www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/figures-characters-and

I admit it is a difficult call. The US economy, not to mention global economy has been going south for a long while. Unless changes immediately are made, this may continue. I have seen little evidence that anyone in power is willing to really make changes that need to be made for the broader population, instead of the elite few. So the money issue is a real one. When you factor in multiple sw packages, hw and other expenses, it can add up real fast.

Not to mention I hate shopping here. The store is a mess and you don't have good sorting options.

Kixum,
The advance pack has continued to be updated. You need to go to inagoni's site not DAZ's. They are current w/ some improvements. C7 isn't quite ready yet.

Well I would let DAZ know your thoughts.

Quote - o.k., kleb, glad to know ya got rid of the artifacts.  there are various adjustments
to those render settings that ringo, litst and the other developers put in there
to enhance realism, but they do add greatly to the render time when set at
maximum quality.

Not sure about litst, but ringo isn't a dev. or are you referring to a PA product?

I do thing the discussions have changed. I would like to see more on developing skills, not fixing shaders and morphs. Don't get me wrong it has it's place, but has gone the other way. There is a webinar on the 30th, I believe for C7 which will be archived in the daz wiki so some might care to check it out for information. The webinar signup it listed in the daz commons. Also sparrowhawke appears to be working on a cloth sim plugin.

Well DAZ's model is an electronic download content company, who is always having a sale. Most of that content is made by PA's. So they would have to be willing or able to adjust to change that. I don't see any indicators that that will be changing anytime soon. An option of a hard copy would have been nice.
I personally have just been annoyed that affordable e-readers haven't been available. Even now they aren't. There's one company that you can get one from w/ a book subscription. I like reading and being able to sit down and read where I want, but paper books are difficult  to update and I find they take up waay too much space and are heavy to move. The bookshelves I have would be much better served being used for something else. Storing books, moving them and getting rid of them just gets old. So much easier to find things electronically than via paper also. The maintenance is ridiculous.

Did you try the free inkscape?

Make sure you got the latest manual from the wiki too.

I do know that the tiff C outputs gimp cannot read. The reason is an index difference. Assumably from the tiff version change. C does support mtl files, last I checked. This is also easily correctable by using a text editor to change the texture path.The problem is what gets put in the obj/mtl file. You can output an obj from hex and C can read it. It usually ends up being a relative instead of absolute path, this causes issues. The other option is to put the textures, obj and mtl all in the same folder.

The problem w/ the manuals is books are costly to print and bad for the environment. The paper books are harder to update, ship and make changes too also. Of course w/ our current situation electronics have issues w/ the environment as well. However, I understand wanting to just sit and read being desirable. DAZ is a content company. They make the bulk of their money off of PA's. It's a symbiotic relationship. Obviously it work's as a model or they couldn't have purchased Carrara. I don't think they saw Carrara as a competitor to their business. But rather an entire package inline w/ their goals. They got a long term user group that overlapped their users. Complete sw w/ dev's and all.

Yeah, I found one exporter, but it says it doesn't work w/ python 2.5. So that could mean anything. I agree about the FBX. I am surprised, since both are popular formats. Sorta a roach motel approach. Once you get in you never leave. :laugh:

The manual is in the wiki. I 've ordered from major sw vendors  and got a box w/ a disk. I personally think paper is obsolete, but w/o good affordable book readers so you can carry your books around to read at your leisure paper books are better than an electronic book. I am surprised that a good affordable book reader didn't happen ages ago. The screen and ergonomics are different than a computer or even a PDA.

Well I can't say Eovia was perfect. I do think C5 was an exceptional release, didn't think that about c4 at all. The content changes to C actually have been important. The features for this release are trying not to be about content.  I think bug fixing is very important. I think that  and workflow are more important than many features. Many users have pointed out to DAZ that they need to work on their software marketing. So that may happen. They do actually ask for customer feedback to some extent so that is important. I honestly think adding dynamic hair and cloth should have come after other major design issues, like multi-pass and layers support. The poser market is big tho and others are even adopting the content model. Obviously Eovia was hurting or they wouldn't have needed to sell. ATM markets are tougher than ever so companies have to try to stay afloat.

Particularly in the US, since we have shipped all our jobs overseas and stopped creating new ones here. Since tons of people are now homeless here, unemployed w/ no health care and numbers rising. Not to mention similar problems or worse worldwide. In the scheme of things this is nothing.