As I said...fool me once.

"Another of my personal requests was the addition of the new pectoral bones, which were missing in Dawn1. This can cut down on the amount of extra breast posing morphs we had to deal with the original Dawn. Posing with bones is not only faster, but also more intuitive. In addition, Dawn2 will be Hivewire3D's very first figure to ship with a facial rig, which is a big improvement over the original Dawn.

Having that said, any comparisons with the original Dawn would be rather pointless, because Dawn2 was completely redesigned from ground up. A lot was learned from 7 years of real world experience from Dawn1, where the idea was to learn from the mistakes, and make this a much better base to work with for both users and vendors. "

And just by this I already know that Dawn 2 will be absolutely useless for me.

"Ghost bones" and a "facial rig" are some of the dumbest things some people "invented" for Poser rigging.

Look, some people actually do their own posing in Poser (instead of buying pre-made stuff). So ghost bones are a big annoyance because you can't easily select them just like actual bones. You have to constantly scroll down an actor list to select a ghost bone.

Wheras with a figure without ghost-bones, you can easily pose each actor just by clicking on them with your mouse.

Face-rigs are also utter nonsense. DAZ "invented" them because they wanted to pander Genesis off to the "Big Boy" Studios.

A strategy that utterly failed.

I want a Poser figure to be simple, sturdy and easily accessible.

I want a Poser figure to play on Poser's strenghts, but not to succumb to some arbitrary "professional standards".

So, again, here is my "recipe" for the perfect Poser figure:

1. Built in muscle-edgeloop mesh topology, as Poser can easily handle tris and poles, and this saves a lot of processing power and makes sculpting so much easier for hobbyists.

2. Simple, but efficient mapping. There used to be a time where we had tons and tons of DIY-made textures available because making your own textures was so easy and fun, everyone could do it.

3. NO GHOST BONES. There is absolutely, positively no use anymore for ghost bones, now that we have weightmapping and easy JCM creation. Ghost bones are a kludge that was needed back in the dark ages of spherical rigging.

4. NO FACIAL RIGS. I want a POSER figure, not a figure that was designed along some arbitrary PRO standards. Facial rigs are good for animations done with professional software for movie studios.

They are just an unecessary overcomplication for Poser hobbyists. Everything a face rig can do, can be more easily done with a morph. We developed tons of tools during the last decades to make morph creation and handling easy and accessible even for beginners.

5. NO CROSS COMPATIBILITY. Dawn I was claimed to be "Rigged for Poser". The truth was, that Hivewire rigged Dawn for DAZ-Studio and then just exported her, relying on DAZ-Studios rudimentary export tools.

Poser is already commercially dead. All the quality vendors voted with their feet long ago.

This is mostly because of the stupidity and stubbornness of Poser's previous owners. Instead of wasting money and time shoehorning yet another render engine into Poser, they should have used these resources to give us a professionally designed, officially backed set of figures.

Or even better bring the meshes we already had to a modern standard.

Instead they treated the meshes like an afterthought and hoped "the community" would sort it all out by themselve.

So we got a slew of half-a**ed "Vicky-Killers", all pretty much vanity projects without any thought about actual usability.

Poser is a hobbyist app. It's great strenght used to be its acessibility. All you needed was a notepad and maybe a modeller like Wings3D to be truly creative.

This accessibility is completely gone, by bowing to "professional standards".  And with it is the community spirit.

Ironically, with the community spirit gone, so is its commercial appeal.

Anyway, I have absolutely no skin in this game. I own Poser 11, but PP 2014 is my daily workhorse. I do my own figures based on

Dork, Posette/NEA, Don, Judy, MIKI I, M2, V2, M3, V3, David, M4LOD, V4LOD and the Kids4 meshes.

I don't do Supahfly. Much too grainy, takes forever and not intuitive at all. (Not to mention that if I want to render with Cycles, I just go to the original)

BTW, I said these same things since Vicky 4 was introduced!

So yeah, no need to issue a poorly made figure and waste 7 years to get some "real world experience".

Instead you could just have asked me, as I can now look back on 21 yrs of experience and hard work to create better, more realistic and still "hobbyist friendly" Poser figures.

;-)

This, pretty much, is the main problem. Many people here, the (previous) owners of Poser especially, had a problem with Poser being a hobbyist app.

The wanted to get rid of the dirty, unwashed masses, and instead playing with the "big boys".

The problem is, without good figures, Poser stopped being fun for many people.

The Poser community is now a barren wasteland.

And the last thing we need is just another "pro-features" figure that on the one hand is too complicated to be fun to tinker with, yet not good enough to justify all that complication.

Genesis 8 is also way too complicated for my taste, because DAZ fell into the same trap as Poser.

But here all the "high tech" is well hidden "under the hood", and DAZ has created a lot of tools to modify the Genesis mesh.

Still, the divide between "Professional Vendors" and simple "Users" is much more strickt in the DAZ-community, compared to how it was with Poser.

We had professional vendors, simple amateurs, but also a lot of people willing to get truly creative by themselves.

And even if it was something as simple as tinting a texture and releasing it as a freebie.

Poser is "Lo Tech".

It always was, it always will be.

The moment we stopped embracing it, the moment we thought we could sacrifice it's DIY-Spirit in the name of "professionalism",

the moment it's downfall began.

That's why I stick with my "Lo Tech" figures. (With a bit of "mid tech" weightmapping and JCMs sprinkled in)

:-)