_Until the deal is further altered.

If DAZ manages to impose this step, they can (and will) go further down the software-as-service road. The "logical" next step is everything-is-"free" but then you have to pay a small amount whenever you try to render or export a scene. It is not far fetched, it is like what happens in pay-per-view video services where you have to pay whenever you watch a movie, regardless of whether you have already watched in the past (contrast with buying a DVD and then being able to watch the movie without further costs, as many times as you like)._

That is totally baseless and pretty clearly conjectured with out any knowledge of how a brokerage functions.

_Prices... The prices use to be a lot higher. Then dropped for a while. They stabilized for a few years. Then started an increase trend last year. For example, in 2004 when I purchased the Millennium Dragon it was $99 for just the model, texture and poses. V3 with just the head and body morphs was $79.

The prices went down. Then the ship started to loose direction. Lots of different things were thrown at the wall to see what would work. For a while, these were good. Innovations. Investments that yielded new products. That's how we got DAZ Studio. Back then there was no such beast. It came about because of a spat with whoever happened to be the owner of Poser at that time.

Then things started to get bad. Barn burner sales. Overnight changes in direction. Lack of communication. At three points it got so bad that I stepped away for years at a time.

Then it stabilized for a while. Things seemed to be improving. Then the ship lost direction again last year. Things thrown at the wall. 3D printing. Gaming licenses. etc. etc. None of them really seeming to work out.

Here's a secret for you... When DS went free; they were giving out refunds. You had to call them directly and plead your case. This happened repeatedly. DS4. The Auto Fit tool. Carrara Pro. The Supersuit bundle. etc. etc.

Yes, some people would have had a bad reaction no matter what. But if the things in the past hadn't happened, then the number of people having a bad reaction right now would probably be a lot less._

Not a spat.. a very real fear that the program would be turned into abandon ware as it was passed from hand to hand.

Actually... when Daz started to have an active and involved marketing team things started to improve. Daz is much stronger and the PA's much more financially secure now than in the past. 3D printing was always expected to be a down the road thing but it would have served no purpose to not get in some testing and so forth on it. Gaming licenses may not have had the impact you were looking for but it helped them work out the direction to go with Morph3d.

Charging for Studio was one of the few miss steps they have made and that was before most of the current Admin staff was in the positions they are. Thankfully they course corrected and once again is a very successful marketing tool. It can't have been too big a hit since they have been able to afford to do some pretty major expansions since then. I can think of a few people who have carried on like they were dumped by a lover after the return to free but most people are not quite so prone to a highly personal grudge long term like that.

"I am not so sure on the cloud side it is a wait and see."

Why? Nothing bad has happened with DIM and it is the exact same sort of cloud set up.

"I'm not against them protecting their products, I'm against them refusing to answer how we can be sure we won't lose access to it."

I'm not sure how many more ways they have to say stuff. First, you can always keep using DIM or zips. Second, the only way you lose access is if something goes wrong on your computer. Pretty much the same kind of goes wrong that would nuke the serial number in the program itself. Once you have the content on your computer its there till you remove it. The cloud stores content you have not yet installed or have removed. If you install it it is on your computer. This is basically the same exact set up as DIM that people have been using for several years now. The only big change is ease of use for those of us who want that.

klown posted at 11:49AM Fri, 30 October 2015 - #4235958

What you can do is tell them you won't be punished for being a loyal user when their "anti-piracy" measures will only hamper your ability to use the content you pay for. meanwhile the methods they describe to prevent privacy might do little more then delay it, but it far from stops it. Poser are you watching? You should be; Remember when QuarkXPress was king of desktop publishing and InDesign was struggling for a life preserver?

The vast majority of users will never even notice the encryption. Maps are not encrypted and those are the things that most users play with if they are going to make changes outside the scope of the program. The only "hampering" is to editing the core text file outside the program. That is something only a very few users feel they need to do.

You really think that Poser/SM is currently in a position financial to do the sort of marketing drive necessary to see any a dramatic enough increase in user numbers? Or that they are willing to make course corrections to even potentially take advantage of ease of use things Studio users would expect to be able to do in a program? Nor is there absolute proof that they have learned there lesson about "phoning home" which Daz did and made sure to not implement.

