Attached Link: https://www.daz3d.com/i/shop/itemdetails/?item=4398

As to when something is old enough to stop being supported is a tough question. I guess it gets down to availabilty and criticality. I wouldn't say any content for Poser is very critical. Old business correspondence and spreadsheets could be needed years later. It's important for MS Office to be able to read those files long into the future. Then it gets down to a question of availability. If all DAZ originals didn't have PNGs until after 2006, how much content is still in the DAZ store that won't show thumbnails in Poser anymore? I'd guess a couple thousand products. Older Poser users have a lot more content from older purchases and freebies that don't have PNGs.

One funny thing is that Poser still imports MetaCreations 3D Paint files. I've never run across any 3D file that uses it. I wouldn't be upset to see that functionality go away someday because I've never needed it.

Quote - *"RSR is outdated for thumbnails and I was surprised that Sharen mentioned that some stores still ask for it to be used"*I am confused, why would you be surprised I mentioned it?

Only because I was unaware that any store would still want RSRs. It was interesting info I didn't know.

Quote - it is holding back merchants to have to support the previous half dozen versions of poser, some of them a decade outdated.*
*/quote] RSR is outdated for thumbnails and I was surprised that Sharen mentioned that some stores still ask for it to be used. It's more a question of whether the Poser program should have the capability of showing thumbnails for products that didn't include PNGs. There is still a considerable amount of commercial content available that only used RSR thumbs.

My favorite product of yours is Irina. If somebody were to buy Stephanie 3 to use Irina, they'd get shrugging guy in Poser 8/9 because S3 didn't have PNGs and DAZ hasn't repackaged all their inventory before late 2006 (when they finally switched from RSRs to PNGs for thumbnails). Nobody should expect DAZ to repackage a large portion of their content inventory because DAZ Studio displays the older thumbnail format. To DAZ, the problem is with Poser and not their software.

The better preview for lighting would have been the most useful feature for me. I've always been frustrated by the schism between the lighting I arrange in the preview mode and the final render.

Up till around the time of V4, DAZ originals only had RSRs (around 2006). I'd guess that anywhere from 25%-50% of DAZ's entire catalog will show up as the shrugging guy in the last two versions of Poser instead of thumbnails. Considering that DAZ Studio doesn't have the same problem, it's a little embarrassing that the program they were originally made for can't show the thumbnails. Besides, I wasted a half hour trying to figure out why the thumbs weren't showing for some content I installed in P8. I did some searches here and found out that the new P8 library no longer supported RSR thumbs.

I wonder if any content creators have been blamed for the lack of thumbnails? A user installs content to P8/P9. Most have thumbnails, but a few don't. The natural reaction would be to blame whoever created the content that doesn't work right with the software. Users usually expect software to be 100% upward compatible with the content available for the software. It's all the more important for Poser since the software inherently relies on external content for its use. Poser has negligible capabilities for creating content within the program.

All in all, I was just looking for an excuse not to buy P9, so it didn't take too much to talk me out of it. The $60 price for a full boxed version of the program (not an upgrade) was awfully tempting. Subsurface scattering and weight mapping will still be around when I'm ready to upgrade a few years from now. They'd be nice to have, but I've lived without them this long and I don't need the latest greatest for what little work I'm doing with Poser right now.

If anyone would like a chuckle about user expectations, look at the below link and search for a review by "iceman". He bought a $17,000 camera for a vacation trip and was pissed off because it didn't come with a lens even though the heading says it's "body only". He would not recommend the camera for a friend. I'm going to guess "iceman" isn't one of the 99% because I do more homework buying a $200 camera than he did for a $17,000 camera.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/674543-STUD/Hasselblad_70380554_H4D_40_Medium_Format_DSLR.html

Quote - I hope that my opionion was taken as just what it was, my opionion based on my usage.

Yours was the one that helped me make up my mind (not that the others didn't make me think about whether the new features were useful for me). You're using Poser more than me, so I wouldn't see a lot of advantage in the upgrade. By the time I start getting back into Poser more, there will be newer versions. By then, it seems likely that Poser and DS will be diverging more, so choices won't be so straightforward.

I cancelled the order. Black Friday sales only give about 15 minutes to check out, so I had to do that, but didn't want to wait too long for the order to reach a point where it couldn't be canceled. Typically, I research an item long before the sale is live, but I was expecting P9 to be $40 more and generally like to wait a few versions before buying a new one unless there's something compelling to make it worth the jump.

Based on the comments, and the fact that I haven't done much with Poser in a few years, there wasn't enough to make it worth buying a new version. A $60 price tag was certainly enticing. I'd imagine that P9 still doesn't support RSR thumbnails while the new version of DAZ Studio still does.

Thanks for helping me decide.

That did it!

In a way, all 2D art is pointillism. Computer art is points of color information. A traditional painting is flecks of paint sticking to points of paper. Our eyes use a finite number of receptors such that our vision is the aggregate of all those points of information.

Tradtional pointillism is intentionally creating art by applying points rather than traditional lines.

