right?) You can have the best of both worlds - draping and collision detection off to the side that can be turned on and refined by those who want it (they're already there and can be altered/incorporated as advanced features that can be turned on), but maybe by default lean more towards a hybrid 'make-art-button' sort of happy medium that doesn't turn CPUs into butter.

But I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to adopt age old-tech and have to refine it, but Poser as it was isn't bad. If they just refine what is already there, they can pay the bills for a future total reprogramming. I think that is kind of inevitable.

To be fair, they would have had to refine what's there... now the day will come where the underlying engine is gonna need an overhaul, but don't expect miracles. Real-life example? Outside of CG-land, I worked with updating/upgrading a product that rakes in $1.5bn/yr. It had comments dating back from 1997 (I wish I was kidding.) There had to be at least six different languages involved, two differing databases built-in (PICK in a VM, and a bastardized fork of Postgres). Most of it was Spaghettified all to hell. Took 20 of us nearly two years just to overhaul the underlying packages, while a handful of others re-worked the UI into something useful. Both QA and C-level armchair eyeballing were omnipresent and brutal (it always is when you're modernizing the company's main money-printer.) The three months of migrating all of the customer installs (each of whom wrote rather massive checks for the thing) was even more brutal. In spite of that, there were a number of things I (and the others) hated, but simply could not touch, let alone rip out and replace... not without a radical change in what the customer(s) expected and demanded (in performance --see also PICK-- in responses, in UI layout...)

The point is this - even on Poser's scale, upgrading/improving/evolving is going to be a long and painful process. DAZ has the advantage (well, a few) in that it was built from the ground up to be free from 1990s tech (especially Kai), to be sufficiently modular that pieces and parts can be ripped out, reworked, and improved, without any degradation or compromise elsewhere. Poser is a bit more monolithic, I believe (though I hope they changed that over the years), so it's likely not as simple as you think it is.

Then again, I think we both might end up pleasantly surprised.