HassenBenSobar posted at 11:36AM Fri, 30 October 2015 - #4235949

So I dont like the new strategy that DAZ is using, honestly, I dont want to pick another argument because ive had enough of it. Since August ive been bickering with Renderosity about the new format and prime. Now this happens over at DAZ it seems like it starts all over again. Whether or not DAZ's intentions are innocent only seem to be part of the problem. Im sure all that DAZ wants to do is sell content. Today, the issue really is how someone else with dishonest intentions is going to use your bandwidth. We learned about that here at Renderosity and Hivewire when our cards were hacked. Weve learned about how user accounts on Steam are being hacked. DAZ is entering the DRM fray late and im sure that there are many hackers who are going to go to town and the new encryption. Does DAZ have the resources to commit a full time team protect its encryption? How will this impact the overall goal of improving the render capabilities? Im convinced that the hacker community is purposely targeting the new and shiny while leaving all the old tech in the past, although I have no real evidence to back that up. Thats part of the reason why I dont want to move from the .zip. Anyhow, I was so upset at Rendo that I made no purchases since August and all of a sudden, im back... What can you do?

It isn't about hackers though is it. It is about thieves who want to make an easy buck by "giving away" stolen content and making money off ad views or subscription services to access those "free" products. Those are people who want easy money not money that takes effort. And if hackers have to waste time that they could be spending trying to make big money hits on little piddling files for "free" "share" sites so be it.

As far as the overall impact on render capabilities.. Do you mean the upgrades added to 3dl and Iray in the new build? There were some speed increases and bug fixes.

I do know that the new version makes smart content easier to work with. I've been resistant to it (old dog/new tricks) in the past but really quite like it now. It is so much more visual and appealing. Plus the info pane has been beefed up and is quite handy.

" and neither is a subscription service."

I really don't know what yahoo first made up that bs but its someone who has just no clue what the word brokerage means or how a brokerage works. The accounting cost alone would be prohibitive unless the how the whole company was organized. And to do that they would have to get hundreds of people on board. Imagine thousands of individual products starting subscriptions for x time every single day with some being pro rated. Then imagine that the money for those thousands of individual subscriptions having to be properly added to the accounts of hundreds of PA's. Then imagine that on top of that some hundreds of subscriptions expire or are other wise ended. Again some being pro rated if there was a CS issue. The accounting would just be so daunting even if they could get 300 people to sign on to a risky concept like that. And before anyone says "oh but they can just do all buy outs" that way also is crazy talk because it means that the cost of doing business skyrockets into the stratosphere. Brokerages work because they don't have to pre pay for the bulk of the inventory that goes into them.

"They're converting Studio into another storefront. The ability to render the content you buy from them is becoming its secondary purpose. The main goal is to make advertising to the users prominent and make purchasing seamless. They'll get more impulse buys than ever before. "Hey your scene has V7 and some ropes in it - click here to buy some chains, whip cream and a new S&M outfit which will be automatically installed and populated into your scene." That's where this is going. They could have done tons of things to fix how users install their content to achieve their purported goal of addressing all the "I can't find my stuff" support tickets they're whining about - integrating directly with the store isn't necessary for that."

Yes, they are adding a little window that will show options from the store. But as store fronts go its pretty small since it is a section at the bottom of the smart content tab. And since it is so unobtrusive most people can't even find it at first I doubt if it will be super distracting unless people are looking to be distracted. Nor does it seem to actually be as aware of my content as you seem to think it should be.

By the way what your calling "whining" is them actually listening to what many customers have trouble with and trying to address it and simplify it. I have been at this a long time and I am pretty confident about where my content is. In fact I am pretty old school so I never really learned to use smart content.... Until now. It is so much easier to really see what the content is with Smart content that when I am just looking to see if something inspires me or strikes me vs me going right to what I know I am about to use. Now if after 10 years I suddenly find it easier to locate things how much easier must it be for someone just starting out?

"If DAZ goes cloud, that's it, I'm gone."

Why is it a simple name change makes people get all woggly? The reality is that content has been jumping on and off that same cloud since DIM came out. It goes there when you purchase it so you can download it, it goes back there when you use DIM to remove something. The rest of the time it lives right there on your hard drive with you. The difference is that it is easier and it does not depend on you having to start a different program. No, not every one uses DIM but the vast majority for them there really is no change where downloads are coming from. DIM skippers are not seeing a change either.

