JoePublic posted at 1:35 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431572

Yet for the last 15yrs perhaps, everyone tries to emulate the way, professional Studios design their figures, completely ignoring the fact that the way Poser is used is vastly different from how CGI Studios use their assets.

As someone who's dabbled in figure creation within the last 15 years, I have to confess I'm coming around to that point of view. Base meshes used in the film and games industry can have very simple. even topology because that will not be the topology of the final figure. I'm no industry insider, but as far as I understand, the usual workflow is to make a sculpt from the base mesh, possibly using a very high poly count, and then retopologize to fit the new shape. We don't do either of that in Poser, which means that our base meshes need to be different.

I used to think that very muscular characters are a bit of a fringe application, so there's no need to support that with the mesh. But the underlying anatomy is pretty much the some for all humanoid characters, so getting the mesh to support the bone and muscle structure from the beginning now seems like a pretty decent strategy to me. If a made a new figure from scratch these days - don't worry, I'm not planning to - I would probably make the base shape ridiculously buff in order to understand how the mesh needs to flow, and then tone that down later.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.