JoePublic posted at 5:46 PM Fri, 3 June 2022 - #4439530

I'm just using G8 as she is the most obvious competition.

(And for the record, I also have a lot of things to criticize about G8.)

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Yes, Poser has a lot of tools. And I pretty much use or used all of them in the past 22yrs.

But I disagree that Poser is bought for the tools.

I bought Poser because it promised me to add realistic human beings to my artwork.

Well, neither Posette nor Dork were especially "realistic".

Nor were any of the many figures that followed, including the DAZ ones.

So I learned to fix them with the tools Poser provided.

It was fun, but I did it because I HAD to. Because there was no ALTERNATIVE.

I much rather had started with a figure like G8, that at least is 85% "correct" right out of the box instead of having to fix basic functionality.

More time fixing things makes less time making art.

So, no, I think both Studio as well as Poser are bought for the same reason: The figures.

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And don't understimate Studio's toolset. (I was one of the first actually paying for Studio's rigging tools)

They even have a type of "Morphbrush" plugin. It is still a bit primitive, but in a year or so it might be just as capeable as the Poser morphbrush is now!

Those are pretty much the same reasons I started building my own figures, cause I was never truly happy with any of the ones that came with Poser, or the ones I bought to add into it. And the more time I spent customizing them to my liking, the more I felt like I should just be spending that time making my own, so I did. And that's what I like about Poser. I use DS and iClone too, and I like them each for what they are, but I come back to Poser because its the most familiar, and I have the most freedom to do what I want in it. I could do the same in Blender, but I usually wind up spending half my time searching YouTube to remember how to do this or that thing in Blender.

I've seen some pretty nice art made from some of the worst figures in Poser's lineup and I doubt those artists spent days or weeks modifying geometry and rigs to create that work. They just used them as mannequins and adjusted areas as needed to produce a final render. Because that's all any Poser figure really is, a mannequin. Blank canvases you can do with whatever you envision. Even the Genesis figures aren't perfectly realistic, they're highly stylized based on a specific DAZ artistic look. It doesn't take much to recognize a daz figure regardless where you see it because they all have a specific look to them. Much like character models from certain high profile games. If you're familiar with the Warcraft style, for example, then you'll spot it anywhere you see it.