I can't imagine them ever going to subscription only because it would be a frekin nightmare for them. There are several hundred individual PA's with thousands of individual products in the store. Can you imagine the accounting nightmare it would be to sort out who got what for how ever many days potentially hundreds of products were subscribed to? And there would be no way to equitably pay PA's unless it were on a per item basis since there is so much variable in how many products people have and which products are most popular. Nor is there any logic to the program going subscription because all that does is screw up a working marketing scheme.

"Of course they also had the option to charge for the software somebody can correct me here but wasn't it "Daz 4.5 FREE for a limited time" "

The marketing phrase your looking for is "creating a sense of urgency" and is much smarter business than "pick it up any time before the end of the world". Having an option does not mean it is good business in the "free to play" economy to go back to a strategy you already have proof is not ideal.

"About the dirt,blood n grimm .show me one DAZ Poser render that's = to Spartacus or Moses.There just aren't any. DAZ Poser has the cleanest War Lords ever seen."

Mostly because those wars are fought on TOS galleries.

Something to keep in mind is that content should aim to be as versatile and flexible as it can be for what it is. Say you do a battle field and because you have never seen one that already has blood all over it you go ahead and texture that in. You may save a few people some time but odds are good that because your forcing your vision of a post battle field ground your going to loose more sales than you gain. Your telling the end user "this is where the blood was spilled" and "this is how much blood there was". What if they want it for animation and they need a pre battle scene? What if they want minimal battle in the foreground where you went heavy on the blood and they want the main battle in the background? The content creators job shouldn't be to tell the artist what their vision is but to help facilitate or inspire one.

RorrKonn, very few of us got into content creation to be "business people". In fact that is one of the worst aspects of the whole process. Depending on where you broker you may have to do pretty much everything, including your own marketing. I think most of us start out wanting to figure out how things work end then move on to the making them instead of making images.

As texturing has changed we have seen much more "dirty, grungy, bloody" turning up. It use to be just crazy tedious to add that sort of stuff. I'm not sure what you plan to texture with but the products in Substance live are amazing. And well priced. But be warned! You can really lose yourself in it.

I agree with EldritchCellar about modeling it without bends. Pulling those out is going to be a huge pain in the posterior. Course if it were me doing it I would still have 3 restarts before I felt fully committed to it.

_Lets say I make a female character for DAZ Studio. I couldn't sell my female at DAZ.com and I see DAZes advertisement every where. DAZ has multiple female characters with multiple venders supporting them and auto fit so any out fit fits any DAZ female.

So if I made a DAZ female character.it would be as noticeable as one drop of water in a hurricane.

I have no doubt DAZ Knows they have a monopoly on DAZ Poser characters and would War to keep it. Not that I wouldn't do the same.

Every one talks about this vendor or that vendor stop supporting Poser. Really the only vendor that mattered was DAZ.DAZ leaving Poser just says it all don't it.

Now DAZ have left Poser. but DAZ built there empire making Poser characters. So could another build there empire making Poser characters ? you no longer have DAZ as a competitor for Poser characters.

So what do you think ,could another build a Poser characters Empire ?_

Why could you not sell a new figure at Daz? Because they do their own? Well as I have said before Daz is pretty pragmatic and if someone brought them an amazing figure and there was a way to blend it into the work flow studio users expect I think they would snap it up. They would save all that R&D time for one thing. Do I think they would plop some stand alone figure in the store and hope it got support? Not so much, because that would just be sad for the creator and they are not inclined to set people up to fail.

If Daz still has a monopoly on characters for Poser there is absolutely no one to blame but SM. If customer base numbers are not where they should be to keep Poser in the lead there is no one to blame but SM. SM should have been as aware of market changes as any of us. They could have addressed the lack of content on their part years ago. They even had a brokerage that they could have really leveraged but decided not to. Instead they have pretty much rested on resale of Poser to existing users and let the rest go hang.

I fully understand them not wanting to hitch to Daz's wagon. After all if that really worked out well there would be no Studio and we wouldn't be talking about any of this. But the minute they deiced they could forgo the new Daz line of characters they needed to get a machine going to produce their own with full support and start out of market advertising to build user numbers back up. If they were not going to depend on Daz character content any more then they needed to have competing characters, and support for them in place before that version of Poser even hit the shelves. And they needed to put as much or more effort into driving in new poser users as Daz has done with studio for the last few years. If they didn't have the money to invest in all of that they needed to seriously consider making the newer Daz figures usable natively in Poser.

