Nails60 posted at 1:16AM Mon, 29 June 2020 - #4393350

The problem with making stuff for M4 is that you are competing with years of back catalog. As far as historical stuff is concerned I have civilian clothing for M4 from the 30s, regency, Victorian and medieval periods (and some cavemen outfits) As far as military clothing goes I've got WW2, Napoleonics, AWI, muskateers, Medieval, Vikings, Crusades, romans and Greeks. While l'Homme doesn't have the same customer base, it has no historical, Sci-fi or fantasy back catalog to compete.

Yes when you look at the best sellers you see mainly products for DAZ, but that is at least partly due to the fact there is much less new Poser content available. Also sales really have a great effect. If a product is released at full price I tend to add it to my wishlist and buy it if and when I need it, whereas if something starts of on sale I tend to buy it before the sale ends in case I'm going to need it (which is why my runtimes have more stuff in them than I'm likely to use in my lifetime)

One final point, personally I think hybrid clothing combines the worst of both worlds, the added complexity of dynamic clothing, with the problems of having to pose figures without the clothes, check the animation,, run the sim, redo if you later want to change the pose (which for me makes the widespread use of dynamic clothing in big action scenes impractical), together with the problems of conforming clothing, poke throughs and less realism.

I believe in general that most "ordinary" users prefer the ease of conforming clothing and the best selling lists seem to confirm this, but maybe that's just confirmation bias on my part

I don't think I'd argue with most of that. Yes, DS heads sales because there's more of it new, but that would often be because it sells more: market forces.

I've got most of that M4 product, too. Some of it can be improved - if I can do that -, and some could do with more variety: a group in the 1930s wouldn't all wear the same suit in different colours. Take a historical setting, even one which uses almost-modern costume, as presented in film or TV - Deadwood, say: you'd struggle to populate it with the outfits available.

Yes, dynamic clothing's a nightmare. I don't enjoy trying to use it, and clothing is sometimes sold as dynamic which would work perfectly well conforming - perhaps just because it's easy for the vendor.

The majority of older product suffers from that same form-fittingness, like everything's extruded from a bodysuit. Just like when I make comics, and my aim is to make readers unsure whether they're even 3D, my ambition would be to make Poser clothes look like clothes. Which is not to say I'll achieve it, at all.

My biggest misgiving about LH is that if I wanted to make a scene requiring costumes I didn't have, I probably wouldn't go looking for them; I'd just use M4 instead.

I'll give it a go, though.