Morkonan posted at 9:21AM Mon, 22 July 2019 - #4357663

The point is that it was what you "saw" and "knew" at the time that made you want to buy Poser. You "saw" a render that really appealed to you in some way, likely of a human, since that's something that many people can immediately identify. (If you were more of a landscapes kind of person wanting to duplicate Bob Ross paintings in 3D, maybe it would have been Vue instead?)

Tacogirl? I ended up buying Vue as well. (Though it may be the end for me, now that they've gone subscription. Love Vue, but don't use it enough to justify paying what they're charging for a subscription.)

What you "knew" was that someone did some computer stuff, sitting at a desk, and pressed a button and did the "Do Art" thing and produced the render you liked. (Probably)

Oh, I knew it was more complicated than that. That was a big part of the appeal. I wanted to be able to customize the figures. To make them look like individual people, and dress them accordingly. That's what Poser was offering (via the text description of the product, not the "picture on the box," which was not very appealing).

You likely had little knowledge of even what a simple "Pose" was, much less what node-based materials systems did or exactly what a "render engine" was, right? And, rigging and geometry and weightmaps vs deformers, etc... Well, that's not something a novice user can easily grasp without pushing and pulling rigged figures in a 3D app, right?

I did understand what Poser did, as far as posing and rendering. I played video games, so had a basic understanding of rendering and texturing. (And I think that's where a lot of new users will come from, if any. Gaming. A lot of people are using The Sims to do the things Poser does.)

A good product appeals both to those with little or no experience with its type and professionals, where applicable, who want specific professional-greade features.

Eh, that depends on what market you're aiming for. And Rosity probably needs to make some decisions.

I suspect Poser has a more "professional" base than DS. When I've seen Poser in the wild, it's for things like professional training videos, or teaching people how to use the automated checkout, or in forensic reconstructions. Ordinary people dressed in ordinary clothes, where diversity is very important.

Will that continue? I don't know. Clearly, that kind of thing isn't what sells at Rosity. I suspect you don't need to buy much content to make those types of images and videos anyway. Nobody cares if Jessie has the same hair and clothes when she's sexually harassing her new employee in the workplace training video and when she's being murdered by her jealous husband in the forensic reconstruction.

Those Poser-type apps, and the comments about the decline of desktops...it does make me think that Poser will probably have to move more toward professional users. At my office (where almost everyone is an engineer, so fairly tech-savvy), the young people don't use computers at home. They do use desktops at work, but at home, they do everything on their phones or tablets.

I suspect aiming at new/inexperienced users might be a bad plan. These people are going to be using apps on their phones, not a big-ass program like Poser.