Could another empire be built on poser characters? Maybe, but it would be load of work and would require some heavy cash investments from the start. Don't forget that for over 10 years sales of those characters has also been to studio users. And for at least the last 5 those sales have been at least 50% of those sales. With the numbers shifting more grammatically away from Poser over the last 3 years. So to build an empire on just poser characters someone would have to drive a huge user increase and to do that they would have to do marketing catch up which would cost money. And then of course they would have to have a compelling, cutting edge, and well supported day one (by themselves and by a score of content creators) character that would pull money out of pockets from the day of release and not slow down. Unless someone wins the lottery I am not holding my breath on that happening.

Oh I understand but for guys like me who love certain products and despite willing to pay for them are unable to because we see them for an app we do not have or will never (I think and hope) get, it is frustrating. I am old enough and experienced enough to understand the need for profit and/or proper compensation but I thought Artists didn't need money! (sorry that was tongue in cheek and sarcastic because you have no idea how damn many times clients or prospective clients and employers threw that at me in the course of my trying to eek out an existence in photography illustration or Graphic Design so much i quit the whole damn circus after years of training and growing experience and skill sets, after years of trying to make it. Knowledge is king here and I just wanted to be told by someone in the know that is is more difficult that it seems to create like products for two platforms/apps. Thanks,

It isn't difficult. Difficulty isn't the issue. As with most things it is time. In this case it is a time vs compensation. Lets say that I do a set of props. Because all the modeling is the same (ish) for studio and poser I don't included that time in my math. I'd spend that time no matter what. What is left? Setting up the surfaces, thumbs and promos. I could be a total slacker, plenty of people use to do it in order to support studio, and simply do an auto convert of my surfaces and call it a day. I can then claim support without actually having put any effort into it. I doubt anyone with a moral compass would be comfortable with that and I know the end users would not be. Doing proper surfaces is going to take about the same set up time it did for Studio. In theory I could carry over the studio thumbs and only do one poser promo to save time. So, in theory a 30-40 percent income increase would cover that extra time. I'm not sure about sales numbers here but for myself and the people I know it has been a long time since that happened. Maybe 30-40 seems like not much but the sad reality is people stopped seeing that a good while ago. It will be even less viable going forward as cycles gets added. If at some point cycles can use MDL (a growing standard shader language by the way that is used by quite a variety of programs already) then that would change everything because it would be a native compatibility.

"So, my question is, as a "Don't know sheitz about modeling myself" kinda person, what would it take for a vendor of similar products that need absolutely NO connection with the complex issues of blend zones and mesh configurations and all that necessary knowledge in making product for HUMANOID/ANIMAL figures, to also in the process of creating a set of said kind to ALSO offer a version that works natively in Poser?"

The last poser product I did sold less than 20% of the volume of an identical studio product during intro and then sales ground to a halt on it. I also know that when various people stopped poser support they saw no change in sales numbers on products but a fair bit of time gained not doing the alternate settings for poser. For the average content creator a 20% return on the same amount of work on setting up surfaces etc just is not viable. So what it would take is at an absolute minimum a sales increase that was at least 50% of the sales for a Studio only product. Ideally of course the sales volume numbers should match those should match for a comparable product or double for a combined studio/poser product.

Daz was able to hold out much longer than the brokered content creators as far as support goes, and Jack is still fighting the good fight in order to be faithful to the plat members. But for most of us the sales numbers vs time to support has been clear for a while. Keep in mind that it isn't just that you may not get back the time spent to support poser you are also taking time that could be spent more profitably. It isn't as if the average content provider is rolling in cash and when your walking a fine line you do have to make sure that things are going to be profitable enough to pay the bills and put food on the table.

Well, Khory_D, I would say the same of you. The workflow process in Poser has fundamentally changed over the past few versions - not that most vendors would be aware of this - most are unwilling to let go of Poser 6 and it's way of doing things. Many are working under the default assumption that everyone MUST work with a Daz figure. That isn't actually the case. Furthermore, vendors today have no clue as to what figures their clothing is going onto - I have dozens of outfits for V4 that have never been worn by V4, but have been worn by Dawn, or Olivia or Mariko or Roxy or Anastasia - get the point? Nor do vendors know if a V4 character was bought for the sole purpose of harvesting the skin textures for use on other figures - I do that all the time.

