ART CANNOT BE RESTRICTED BY RULES But contests can. Get over it and move on.

Link?

WHAT??? Sheessshhhh.....

Funny that when folks can't respond any other way, they drag out a nun to make a point. Whatever, folks. Just don't start whining about Poser not getting any respect when you can't even do it yourself. :: off to dance ::

"Everybody dance..." -- Corky Sherwood, Waiting for Guffman

this got nothing tha do with this thread but gots tha say it. As the creator of "The Magic Flute" Mr. W. A. Mozart said: "(insert string of consonants here)!" :::shaking my helmet now and doing that dance of the really big soprano::::

Who jerked? What jerk -- where? Oh, you know, the usual: "What I do is ART, dammit!!!" :)

DaleB: Way up in the thread, I commented that my own experience with Bryce presentations at CGTalk had been really good -- no one trashed the software used, no one gave me grief because it wasn't LW or Max. I honestly don't think there are as many software snobs at places like CGTalk as we're led to believe. Bijou: Now Poser women have to always look hot is Joey's point. You wish, hon. :)

but whether poser is a viable tool No, the point of the thread was, "Why isn't Poser better accepted by the serious 3D community?" And my point, which seems to be trampled by the indignant knee-jerk reactions, is that we bring it on ourselves because we limit Poser's capabilities by focusing on one small part of what can be generated through its use. Poser is capable of far more than just "naked women lying around", but you'd hardly know it based on the gallery and it's the gallery that people use as a barometer of what the program can do. You go to cgTalk, and maybe you'll see tons of fantasy images but theyre images executed with far more diversity, both in subject matter and style. Here, you look at the Hot 20, and what do you see? Variations on the same theme, all executed with almost exactly the same style because the artists are all drawng from the same well: the same base mesh, textures with minimal avriance, and painted hair technique that comes straight out of a singular tutorial. ... which was the point of raising BMO and Orion, if you think about it a little. We established earlier in this discussion that it's the market that wants little but pretty girl art and that the merchants, in their drive to sell, will pander to that with great diligence, even to the point of stealing from each other to do so. And the result? Waves of photocopy textures, all with the same skin tone, the same make up, the same general look... because it "sells". It just contributes to the homogenistic inbreeding that plagues this program. Don't try to pull this into a rant about the "high art of pin ups". That's irrelevant to the point of the discussion. If you want to create pin ups, go for it. Have a great time. Call them "art" all you wish. But at the same time, remember that those pin ups and "nude studies" and NVIATs, as interchangable as they most definitely are, are what people outside the Poser community see as about all this program can do because there's not much else for them to see.

grow up and face reality Well, IMHO, the "reality" is that this thematic mono-direction is what created an environment that led to incidents like the whole BMO and Orion flap and countless more like them, not to mention the many more we know will be uncovered in months to come. That's just as much a reality as whining that naked breasts get all the gallery hits. After all, consider: when was the last time we saw this kind of chaos erupt over a Michael texture?

It appears to me that cgtalk people just like bitching when the program costs under 1k and can't adjust to change in anyway, shape or form With all due respect, I can't agree. I've had good experience over there. Yeah, you get the attitudious jerks, but that's no different from this place FTTT. CGTalk is really about taking 3d to a higher level, regardless of the software -- even Poser has known to surprise them on occasion, but it's an application of Poser that pushes what the proggie can do. If that's snobbery, well, okay... but I don't see it that way.

The next time that I see a thread started here about those sub-artists over at cgtalk, I'll agree with you But you already have. :) >> My statement concerning authority stands. Which item(s) among the Hot 20 should be removed, in your opinion? None. But accepting something for its ability to maintain the status quo is not the same as thinking maybe, just maybe, we could be pushing this proggie a little harder than we currently are. Post 76 makes an excellent point: that by shoving and prodding and pushing things that maybe weren't meant to be shoved, we keep pushing the boundaries back. But it's ironic that for all the pushing and prodding, it still winds up being yet another stereotypical image of a Caucasian woman with long legs and perfect makeup and not enough clothing. Then folks get all upset when someone points out this rather unavoidable fact; still, when a technique as potentially versatile as transparency maps gets used to crank out version 2,897 of lace undies and version 6,940 of long tresses in sexy disarray... well, hell, talk about wasted potential, sorry. We haven't come anywhere close to realizing what this program can do, because we get to a certain point, and then we stop, waiting for folks like Geep or Catharina to break down the walls for us and show us how to make things that no one thought possible. Sorry. It just gets really frustrating sometimes. I know, I know -- it's the market. The market wants fantasy armour and slinky lingerie and impossible high heels and textures with immaculate mascara. The market wants page after page of interchangable, collect-them-all-amaze-your-friends-at-parties pin ups. I guess I'm getting to the point where it's all just a frigging bore. Hell, 90% of TV may be what the market wants, but that doesn't mean I'm required to like it. :)

I do it for fun only. So do a lot of the folk at CGTalk, surprisingly enough. Sure, there's a lot of hardcore professionals at CGT, but there's far more amateurs who play with this stuff for the sheer hell of it. >> And who will be the authority? The authority that will make all of the decisions, and that will enforce "quality" on the rest of us? Irrelevant, sorry. It's not about "authority"; it's not about someone being an "arbiter". It's about the sheer OVERLOAD of a single theme, expressed in dizzying repetition, to the point where no style prevails because there is no style in the first place -- look at the Hot 20: almost everything there looks like it came from the same artist because it's all the same style. Poser is capable of far, far more -- but you have to make the personal choice to delve or not. Most folks won't -- BFD. >> It feels so GOOD to be superior! So who's really being superior here? Us or them? Somehow I sorta think that's one of those questions we really would prefer not to answer because the answer might not be the one we'd really like to hear.

PoserStyle, if you can get in.

no one rejects 3ds for this reason This is like the long-standing argument that 90% of what you see on TV is crap, but crap apparently sells enough that every TV season we see the same tired cliches in the same tired sitcoms. Then everyone says what a wasteland TV is, but no one seems all that interested in making anything more out of it. And what's the result? More crap, all dressed up with nowhere to go. The excellent art in Poser? That comes from people like David Ho, who pushes this program into the stratosphere. The rest? Pretty images, no argument there -- but to what end? So why do people reject Poser and not 3ds? Because of the nature of the 3d beast. The serious 3d folk are modellers, and they take a great deal of pride in creating something from scratch. It's their Grail. So why should we be surprised when they look at images that use a stock mesh and a stock texture and turn their nose up? For all the "well, they don't build the computers" attempts at an argument, we do have to accept that we're working at a level of 3d that's pretty facile and superficial and mono-directional, while theirs is plumbing slightly deeper and more complex stratae.