Poser is dying [1] and Studio is heading for the cloud so nobody has anything to gloat about. I see no sensible long-term strategy than trying to go to a full FOSS pipeline.

[1] SmithMicro financial and business outlook is simply horrible. Sprint (70% of their income) has started the move to other products and Sprint revenues are projected to be 1/3 down just in 2016. Delisting from NASDAQ in March is certain unless SM gets an extension of the grace period (which will give only a 6 month not renewal respite until Sep 2016) or a reverse stock split is performed (and in this case shorters will feast on SM body until the share price goes again below 1$). SM problems stem from the top management and they recently added a poison pill option so no hope of a hostile takeover to send the board away. I see nobody (apart from DOCOMO shiver-emoticon-if-this-was-not-this-shit-of-new-editor) willing to buy SM graphics business.

I think that if there were people really willing to help, concentrating efforts on MakeHuman would be a more useful proposition rather than starting the usual 1-man crusade that peters out as soon as the difficulties of the task and the amount of work are recognized by the Don Quixote of the day.

@jura: Shift+A, select Camera from the popup menu. Point it as Razor42 wrote or select Lock Camera to view in the 3D view right panel. Switch to camera view with Numpad 0. If you want to do something cooler, watch a tutorial about Camera fly mode. It does not seem to be as overtly complex.

Food for thought: Blender Foundation has released version 5 of BlenRig.

@crashworship: wise decision not to hold your breath.

What make me mad is that the only item the prevents a complete FOSS pipeline from 2D concept art to composited movies are humanoid figures. Unfortunately, MakeHuman content is not up to snuff to obsolete Poser/Studio content.

DAZ open sourcing Studio? you must be joking, they are rising walls around their upcoming digital Alcatraz they are building.

bagginsbill posted at 6:23PM Tue, 12 January 2016 - #4248721

And I want stupid flame fests to stay in the Community Forum where it belongs.

Discuss Poser here. Occasional off-topic posts are fine, but to MOVE this thread TO POSER forum was really weird.

Maybe this thread is here because Poser forum is the last forum on Renderosity that it is not (yet) a complete Wild West ghost town, rolling bushes included.

@bantha: I do not think that this market is large enough for everybody, I think that it is (or was?) just big enough for a single line of products. Extinction of the whole business is not outside the realm of possibilities, especially if no external (non SM, non DAZ) player comes into play.

Boni posted at 6:12PM Mon, 11 January 2016 - #4248407

This is on the edge of harassments

No harassment intended, you are not that important to be worth me investing time into harassing you .

I, as J2EE web developer, with experience in consulting for outfits like Leroy Merlin, was just giving my professional opinion on the state of this website. If it is not malice then, using Hanlon's Razor, we have to conclude that it is utter incompetence.

Whatever the cause, I think that the only remain applicable comment is this Youtube video.

Haven't you all realized yet that this disaster is not an accident but deliberate action? Renderosity management simply does not have the guts to openly announce that they are closing the forums and galleries and therefore resort to a harassing campaign.

If you want to discuss issues, move to RDNA.

About the still remaining specularity: link to the description of the project.

They are not Rendo-based know-it-alls, they are academic researchers.

Your are telling Rendo to further tweak website code? isn't it already wrecked enough? If this had been a japanese website, somebody would have long ago committed seppuku out of shame.

The situation is not good and the grass isn't really greener on the other side of the fence. The market is fragmented along applications, versions (on Poser side), and figures. What can be done? I really don't know and I am not optimistic at all.

Some thoughts about DAZ moves

First some facts.

Fact #1: On DAZ forums, DAZ officials have been buried under requests of official statements about the future evolution of the DRM scheme. In response, they officially refused to make commitments about the future.

Fact #2: In stark contrast to #1 reticence, DAZ officials are unanimously repeating that scripting and export capabilities won't be removed in future versions.

Fact #3: It appears that there are problems with some Studio tools for DRM-ed content and DAZ officials are pointing the finger at these tools not going thru established Studio APIs but trying to access directly the DUFs. The fix indicated is to update those tools to be "well behaved", read always go thru Studio APIs.

