Thanks for setting me straight. The base figures aren't necessarily zeroed.

Quote - ...she's one of the few who's voiced a problem in that area? ;o). Sometimes, you just have to do something yourself, no matter how much of a drag it is...lol. Laurie

Are you kidding? You can't hear the screams of every new user who has had to come to terms with Poser's content management? Oh, dear. What's it going to take?

Somewhere in the distant past (before I started with P8) Poser and/or DAZ surrendered control of their basic directory structure to any and every vendor who happened to come along. The end result was one of the most confusing, disorganized, inefficient, incomprehensible, confusing (did I say that already), user-hostile train wrecks I've ever seen in a major software product. I think it would be a step forward if vendors simply distributed their products at random all over your hard drive. At least that way no one would ever waste time trying to make sense of it.

I have to wonder how many potential users - and therefore how many potential sales - have been lost to SM because noobies couldn't make heads or tails of the library. "A MAT is a POSE? Whaaaa?"

Software upgrades routinely abandon old, inefficient, unnecessary and unpopular features all the time. Still there will be those who's work-flow depends in some way on those features and who will be inconvenienced. The option of keeping these features around leads to bloat in the code, slower performance, bloat in the interface and confusion to the user.

As already mentioned, there are free, third party products that will do the conversions automatically for you.

<self-appointed moderator>
Having said that, I will agree that the comments suggesting that if you don't like it to get a refund were indeed snarky. Criticism of a software product is important to the publisher and to the users. I say keep it coming.
</self-appointed moderator>

One final thought. Gagnonrich mentiones that vendors are still selling content with rsrs. I agree that if you buy something that has critical features that essentially no longer work, you should at least be given a warning.

I meant the base characters like V4, M4, etc when first loaded are at the zero state. Right?

As a beginner in all of this, I very much appreciate the credits. It tells me a lot about how I can go about creating a particular look, or which vendors suit my tastes. More detail is better. Keep it coming.

What I think I'd like to see is Poser bought out by Adobe and integrated into their tool suite. In that scenario, Adobe would probably just buy the underlying 3d technology and redesign the interface to be more compatible with their other tools, and let's hope more user friendly. The problem for Adobe in this case might be that the whole buyinig and selling of content is not compatible with their business model.

Please, any advice on lighting would be appreciated. That's the one area that keeps me from actually posting any of my stuff.  Every effort I make with the lights just makes it worse.

And thanks for asking the question, Magic_Man. It's one I've wondered about myself.

The Poser developers strike me as brilliant programmers but dunces at usability. How could thay not have realized that

  Figure->Use Inverse Kinematics->RightLeg Uncheck
  Figure->Use Inverse Kinematics->LeftLeg Uncheck

wasn't the most user friendly way to go. And you say it's been that way since P5?! Wow! I only started with P8, so I assumed it was a new feature.

But do you really need to zero out a character when it's first loaded? Isn't it at the zero state by default?

I'm coming into this discussion as a bit of a newbie. I've been working with DAZ and Poser off and on for over a year, sometimes abandoning one or both for months at a time because the experience was just too frustrating. I'm finally at a point where I can generate some renders that I'm somewhat happy with, but it took a ridiculously long time to get there. So for me the main thing I would most like to see in any new release is a focus on usability.

Poser is an amazing product, and I say this as an application developer of over 20 years. How the developers are able to get these 3d objects on a 2D medium and get them to bend and morph and move and spin around the screen is mind boggling, so I have nothing but respect for the folks that make the magic happen. Unfortunately Poser appears to be yet another application where the interface was designed by the same people who wrote the code, and I can tell you from experience, programmers make lousy interface designers. Poser has all the earmarks of this "UI by IT" approach. As a quick example of this consider something as basic as the name of the directory where content is stored. Is it called "Content" or "My Poser Stuff"? No, it's called "Runtime". What does "Runtime" mean to the ordinary user? Probably nothing unless the user comes from a programming background, and even then "runtime" usually refers to components of a system that only come into play during the actual execution. From a programmer's point of view, calling the area where the user's content is stored "Runtime" makes some kind of sense, because it is separate from all that other code they are working with that just makes the application work. Still, only a programmer would name the "content" area "Runtime".

Well, enough of that. Changing the name of the "Runtime" directory to "content" isn't even anything I would recommend at this point, but a complete overhaul of Poser's content management is something I would recommend. Let's face it, right now Poser's content management is one huge, festering, stinkin' mess. From a user's point of view it completely defies logic. To be fair to the Poser team, the basic layout that they came up with wasn't too bad, but once 3rd party vendors started adding functionality that was outside Poser's scope (see “Why are most MAT's in the "Pose" library?”) and started placing their own files willy-nilly within the Poser libraries, it became the big pile of poo that it is today. I realize that you can organize the libraries any way you like - at least within the limits of the library names Poser gives you to work with. Still, it's bad user design to ask each user to clean up the mess.

I've read through most of this thread and I noticed that for the first few pages I agreed with and understood most of the suggestions, but as the discussion progressed, the suggestions became more and more arcane and oriented to the expert user. That's fine, of course. Newbies, experts and those in between all may have good ideas, but it reminds me of a phenomenon I've seen in other high tech companies. Companies developing leading edge technologies pay a lot of attention to their power users, and they treat them well. Power users get inside info and advanced copies of the software. They get invited to conventions. They get watches, jackets and freebies. They get a special place in the company’s hierarchy. They also get heard. There's nothing wrong with that except that in focusing so much on the power user, companies can sometimes forget about the great unwashed masses of their user base. The companies will end up adding these cool new features to the product that will get great buzz among the trade journals while ignoring the needs of the poor SOBs that just want to get the damn thing to work.

Well, that's a pretty long screed for a forum post. I just wanted to emphasize to the folks at SmithMicro that you've got to make your application more usable. It's not just content management that's the problem. It's the whole user interface, the documentation, the instability of the app, and the slow response time. On your next release, add some of these leading edge features if you must - and from a marketing standpoint, you probably must - but please, oh, puhleeeeze do something about the usability problems. Thank you.

Before this thread peters out let me bring up one area of potential income that I mentioned in the OP but that no one else has commented on, and that is porn. There are a lot of smokin' hot babes posted to this site - heck, there's even an entire genre in the galleries section devoted to pin-ups.This may not be an industry you see yourself in, but if Nance can "suppress (her/his) artistic aspirations and ideals" enough to work with lawyers surely you can work with pornsters - or whatever they're called. Has anyone tried that industry?

"Leaf by Niggle" - a short story written by J. R. R. Tolkien. Yeah, I didn't get it either.

Well, OK. It looks like Poser's content management disorganization is more of an artifact of third party developers than it is an actual plan drawn up by Poser's developers. That's good.

I've only used Poser since version 8, so all of its history was unknown to me. So if I understand correctly, the whole "Materials" library is relatively new (since version 6?), and over time will probably replace the Mat poses.

Quote - I don't know of any other advantages with matposes over poser 6 mat collections?

Well, from a usability standpoint it's probably a major issue. I wonder how many potential users have abandoned Poser because one of the fundamental facets of the interface was incomprehensible.

Quote - In terms of MAT poses, what it boils down to is, there are only two types of Poser file: Those which load geometry

Those which modify geometry in some way

So files that load geometries would be characters (cr2) and props (pp2). All others modify geometry, right?

And thanks, basicwiz, for the PzDb idea.

Quote - I have seen so many people get Poser, and within a week start asking how they can sell their creations.

Really?! A week?! Man, it took me three months just to get Vicky out of her purple bikini and into some decent clothes.

Maybe I have an earlier version. Looks like mine is 8.0.0.10157.