Quote - The problem with Copyright discussions is just that though TG. Some folks have elevated the ownership of an idea to the same levels as religious fervor. And they're down right religious in their desire to not be moved for fear it will loose them their salvation in some way. Best just to smile at the notions of those who disagree with you and move on.

Well, this seems to be true of discussions about just about anything. People can get remarkably emotional about movie reviews, fast food dishes, the local weather. I'm guessing that if we have the emotional space to get dramatic over something like the moral basis of intellectual property rights, it probably means we have pretty darned easy lives. So that's a good thing.

But really the whole purpose of continuing with a discussion of this nature is not to persuade SM, for example, to a different opinion. He won't be persuaded no matter what anyone says. The purpose of continuing is to share our opinions so that we can bond with those who agree with us, and possibly to persuade the lurkers.

Quote - >> "You talk about the artist that created the original, what about the artist that created the copy?"

Am I supposed to applaud the guy who makes a film based on a play he does not have the rights to just because he knows how to make a movie?

Shakespeare productions get applauded thousands of times a year, both on stage and on film. Is there something wrong with that? Or does your standard not apply just because Shakespeare had the courtesy to die a few hundred years before modern copyright laws were invented?

It's a bit much to expect every clothing creator at Rendo to create perfectly original designs. That job belongs to fashion designers who very well expect their designs to be copied. If something is dear to the heart of a designer, they can protect it with a trademark, and that obviously needs to be respected. But to expect every single artist to reinvent the wheel with everything they create is absurd. No one could work that way. And copyright laws reflect that.

People probably want knock-offs and look-alikes. It's already been said here that people like to watch a movie and then try to render a scene from the movie. Gawd knows why, but they really do.

I used to visit the Daz3d site when I was a platinum member years ago, and I noticed their releases seemed timed perfectly with those of Hollywood. Very shortly after that the galleries were inevitably inundated with thematic renders of recent product.

I think the last time I even considered rejoining the PC club was when the forums/galleries were filled with dying Aslans. That changed my mind in a hurry. It was almost enough to make me lose my breakfast. I prefer Rendo's endless stream of latex hooker/pornstars, frankly. But I suspect it's exactly the same impulse driving both markets, each just servicing a somewhat different demographic.

Not that I'm immune. My favourite Daz clothing, by far, was the SP3 set "Celeste." I don't know why. But I made quite a few renders before the origin of the design for that set ever dawned on me.

I don't know if it was in any of the previous versions of Poser.

There are marketing specialists who spend their lives working on the psychology of pricing. It's not an insignificant question.

The easiest solution would seem to be to assign a quality price -- for the psychological benefit -- and put your items on sale.

I don't know what the policy here is on sale prices. Some items here seem to on permanent sale, which actually annoyed me recently, as I bought an item just before the sale was about to expire, only to see it extended the next day. But I still bought the item. So it was a strategy that clearly worked.

I agree with Marque. The elbow in A is troubling, which probably explains why she's kinda grimacing and holding her neck in such a stiff position.

B is much much better, more relaxed, and more natural.

As I understand it, you can't copyright an idea (story, character, title, names, etc), but you can trademark one. Specific comic books are copyrighted, but I expect that the characters are trademarked, and trademark laws seems, to me, to be far more weighted in favour of the owner of the trademark. (I'm still remembering Thomas Dolby being successfully sued by Dolby for using their trademarked name, even though he was only using the name he was born with).

So, I'm not sure whether the dark glasses and leather trenchcoats from the Matrix could be copyrighted, for example. Or that it would violate any laws to create content based on them. Unless, like the Superman outfit, those Matrix outfits are also trademarked.

I would think that would explain why there are a thousand look alike fashions available at Wal-Mart, but as soon as a manufacturer puts a copied label on a knock-off it becomes counterfeit and illegal because the label, not the design, is trademarked.

I certainly would.

If I thought I were going to live forever.

It's not a matter of being capable of learning to do these things. It's a matter of allocating time. The older I get, the less of it I have. So I tend to search, find, and download/buy if I can.

If there were a particular image that needed something that was absolutely unavailable... I still probably wouldn't bother learning to make it. I only have enough time in my life to make so many images, and I'm not too attached to any one of my ideas that I feel I have to create one.

That being said, I might eventually get bored with making images, and move on to creating content. But it wouldn't be because I needed the items. It would be because I was bored with the process and wanted to do something new.

I wish that people who created items with a commercial usage restriction would put their license in something other than a "license.txt" that will certainly be overwritten by the next thing to be installed.

That being said, it's still close to impossible to keep track of things, so I generally don't download stuff with a commercial usage restriction, except by accident.

I don't know why creators bother with the restriction. It's not as though Disney is going to come along and take their freebie V4 latex boots and make a $billion with them.

If the primary purpose of most freebie distributors is to introduce their products to the market, then it seems by eliminating the commercial use market, they're cutting out the people with the biggest budgets. But oh well. It's their choice. I just don't have any use for restricted items.

None of the figures available is truly fantastic, and all of them have problems. 3rd Generation Daz have macaroni shoulders that look disastrous, even morphed, without clothing. But their faces are lovely. Poser 6+ figures have better upper bodies, but the legs are weird and the faces are OOOGLY as sin itself. M4 still has problem shoulders but they're improved vastly, particularly with a few well placed morphs. But rendering several of him in a scene kills my machine. V4 has better shoulders, but they are narrow and even with tiny breasts she looks too well endowed to relax her arms at her sides because her chest is too wide for her narrow little shrugged shoulders. None of them has good legs, particularly in the hip joint, except Antonia, whose legs are the best I've seen. Apollo has a very natural but stocky looking body, but there's something weird about the eyes I can't get rid of no matter how hard I try.