Let's see what we can get out of those facts.

When do you refuse to make written (i.e. legally binding) statements about something? when you already know that things will change and, needless to remark, not to customers advantage. Conclusion #1: Something more aggravating than the current DRM scheme is already scheduled to be implemented.

With scripting and export still available, the current encryption scheme is as watertight as the Toll Booth in the middle of nowhere in Blazing Saddles. Conclusion #2: Either everybody in DAZ is suffering from lead induced dementia or there is something else, not yet in place, that will build a long, strong and high wall on the sides of that Toll Booth.

DAZ officials are adamant that everything has to go thru Studio engine code. This means that Studio engine code has to be in control of everything.

Let's put all together: something worse is planned, this something has to prevent the trivial export/reimport of content and will be buried within Studio engine.

What can this "thing" be? I initially thought that DAZ would move to a browser-based cloud architecture but this theory is eliminated by DAZ insistence of using Studio APIs (if you go browser, Studio will become obsolete and whether people use APIs or not is irrelevant) so we derive that Studio will remain around, central in DAZ architecture.

The only thing that matches all the observed information is an evolution of DAZ_Connect that monitors your activity and, whenever you load a scene, you load content, you export content, you run scripts, it phones home to check whether you are allowed to do what you are trying to do. Checking might happen irregularly but still sometimes it will have to take place.

Let's examine the consequences of using DAZ Studio, Big Brother Edition:

Consequence #1: your computer has to be online. No ifs, not buts, regardless whether Studio checks every time or randomly, when it tries to go out it has to be able to do so. You are disconnected? phone line troubles? bad WiFi connectivity? sorry, game over. Oh, I was forgetting: when now DAZ cloud services tell you that the forum is offline, you do something else, in our case, you can close Studio and wait for DAZ to come back online. Enjoy your non-use of the content you bought.

Consequence #2: you are leaking telemetries on the content of your scenes, of your activity schedule and location, to everybody, from DAZ to hackers to law enforcement. Telemetries are never a good thing (it is not a coincidence that the first thing Windows 10 users do is to go thru all of them and turning them off). In this case, you cannot turn them off. Since we all perfectly know that is the most common usage of Poser/Studio, I hope that you are confortable with this kind of monitoring on your "art making". Should you belong to the limited category of users who can boast about their work in public, forget about doing confidential work for some party (e.g. legal presentations) with this continous leakage of information.

Consequence #3: related to #2. DAZ become a merry repository of information about questionable practices. The words "Ashley Madison" evoke anything ?

Consequence #4: monitor DAZ_Connect communications for the moment you are buying thru it content. Credit card infos are always yummy and, in this case, you have to trust DAZ programmers of having put into operation a secure communication path.

Now DAZ representatives and vendors will step in and try to dismiss what I have written. Weight their words remembering that their paycheck depends on DAZ management.

Well, well, we are on the same wavelength. When you are not into porn (i.e. when your figures are clothed) your interest is restricted to the visible parts of the body, not to the full thing and this, e.g., remove all the figure/clothing compatibility issues.

Watching with extreme interest this thread.

One of my New Years resolutions was to start making extensive use of the Ignore feature on the forums I visit.

I can report that it is working very well and that my blood pressure is significantly lower.

RorrKonn posted at 3:58PM Fri, 01 January 2016 - #4246720

There's very few CGI Artist that can actually make Vickys = .

Hundreds of them, at least, just not interested in this market.

wolf359 posted at 10:11PM Thu, 31 December 2015 - #4246567

The poser "market" ,as I have seen it here, is only interested in Northern European Female models with realisticly bending joints so she looks "realistic" in her naked renders and an endless supply of female clothing to dress her for internet gallery stills.

No story telling, no animation, no VFX work............. just her Standing there.

you are not going to find Many real "pros" willing to invest time in this paradigm.

Add to the picture that this is a community of people who don't buy stuff at 9.95$ because they are waiting for it to be discounted to 4.95$, while on TurboSquid prices start from an order of magnitude more and are never discounted. Why spend your time creating a 29.95$ fully featured character which sells next to no copies when you can sell for 79$ a single tooth?