Yes, it is a lot quieter than before. Some factors...

It's January/February, when people find time to play with the stuff they purchased back in November (Black Friday).

A lot of Poser / DAZ stuff has simply been done - we have a very mature ecosystem that needs very little activity to keep it going (other than archiving and keeping things online and available).

Some long-time users, especially those with great technical skills and knowledge, have passed away or gone quiet.

Many 2D image-makers have found what they need in AI image making (though Poser has a rich part to play there, re: making input for Controlnets and Img2Img).

A key Poser-friendly node and people-funnel / showcase, in the form of the regular Digital Art Live magazine, had to suspend publication due to the triple-whammy of piracy, artists swapping to the new AI image generators, and the cost-of-living crisis.

DeviantArt isn't what it was, which doesn't help funnel people toward Poser.

The Vue landscape software going subscription did not help, not the hacking and destroying of the Vue content store. The Poser to Vue workflow was simple, quick and painless, and gave access to a great render engine. It still is (still works), but in terms of sales Vue has abandoned its hobbyist users.

Many people are still six months away from getting back to financial normal, after all the lockdown disruptions and inflation. There won't be that regular monthly '$50 spare' to spend without thinking on 'bits of software and 3D figures/clothing' for a while yet. If they're not buying, they're not using.

Young people have a zillion other things to entice them, in terms of creativity. Many of these are huge time-sinks.

You may also find useful the Poser Technical search engine.

That's a good example. With a local install of Stable Diffusion 1.5 (which is the base AI that most of these sites use), there is a green-screen plugin (aka a "Lora")  for it. Using that and Photoshop (the new AI Photoshop, or old Photoshop + the Primatte Chromakey plugin) you could easily make a cut-out of the figure shown the AI enhanced render, then paste the cut-out back over the Poser render. That would keep the background consistent at least. Maybe also then blur the background a little, to give a sense of depth. 

Nice. And the nice thing is that the AI will be almost as happy being fed real-time or quick renders from Poser. I'm guessing your source renders are proper renders, that took an hour or two to render. So AI can speed up the whole process of making a picture, starting from Poser.

The only problem is that some things will be lost in an AI re-rendering - for instance the belt-buckle on your first example, and the lasso on the second. The sorts of things that will be important for comics, where the reader expects consistency.

Stable Diffusion is Python, Poser is Python. So, let the Poser and SD talk to each other. By simply allowing any third-party script to be plugged into Poser's PostFX. That's the obvious choice, and then after that the Poser developers don't have to wrangle with AI. I'm sure they have enough to do, and don't want to be 'chasing the tail' of AI.

For instance... I plug a script into PostFX to let me send my basic Poser render to Stable Diffusion Controlnets (Canny, Depth and Openpose), with one click, for the "SD render". Someone more Python-y than me could probably rig up a normal script to do that anyway, once the SD UI's can also be officially scripted ('take renders from Poser, slot them in here, here and here, set SD sliders to my 'Poser preset', then generate an image'). Of course that can be done manually, but it's a of fiddly pixel-size input, clicks and dragging. It would be nice to have it done automatically via PostFX.

Another option might be to add the equivalent of PostFX to Poser's Comic Book Preview panel. In the form of a simple radio button... "And make it look Pro!", by sending the real-time render over to be re-generated in a special comics-art SD model. Again, one can do that already manually, but it would be nice to have a one-click option.

Your idea of adding textured primitives to the scene, via a simple SD text prompt, is a good one. Though bear in mind that SD itself will be able to do that. There's already one special SD model in which you can basically say "keep the scene the same, but just add a glowing blue 3D orb above the head of the figure". And it just changes that one thing.

As I've mentioned before, Renderosity could consider buying out Ken's Openpose plugin and making it free with Poser 14. It would get the AI crowd thinking about using Poser, especially if it was also bundled free with the $50 Poser 13 (I assume another perma-deal on the earlier version of Poser, as before). The buyout might be in the form of giving Ken $2 on every sale of the $50 Poser 13, so there might be no up-front buyout cost.

Here's a tutorial which also shows you how to give the script a keyboard shortcut.

I think Poser 14 has certain AI developer options in early 2024. Such as...