Poser has changed, even if vendors haven't - mainly due to SM listening to the customers. The reason we have the fitting room is due to vendor intransigence about making content for any figure NOT named V4. There are numerous other examples. The Copy Morphs From command, for example, means that vendors needn't bother with PBMs in clothing anymore. It would certainly save me the time of stripping them out of every single piece of clothing I own. And don't get me started on material files.

There is a rather valid reason why they are "unwilling to let go of poser 6" tech. It is because the poser user base is so fractured due to the ownership of a wide variety of versions and the size of the consumer base for those products that they need to support the least common denominator. Nor do they really care what final figure a product is used on. They sell a product for V4 and it is a V4 sale for them. What you do with it in the privacy of your own computer is not of interest to them overall. A beautiful render with the product used as sold is always a plus but not common enough to really be a big point for the vendors.

Figure fragmentation is what the thread was originally about. (Time to leave V4). As a Poser user, the issue is irrelevant. I can pull in both Poser compatible figures and the 1st 2 generations of genesis figures. Granted, I can't use the new fat chick, but I can live without her. BTW, just what is the difference between V7, Arabella 7, and Karen 7 - the promo's don't show me why I should buy it. And Josie 7 doesn't' seem to do anything that Josie 6 couldn't do, other than be a drain on my wallet.

As far as figure fragmentation happening.. Obviously from the vendor perspective they have two choices. One is to stick with the customer base that they have catered to and hope that the sales volume holds. You yourself have made the case that they don't need to support any figure other than v4 since people like yourself are using products on other characters. That way they can at least hope to maintain a similar income to what they are seeing today. The other option is to branch out into the growing Genesis market. That is evidenced by the increased support and continued support by vendors in this market place. In other words they see the income there that they need to make and so they continue on with those products. It boils down to continuing to support the generation 4 figures and hope that they maintain an income or move to the newer generations and increase income with that.

Of course there are some who are going to say "oh but the next big Daz killer is just on the horizon". It is possible that for the first time SM will hit it out of the park with a new and included as part of poser figure that will answer all the poser users prayers. Then all they have to do is get every poser user to upgrade to the newest version of poser so that they can have a broad enough market to make support for that figure viable for content providers. And then they have to hope that that market is as large as the current market for genesis products so that this new figure will be able to take a dominant stand in this market place. Should that actually happen I doubt it would be a Daz killer because unlike so many other players in this game Daz tends to be very pragmatic. If there really were a compelling figure that had the sales volume potential of genesis I suspect that you would see products in the Daz market place for it. No its never happened before, but then there has never been a compelling figure that had the base customer support to make that an appealing option for the Daz PA's. I don't actually expect that to happen of course because the odds of any character achieving the necessary numbers so that genesis content providers to move over long term are pretty low.

DS doesn't support capsule rigging or Poser's weight mapping (or any Poser 5 or later feature other than the ability to read .mc6 files), so I am not real sure how to get newer SM figures working DS. If there is a way to do it, I certainly wouldn't mind learning. I like my Asian characters to have black eyes as opposed to blue ones and be short, so just how do YOU get Miki 3 or 4 working in DS? Do tell.

Laughter.. Seriously you think I would pay for Miki anything? Are you under the impression that the only way to get an Asian character is with her? Because there are maybe a thousand other ways to whip up a short Asian woman with black eyes.

Whether or not a product is old doesn't prevent it's use - Which would you find more useful? - A new male suit with no movement morphs and only a couple of texture sets, or an old suit with many movement morphs and many texture sets. As an example, IMO, the Casablanca suit for M3 was the best suit ever made for Poser figures, as was the clothing made by Utilize for M3 (still being sold at Daz). Which is why all of my male figures are wearing them. Does Autofit work with Gen3 clothing? I haven't been successful, but it would not surprise me the least if I was doing something wrong - it isn't like there is a usable manual to go with DS.

Yes it works with gen3 clothing. Those are the suits I would use on Genesis. I've never found it difficult enough to require a manual though.

