Just to correct the record, Curious Labs Poser 5 is the first version where dynamic clothing was implemented. It was released in 2003.

And you're truncating the argument, Wolf. It was about having all the bells and whistles of Poser when moving to DS, **not **about needing said options for DS to be usable. It had little to do with the mighty G thing, Gray Golem, etc. This happened at the time Genesis first came out (which wasn't that impressive in initial release (which was also true of DS and DS 2). And at that time, the now defunct clothing sim, animation system, and other assorted add ons needed for that functionality were about $700, because in several cases you were also buying 3rd party licences. The base program may have been 'free', but anything beyond that was $$$. DS at that time had fewer features that P4 did; its one trick was Genesis when it came out. You didn't need the add ons if you just wanted to do still renders, but if you wanted dynamic cloth, the animation system which was a bit better than Poser's, the rendering improvements and so on, you had to pay for them. You and I both know you were mad that the Poser animation controls kept getting skipped over release after release. I was too (Full IK/FK system, please....?)

BTW, I'm investigating Blender as part of my pipeline now. Manta Ray is giving me shivers, and I have a 12 core Threadripper for it to throw floats at. Just need to get the renderdarden updated (everything uses AVX instructions, and the older Athlons lack those) and all the distributed renderers installed again.