The definitions blur with this example of using a computer to determine which color goes where. Instead of organically creating the Crayola image by individually placing the crayons to build the image from an outline and filling it in, it's more likely being created by unskilled laborers laying down the crayons from the bottom up based on a printout of the colors that need to be layed out in the frame. The computer created the art, not the person placing the crayons.

If there were a plastic lattice frame where crayons could be placed into predefined holes, it would be possible to create this kind of art without the aid of a computer. Trying to do it, without something to hold the individual crayons in place, would be physically more difficult. Anybody who has put all the crayons back in a box knows that the crayons don't line up parallel, so it takes some fiddling to get them all to line up together to fit well in the box. It wouldn't be impossible, but then it's a matter of fighting with the medium.

Attached Link: http://www.christianfaur.com/crayons/TrueColors/image1.html

Did the apple color picker actually specify a Crayola color?

I know that Photoshop's color picker shows the numeric values of the colors. While not impossible, I'd hate to sample hundreds or thousands of pixes. That wouldn't require any specialized software.

I wonder how much the artist changed the colors. Shadows on the face are blues, greens, and purples instead of browns and dark reds.

Attached Link: http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Moving-Picture-Book/dp/0486232247/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313764781&sr=1-7

Bars sometimes have a similar lit picture hanging up that has rippling water, moving smoke, etc.  I remember seeing smaller versions being sold at Mall kiosks, but forget what they're called.

I think you're talking about a different book that I also have. It uses moire patterns to provide the illusion of water moving, wheels rotating and other effects. It's a brilliant idea, but it's not the same as scanimation.

Scanimation is literally an actual animation. I bought the Star Wars version and Luke battles Darth Vader with light sabres. The Milennium Falcon flies away from the Death Star. There is actual animated movement.

The moire books have images that don't have any actual movement, but moving the transparent layer over the images causes new lines to appear as the lines in the image intersect those on the transparency.

In a lot of ways, I like the moire books more because the drawings look like old fashioned copperplate illustrations with detailed fine lines. The Scanimation books are less detailed because multiple frames of animation are printed on a single page, divided up by the width of the window that they'll be seen in. That forces the images to be chunky without much detail.

If you're at a bookstore, look for the books because they are fascinating.

Both paper and plastic 3D glasses can be bought at Amazon for a reasonable price. I tried the below glasses and they work well, but a friend already broke a pair.

http://www.amazon.com/3D-Glasses-Variety-Pack-Magenta/dp/B0038ND4A4/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1313616376&sr=8-6

The Elsa Revelator glasses can still be used on XP machines without an ELSA graphics card. All you need is an NVidia graphics card and their old stereo drivers. MS didn't support them in Vista, so you'd have to have kept an older computer that runs XP. NVidia now has a more expensive 3D stereo package that uses a different format and the new drivers aren't supposed to be compatible anymore with older page-flipping glasses.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/3dstereo_91.31.html

Is one of the lighting books better than the other? I could see where one could be helpful in lighting Poser--though Poser lights don't quite behave like actual light.

I still need to learn how to use Blender, so it's good to have a recommendation on a useful book.

The only use I've found for the Complete Works of Shakespeare is as a footrest.

Attached Link: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3dsmax-american-football/484798

As long as there are markets, like Turbosquid, selling simple models such as a football for $90, there's no reason not to think that DAZ cannot break into that market with lower cost 3D products.

Many a movie has used Poser models for previsualization. In the end, they're going to go with their own models for the finished product. That doesn't mean a low-budget movie wouldn't use Poser models. I forget the name of the show, but there was an X-rated one on the Playboy channel using Michael and Victoria for their main characters. Poser was used for the Green Arrow flash videos for Smallville.

Just because Poser and DS are hobbyist programs now doesn't mean their slow improvements won't expand to new future markets.

From a more practical standpoint, Poser meshes aren't "watertight". 3D printing is not yet at a common consumer level or work, so it's not designed to readily work with 3D meshes designed for artistic use. A 3D printer will fill in all closed meshes. If there are any openings, it will continue to fill in the areas outside the openings. A simple sphere or cube is straightforward because everything is closed off. The head of many Poser character has openings for the eyes and mouth that are filled in with other meshes for eyeballs and inner mouths. Poser hair is usually made realistic by transparencies. A 3D printer only looks at the mesh, not the transparency texture. Adding clothing and hair to a figure creates new meshes for a 3D printer to fill in separate from the main figure.

Before this can be a consumer product, software will be needed to quickly optimize a model for printing to close off a model, combine all objects so that there is only a single mesh, add thicknesses for the printer to minimize printing very thin meshes. Right now, there is a laborious process to prepare a model for printing.

I cannot swear to it, but I seem to recall a 3 inch model costing about $100. The process isn't cheap. The resulting model usually looks like a rough layered object that requires sandpaper to smooth out the model.

It's a cool process with great potential application, but it's not ready for consumer use yet. It's great for industrial applications to build prototypes because the CAD software is designing solid objects.

Not yet.

There's a mushy undefined look to the Genesis images I've seen. Maybe the morph packs fix that, but I haven't looked too closely.

That doesn't mean that there won't be a reason to switch a few years from now after the new figures have been around for a while and improved.