* Renderosity buys out Ken's Openpose plugin and then ships it as standard for free. This gives a market advantage, especially if it works with a $50 Poser 13 (I assume another 'perma-deal', like the current $50 Poser 12 offer). DAZ Studio only has a 'no-hands, no face' Openpose option. Thus Poser would have a market advantage, especially if the Openpose plugin is allowed to work with a $50 Poser 13. Poser devs don't have to maintain anything there, as the plugin just works.

* Allow PostFX to have any Python script plugged into it, for further post-render processing. This would allow AI connections, yet AI-phobic people wouldn't have to use it or see it. Again the Poser devs don't have to maintain anything, just open up PostFX to third-party scripts.

* 'Text prompts to AI-made strand hairstyles for 3D' is coming soon, but it's early days - that is probably something for Poser 15.

Anyway, here's a nicer AI picture than the ones above. Stable Diffusion 2.1, from a text prompt without any image-to-image. Took about ten seconds to render. But with Poser I can set up basic real-time renders, and then next time use these as guides... to get a similar picture composition that's exactly right.

Curious. Is there a limit on str (string?) print statements, perhaps?

You're aware that 'print' is one of the key changes between Python 2 (Poser 11 and predecessors) and Python 3 (Poser 12 and up)? It sounds like perhaps you're trying to run a Python 2 script in a Python 3 environment. Print statements, strings, and iterated lists are handled differently.  Print is fairly easily fixed though.

Wonderful, many thanks Bwldrd. I had run several searches for "background" across my Poser Python folder, but didn't think to search for SetBackground.

Here is the final working fully-automated script, tested on both Poser 11 and 13.  Useful for those needing a quick depth pass render, but who not want to go to the trouble of setting up an Atmosphere, using a special .MT5, or rendering in Firefly to .PSD with z-buffers on.

For full functioning it needs the user to align a number of exactly matching versions,and possibly also to have an OS that doesn't freak out about cross-software scripts and the like. The detailed instruction tutorials are:

https://jurn.link/dazposer/index.php/2022/07/04/daz-3d-bridge-for-photoshop-it-needs-photshop-cs6-32-bit-for-full-functioning/

https://jurn.link/dazposer/index.php/2022/07/03/up-and-running-with-3d-in-photoshop-via-the-free-daz-bridge/

Working for me. Good luck!

It does look rather temporary though: I get: "Site Maintenance in Progress Until 4 am Central Time." If it has to be done... then I guess it's better done now, than on Black Friday or at Christmas.

One worry might be the use of Adobe AIR for the Library. I assume newer versions of Windows would run it, but you might want to check that. But it you can afford $50, you should know that you can get a Poser 12 licence for $49 via Graphixly. Or a Poser Pro 11.3 licence from NeoWin at $79. The latter should run most of your old Python scripts, and also the DAZ DSON importer and perhaps even the old PoserFusion plugins (if you ask it nicely, and can find the installers).

I'm not sure if the Smith Micro servers are still responding to licence pings from Poser 10 installs. Poser was sold to Renderosity / Bondware.

Sounds like a good aim. First you probably want to make a "mind map" of what you want to create. Then another map of what the Poser/DAZ community is currently missing in terms of content, or if there are areas where the content is old / badly designed / or simple lacking. The overlap between those two maps is where you would probably find it best and most profitable to work.

Given the advances in AI in another 3-4 years, we will likely then have a workflow from Poser / DAZ to a real-time 'AI renderer' viewport, in which a real-time AI 'works up' its output from a set of basic renders of a scene (depth-map, cartoon outine, pose estimation). In which case Poser / DAZ's strengths will then be in fantasy / sci-fi 'things which don't exist' (no photography of them, to train an AI on), visualised precisely by Poser / DAZ in a way the AI can replicate in full.  Along with precise  character poses + facial expressions.

As for the very basics of character rigging for Poser, I can recommend Darkseal's old 'Z Poser Figure Creation with Darkseal' video set. Old, but still valid and very detailed and complete. On the DAZ Store and likely to go to $5 on the Black Friday sale.

Also copies the background, so not the same as a PNG cut-out with transparency. Can be automated in a Python script with a ProcessCommand.

Although it would be better to have the script tell Poser to render a .PNG and then have subprocess call up the destination software to run a loader script native to that software. The loader script would know where to find the .PNG that Poser just rendered...