Fauvist posted at 10:47PM Wed, 17 June 2020 - #4390764

Does everything have to be a competition? Can’t content be created that can be used equally well on both Poser and DAZ Studio? Does it have to be “one or the other”? Can’t somebody figure out how to fit ALL clothes and ALL hair on ANY figure? So that people can buy everything, instead of half of what is available. I don’t know - somebody tell me - can you use DAZ figures and clothes and hair and textures in Poser? Can you use the new Poser figures in DAZ Studio? What program can you use Dawn and Dusk in? Can they all wear each other’s clothes. Is all this stuff compatible with each other? We are not dealing with physical objects here. I feel we are dealing with company egos.

Textures for a mesh are compatible in any 3D application, Poser, DAZ, Blender, whatever modeler or renderer you use. By textures, I mean the image maps that define diffuse color specular color/intensity, transparency, bumpiness, etc. But shaders (those extra nodes between textures and the main surface panel) are application specific. Another app may have similar nodes available in its interface, but there's no way to save an item so that all possible apps can make use of its shaders as they were set up in the original app. Textures, yes; shaders, no.

Polygon meshes are likewise compatible in any 3D application. What makes the difference with figures meant to be posed are the different approaches to skinning, grouping and rigging. If, early on, someone had developed the perfect way to skin, group and rig humanoid figures, then all subsequent figures could've used the same methods and then all content for those figures would be more or less interchangeable. But that's not what happened! So a figure that has groups (actors) for a pelvis or buttocks, for example, can't share clothes with a figure that does not have those parts, at least not right "out of the box," because the clothing is designed to respond to those parts. The clothing can be converted (Fitting Room, Wardrobe Wizard, Crossdresser, etc.), which means that it will be re-grouped and re-rigged to adapt to the new figure, but results vary b/c you're basically taking what someone designed as a convertible and forcing it to be an SUV (or some similar analogy!) The closer the original and new figures are in grouping and rigging, the better the results.

That's not really a matter of company egos but of how approaches to designing posable 3D human figures have evolved. When two companies each develop their own approaches to weight mapping to improve rigging, then it's inevitable that those two approaches will not work the same way, so figures designed for one of the apps may have compatibility issues in the other app. For that matter, when a company develops what they feel is an improvement over their own previous approach, its newer figures may have compatibility issues with its own previous figures. That's basically the price of progress in the world of software and hardware!

What affects how figures are designed also affects their clothing. But that's less true with hair, as it's fairly easy to adapt just about any hair model to just about any figure, using translate/scale/rotate parameters and a bit of morph brush or whatever similar tool you have access to. It's true that some styles of hair aren't as easy to adapt to some styles of figure head (esp. around the ears). But I've never understood why hair would need to be a conforming item, when you can simply parent the hair (figure or prop) to the figure's head and it'll stay put. Then you can use whatever controls exist (or make them) to pose the hair as needed.

Something else I've never understood is why so many static prop sets are sold as "DAZ Studio only," given that there's nothing about OBJs and textures that can't also work in Poser or any other 3D app. The shaders used to apply the materials might be different, but a basic setup of diffuse, specular and bump texture maps is all you need for the item to work in Poser. You can easily see that they'll work by exporting the items out of DAZ and importing them into Poser, so why don't vendors just offer the Poser versions in the package (and increase the chances of a sale, since I'm not going to spend $$ on a product if I have to do the conversions myself)!

Just a few thoughts in response to your post, which I realize may have been asking rhetorical rather than "real" questions :-)

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TOOLS: MacBook Pro; Poser Pro 11; Cheetah3D; Photoshop CC

FIGURES: S-16 (improved V4 by Karina), M4, K4, Mavka, Toons, and Nursoda's people

GOALS: Stylized and non-photorealistic renders in various fantasy styles