Cascade777 posted at 6:03 PM Tue, 21 June 2022 - #4440169

Ok! I will try not to be rude. But this project seems to be just to get allot of attention over almost a Decade now. With no real results, I do not recall the names of the first two that were at the time of V3 ( I think , not sure ) and never gotten published. Was it back in 2014 of before ? Well these are the fallowing but I do not believe that they ever going to be Public just like the Previous projects. Sure one can get a load of attention but honestly if it is just a tease it could cause to block other good projects that really end up for public . It probably already happen , as I recall that there were other ideas in the past and people were shouting that the Orions are soon coming and others projects are not welcome !

So your mood seems rather to be based on a lack of attention but not really a plan to get this or the last project done.

I can understand that reaction. It's to be expected and I probably deserve at least some of it. But that's not the case.

For one thing I never started this project to try competing with anyone else's projects or to divert attention from them. I created it because I wanted a set of figures that no one else seemed to be inclined to create. I could just take an existing figure and modify it to whatever I wanted, and I've done that with some of them to an extent, but for all that trouble I might as well just build m own, so that's what I did. Poser is big enough there is room for plenty of people to create their own figures.

Building a figure like this is a ton of work. It's not like building a figure for a game engine or even blender which are usually mostly quad, simplistic meshes built for a single character and purpose. There's a lot more involved in designing the geometry and rigging for a Poser figure so that it can handle everything that's expected of it. The mesh and rigging has to go through countless iterations in order to achieve a semi-believable versatile figure that doesn't rely on 1,000+ JCMs in order to pose properly. Most figures are built by a team of people who are each experienced in their area (one for modeling, one for rigging, one for texture work, etc.), and even then it can still take years to complete. This project has been just me, 99% of the time. I have had a couple folks help me here and there, mostly with questions on how to do this or that, critiques on what looks right and what doesn't, a couple gave me some useful tools and resources (which are greatly appreciated) but beyond that it's just been me. Along the way I've had to refine my knowledge of anatomy and geometric design and try to apply it to my figure design. I've had to work out ways of doing certain things and dig through countless forum archives looking for information when I couldn't find anyone to answer it directly. And all that along side juggling a full time job and various other life events.

To give you an idea of just how much work has gone into developing Orion, here's a screencap of his current runtime: 

Each of those is a different iteration of him. And each folder has just as many. And that's just the current archive from the last 2 years. It's nearly 10gb. I had to move the older archive to an external drive because it was taking up too much space and they were versions of him that are so far removed from the current version it wasn't necessary to keep them close by but I didn't want to just toss them either.

Add to that Poser's rigging tools and random glitches can be more than a little frustrating at times. Then there's the community that can be... more than critical... of any figure that anyone creates, to put it mildly, or simply ignores it because it doesn't live up to whatever set of arbitrary requirements a handful of people throw at it (two Poser figures sitting in the store right now, have been for at lease a year, no one has bothered making any content for, or even uses them in renders that I've seen). So that can be a bit discouraging to those of us who do want to create new figures. And I didn't want to just add another generic 3D doll to the pile. It needs to be appealing and modern enough for people to want to use, otherwise what's the point? Well that takes design and planning. Add to that the curse of my perfectionist's disease.

When I shelved this project last year, La Femme and L'Homme were new in the store and everyone was clamoring for them. I was also working full time and didn't have a lot of time to devote to it and didn't want to keep people waiting on something that I didn't have an end date in sight for. So I thought at the time it would be better to focus my limited time on building add-ons for them instead, which I did some of but even that was hindered due to work and other life issues. Then my PC took a nose-dive and that took a while for me to rebuild and get running again. This is the 2nd full PC rebuild I've had to do since this project first started (this last time was the motherboard, which I had to replace twice because the first one was defective and only lasted about 3 or 4 months. Thankfully I didn't lose any of my files).

Also, several people have confused Orion with an older project/figure named Brad. I personally don't know anything about Brad and had nothing to do with its creation or creators. 

So no, my intention has never been just attention seeking. I don't see the point of that. This thread is intended to show a sort of journey of creating a figure for Poser and what is possible, along with garnering enough interest for it to be worth doing. Poser is capable of more than people think it is in regards to figure development, even with it's glitches and quirks.