So they all have pros and cons. In the end, then it's which works best for which scene. IE: I'd never use a 3rd generation Daz creation for a nude scene. Never. Urgh. But for a close up portrait. Yes!

The availability of supporting products is also a key factor.

In the end, though, I'm not sure, when it comes to midrange, multiple figures in a scene, that anyone has done better than M2 and V2. But the attempt to make figures that do everything for everyone looks like it's backfired. And It's kinda been downhill from there.

Edited to answer the OP's original question. It's a good one.

Poser figures are ugly out of the box. I hate to say it, but the market agrees. They're ugly. They just are. You have to fiddle for a long time before you get something that looks nice. And who wants to fiddle for a long time with something that starts off ugly unless you want it to end up ugly too?

Okay, a lot of people. But probably not most people. Particularly not impatient people. And poser users are going to include a lot of impatient people. I'm one of them. If I weren't impatient, I'd just draw the figures myself, after all.

Quote -  I've heard of using a flash drive for extra RAM, but haven't found anything USEFUL on how to do it. You have any information on that? I even named my 1 gig flash drive 'RAM' in the hope of using it so!:laugh:

What is ready boost?

It's available as one of the options when you first plug in the drive, if you have it on autoplay. There's a ready boost tab. Conversely, you can just search windows help for ready boost.

That is, if you're using Windows 7 or Vista.

If you're using XP, which I think you are -- I just checked -- um.... not so much, I'm afraid.

Quote - I've only been in for about 3 years, so I can't speak about then, but one thing that really irks me is that product documentation  (with a few exceptions) really stinks.  For one thing, many come with a file called "readme.txt"-you can only have one per directory, so if a bunch of stuff is getting installed, invariably I end up overwriteing readme.txt-perhaps even more than once.  I find readme files in any number of different directories, sometimes in runtime/readme's (or various misspellings thereof) under runtime/libraries, etc.

Arggh. My own pet peeve too. A community standard that included unique file naming and standard folder/file locations would not be that hard to follow.
Other aspects of the file structure of zips, on the other hand, has improved. Really old content is often not organized even in to runtime structure. Everything shoved into a single file with a readme detailing file placement. So, we do get better at some things! :)

Have the models improved, in general?

As others have said, some is better, some is worse, and there's a whole lot more in the middle than there used to be. So the impression is of a reduced quality. I was thinking about a year ago, about a particular merchant/marketplace whose offerings didn't seem, in general, to be as detailed or well-crafted as they did 4 or 5 years ago. So maybe I agree.

On the other hand, poser models are offered at ridiculous prices and most merchants can't (can they?) really be earning much more than sweatshop wages, given the sheer amount of work that goes into making even a "mediocre" model. Surely, it must be a labour of love that drives most creators, rather than a reasonable expectations of riches. It's hardly surprising that the most creative people get burned out periodically or that other markets attract their talent.

I stopped getting that texture will not load message when I changed to render in a separate process.

Now, if I overdo the scene complexity, the render just stops somewhere, but Poser does not crash.

By the way, on 1 gig machines, I've used ready boost and a flash drive to add ram, and it does help remarkably for cheap.

Quote - There is huge confusion here, and those that are struggling with this will kick themselves once the penny drops because it's really very simple.

Indeed. I had this revelation when I got a whole lot of prints made. Some I uploaded at 72ppi some at 300ppi some at 200ppi, and I was concerned that the lower resolution ones would not print well. Nonsense. All that mattered were the dimensions of the images in pixels as they related to the dimensions of the images in inches on paper. The 4320 x 2868 that my camera puts out is good enough for anything I might want to do, and I don't have to waste time converting anything to anything. Of course, I was letting the printers do the math for me. But they never insisted on 300dpi or anything like that. They simply indicated the minimum dimensions needed in pixels for each print size in inches.

On the other hand, my MIL sent some of my poser images to be printed for product inserts, and the printer insisted that they be sent to them in 300dpi. She didn't know how to make the change, and what came back was... um... suboptimal, even though they were renders of 4000 x 3000 pixels to be printed on 6x6 inch paper. My only guess is that the either printshop was incompetent in some way or my MIL sent them resized smaller images by mistake.

I figured that the PPI setting in photoshop was just one way of asking the software to calculate the size that the printed image will be paper, given its pixel dimensions and current printer software standards. But not some native quality of the image itself.

What I took from this is poser is that the dpi settings aren't relevant, but that I need to render at the largest pixel dimensions that my machine can handle.

Am I close? Or do have it totally backwards?

Quote - how many hundreds of posts do the perennial "is Poser work art?" threads attract?  and how many people go on and on about creativity and tools and photographs?  but i've literally never seen a photo community with a gallery as unvaried in content and message as this gallery.

Photographers are pretty limited in what kind of work they can produce. They just don't all have access to the exact same model. And even if there are a lot of them who can reach one particular location, they're never there on the same day, with the same light and weather conditions, looking at a scene from the exact same view. Variety is an unavoidable component of photography, and trying to reproduce others' work with as much precision as possible is one of the best ways to learn the trade because it's actually hard to do.

Not that there aren't photography forums filled with what looks like the exact same unspectacular sunset posted over and over again. There are lots of those. But they tend to draw almost no attention and fall off the front pages into obscurity.

I expect that the galleries here and in other similar places are lacking in variety is because, despite everyone saying that they only produce or should produce art for their own pleasure, the neurotransmitter hit to the reward centre of the brain when we get a lot of views or comments "from the masses" is simply too strong for most people. So they make art -- and buy stuff that helps them make art -- that pleases the masses. And when it comes to poser art, the masses don't seem to have very original taste.

At least, that's how it seems if you look at the galleries here.

I think, though, that there is some truly spectacular art in the galleries here.  But OMG is it ever hard to find.