wolf359 posted at 11:37AM Wed, 18 March 2020 - #4383731

If your core program has been slow to innovate then the content created for it. will stagnate as well.

What are the major new features in poser 11 that would be considered paradigm shifting in terms of making the program more attractive to vendors as a content development platform. ?.

When you see people saying that they are using this or that 12+ year old figure that indicates that the core program has not truly innovated in more than a Decade or the old content would not be compatible ,in any worthwhile fashion with the most recent features of the program.

And crowdsourcing figure development only leads to LESS UNIFORM STANDARDS for any potential new vendors to follow as the one person who made their own exotic figure is the single point of failure and when they leave,die ,quit the figure typically dies with them.?

To quote Dekard Cain: Stay a while and listen......

"UNIFORM STANDARDS" are like communism - a red herring.

Many vendors DO NOT FOLLOW CURRENT STANDARDS THAT HAVE EXISTED FOR OVER A DECADE. How do you propose to get vendors to follow new ones?

Many vendors refuse to learn any feature that was added to Poser after they bought their copy - full stop. Ever since the release of Poser 9, all I have heard is _ I don't have time to learn new features._ .

These are the same folks that don't buy new copies of Poser.

These are the same folks that are still making material .pp2s for Poser 11.

These are the same folks that are still runningalloftheirfilenamestogether because they apparently are still using Windows/286.

These are the same folks that hide their products in Ego folders, making it harder to use their products.

These are the same folks that use numbers in the place of colors, forcing the enduser to load each one to see what it looks like.

These are the same folks that can't name their products consistently throughout a single product, much less any texture add-on product.

These are the same folks that make thumbnails that don't provide the end user a clue to the product - they are creative however.

These are the same folks that were aggressively unwilling to make content for any post-V4 figure. SM addressed this by adding the fitting room to Poser, effectively killing the clothing market for these same mediocre vendors.

At the end of the day, these folks want a way-back machine so they can stay in October 2007. And have a user base stuck with Poser 6.

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End users still use V4 because it has a metric butt ton of content made for it and most of it is better made than what is being made for post-V4 figures. Poser innovations are in the software - and they are legion. With Poser, we can add innovations like weight mapping, subdivision, and control chips to control facial expressions (or muscles) to any legacy figure we choose to use. No need to waste money on a new figure, if it doesn't float your boat.

But what if you have a new figure that does float your boat - like, I don't know, how about La Femme? The vendors don't support it, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. And don't get me started on Le Homme, poor b****** doesn't even have a pair of shoes. (In the examples below, replace V4 with M4/M3/D3/Simon to see how a male product is supported.)

Poser to the rescue:

The innovation of the Cloth room means that the collection of Dynamic clothing you bought for V3 & V4 will easily fit La Femme.

The Innovation of the Fitting room means that the hundreds of outfits available for $1.99 at Daz or $3.50 at 'Rosity are available for La Femme. Hooray! La Femme has a wardrobe. And unless the product is really good, I am probably not buying any original clothing made for her - unless it is really good of course, then V4 can wear it too.

The innovation of the Dials to Single Morph command means that La Femme just became a LOT less memory intensive.

The innovation of Copy Morphs From command means that you can put that FBM you just created into your conforming clothing and it is a lot less memory intensive - especially if you delete the character morphs that aren't being used - each unused morph takes about 1Mb of memory, btw.

The innovation of the Merge Figure command means that I can add an outfit to La Femme and merge them into a single .OBJ. So La Femme is now wearing the V4 Courageous outfit with Star Trek TOS Textures. I can easily slot her characters into my Star Trek stories, should I need yet another instantly forgettable early 20's Caucasian that looks exactly like it's V4 predecessor. (See what I did there?)

The innovation of the Reduce Polygon command means that I can further shrink the La Femme's memory foot print, if necessary

On a wider scale....

The innovation of the Add-in Framework means that I can pull in DS native content (via DSON importer), update legacy texture sets (via EZ-Skin), unfubar material .pp2s (via Batch Material Convert), unfubar props (via Geometry Stripper), unfubar cr2s (via Cr2 Editor), Import FBX models, (very useful when you need furniture) etc.

Let me give you a 2nd order example.......

The Genesis 8 figure has facial bones. This is implemented in the base mesh - it can not be retro-fitted into Genesis 3 or earlier. Poser uses control chips, which will do the exact same thing (and then a whole lot more - just like every other feature that is common to both programs).

I can (and have) added control chips to my Genesis 3 figures that I use in Poser. All it cost me was a little bit of my time; in my case, less than 1 hour (Because I RTFM.) - now all of my characters have them - I added them in a single afternoon to every base mesh I own. All of my figures have the same expressiveness you can see in Project Evolution (I put my control chips in the exact same places, again no real need to reinvent the wheel.)

Poser 11 Pro isn't the one you vaguely remember, five or six iterations back.