Penguinisto posted at 2:44PM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363370

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...

Yes, I get that the big pro programs try to keep everything proprietary if they can- another reason I don't use them, on top of the front-end expense. I don't feel locked in to Poser, if anything, I feel like there's not enough internal consistency or depth. Mostly I wanted something that would spare me learning Blender, but I find I need to learn Blender to use Poser for what I want. Poser isn't useless, and it does have some nice content, but it isn't designed for asset creation, and there isn't enough of what I need around on my budget to let me do what I had hoped to do. So, I need to use Blender at the asset creation level, and from what I can tell, I need to use Blender at the rendering end, too, for the kinds of projects I'm doing. I say 'from what I can tell' because I just haven't found much about NPR rendering in firefly, so maybe I can do what I need to there, but I haven't figured out how. Preview simply has too many conflicts with things like strand hair to be much use, and the NPR rendering settings are too limited. Overall, I feel like Poser has some really good features, but often they don't work well with each other. "With enough effort' is not very heartening.