RHaseltine posted at 3:46 PM Thu, 30 March 2023 - #4460085

Giving Poser the ability to import .duf content would not require copying the content, so I don't see how it would entail copyright concerns. Poser now has many of the required features, Dual Quaternions being an obvious exception, but of course that says nothing to its practicality or desirability, and of course an imported figure would not have built-in support for soem Poser antive featrues such as Walk Designer.

I have 3 plugins for Poser 12+ in my store that already read and import DUF format straight into Poser, and that indeed does not infringe any copyright law. That is not the issue. The issue is that Genesis is not a "figure", it's a "platform". Every feature it can perform depends on DS4 to function, meaning they remade DAZ Studio to support it. In other words, Genesis will not work in DS 1, 2 or 3. It only works in 4, where the "platform" was created specifically for it. It's this "Genesis Platform" that is copyrighted, to include all of its functionality.   

I know it's funny to put DAZ and copyright on the same sentence, since they had no shame when they stole Poser rigging to use in DAZ Studio. They gave it a fancy name (TriAx), but it's the exact same Poser rigging used in legacy figures. If not, legacy figures wouldn't work in their software. For those who don't believe me, I have talked to one of their figure riggers, and he confirmed that it's the exact same rigging stolen from Poser. If it weren't the same, it wouldn't work seamlessly in both programs. I never understood why Poser didn't sue them, but I suspect it had something to do with Poser being sold from one company to the next so many times in a row. These companies (probably) didn't want to get into legal disputes with a larger corporation. Who knows?  

I agree that it was a good thing that DAZ decided to drop the proprietary file formats, and adopt an open standard like JSON. That was a long standing request from the vendors, so it was a good move.   

About Dual Quats, Poser supports it too. It was used in the Kinect MOCAP support added in Poser 11, and even the Python API has access to Dual Quaternion math off the bat. I have used it in my "Scatter Tool" plugin for Poser 11 and 12, so it's not something new. The rigging in Genesis 3/8 is the classic "Simple Bone" used in game engines for ages. Dual Quats is the math used to calculate the rotations, which is also commonly used in game engines. Poser uses Euler rotations, but it could be quickly replaced with Dual Quats without changing anything in the existing rigging. It's just the math used to calculate rotations, not the rigging itself.   

2 major advantages of DQ over Euler rotations are the elimination of "gimbal locks", and also the faster calculation speed. I think some parts of the Poser interface use DQs, but the rigging is still Euler rotations. 

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