HKHan99 posted at 10:36AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363334

Yeah, it's that "they got you by" approach that bothers me about this whole business. It seems directed more toward extracting money than getting a functional product out to people. I bought Poser because I thought there was less of that than with Daz- and there is- but not as much less I was hoping for.

Fun bit - with few exceptions, there really isn't nearly as much of that lock-in as there used to be. I can use (with very, very few exceptions) Poser content in DAZ Studio. Folks can (with sufficient effort) use exported DS content in Poser (though this will become increasingly hard to do as the two applications diverge).

BUT... both applications can still import and export 3d assets in basic formats (Wavefront .obj, .fbx, etc). Both have plugins (and other apps have plugins for it) that allow export to a wide variety of render engines, modeling suites, compositing apps, you-name-it. Taken together, this means with a sufficient level of effort, neither application really locks you in.

I guess what I'm saying is, the whole lock-in with Poser or DAZ Studio is, well, way overblown. I say this because neither are big-enough players to demand much of anything, let alone dictate terms. I am more than willing to wager that both companies bust their cojones to interoperate with a whole plethora of other applications, to accommodate a wide variety of workflows (I got to see some of that up-close and personal back in the day.)

If you want serious lock-in though, look no further than converting the .max file format to anything else w/o using a paid-for copy of 3DS Max (as an infamous example - there are worse - way worse). Yes, DS has binary file formats, but DS costs $0.00. Poser (I think still) uses easily-opened files that can be read by pretty much anything (even a text editor), and converted with little effort (...or use the free DS app to open it, then save as .fbx).

Long story short, Poser and DS really don't lock-in much of anything, compared to the CG world at large...