Nothing made for genesis comes even close to those "old" products. And those "old" products have texture templates - I have no idea where Daz is currently hiding those nowadays, I just know that before genesis rolled out the door, they were together with the clothing product, so the customer could download them in 1 go.

Then by all means use the old products if you want. I use them and everyone else I know falls back on them at times. I think though that sales numbers indicate your quite wrong about the newer products sold here and at other brokerages.

As far as templates for Daz products, I'm guessing you have not looked in your account/product library at the products. The templates are all downloadable there.

AFA "dig on studio" - its more like a dig on Daz's software "development" process such as it is and what there is of it. I am one of the many customers Daz cheated out of $150 out of with Cararra 6 upgrade fiasco and I have neither forgotten nor forgiven Daz for refusing to refund my money once they admitted that they lied to all of us about getting it to work in OSX. Or the fact that my copy of Hexagon wouldn't run in OSX for 4 years.

A shame about Hex. It is still my go to. When exactly was this Cararra 6 fiasco? Sometime around 2007 right? You are aware that the people who ran the company then are no longer with it any more and have not been for several years right? In fact it is a much different company since around 2011/2012. If you have a gripe that goes that far back your need to gripe against a whole different brokerage now.. or a comicon.

DS lacks features of Poser 5, never mind newer versions. The easiest example is the cloth room, but it isn't the only one - just the one I use the most - closely followed by the Fitting Room - the ability to easily update rigging (rigging got a whole lot easier in 2014), adding subdivision and weight mapping to legacy figures leverages the products I already own.

Much of what Studio "lacks" are things most users never bothered with anyway. I'm not sure why there needs to be a special "room" for fitting when it can be better integrated and that integration is hardly a lack. And I am sure your fully aware that Studio has done subdivision and weight mapping for years so there's that. Just as there are a few bits and bobs Poser has that Studio does not there are things missing from Poser that Studio does do. Different strokes for different folks really. I doubt those things are the real driving force as far as software choice goes much less character choice.

So tell me, using my example above - how would YOU get Miki 3 (capsule rigging) or Miki 4 (Poser Weight Mapped) (or a legacy rigged figure like Eroko - when she isn't tied up) dressed in a genesis 2 outfit? I haven't been able to figure out how to do it, and needless to say, there is nothing in the "document center" that explains how to do this. That is kinda important for what I do - I need all of my Star Trek characters in the same uniform (V4 Courageous & M4 Valiant is what I standardized on - that may change if I can figure out how to get some genesis 2 clothing working reliably in Poser - I will figure it out - there can only be so many wrong ways to do it.)

Well I wouldn't be dealing with Miki as I never wanted her but I could certainly use courageous and valiant on any of my genesis 1,2, or 3 characters. And um..wouldn't you just take which ever figure you wanted to use them on into the fit room and work it out there? I would assume that it replaces what auto fit does right?

AFA that 3 to 4 hundred dollars - you can start with Slosh's UV products and then get a full collection of Dimension3D's GenX2 products - that is right at 185 right there, now add in DraagonStorms texture Batch Conversion products. If there is a cheaper way to do it, I wouldn't mind seeing some documentation on it. (There's that pesky word again.) I probably did spend too much money on add-ons, but I couldn't get a handle on what I needed and what I didn't.

You don't actually have to buy those products. I've never bought GenX1 or 2 because I don't need to carry over exact morphs from one generation to the next. If I wanted to avail myself of exact copies of the thousands of available generation 4 morphs it would be money well spent or if I had a character in say a comic book that I needed to look identical it would be worth it. I'm just never needed that sort of exactness myself.

Sloshes products are a wonder if you have heavily invested in say Hero or Aiko etc, or if you just can't let go of some of those old skins from 10 years ago. It makes more available for expansion without question and I know that many people have taken advantage of that that had huge back stocks of characters from the past. For people heavily invested in previous generations it is actually a big money saver.

DraggonStorms batch converter is a wonderful time saver if you have scores of characters your moving over. But if your doing one or two its not really that complex to do if you have a general understanding of surfaces. Again it is money well spent if you have an extensive library of gen 4 products.

All three were product lines were huge sellers. Not because they were required but because they were time savers or pulled things out of the way back that people wanted to be able to continue to use. It was however choice based and not a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. They saved time or money and clearly many people found that more than worth the cost of the products.

AFA moving textures - yeah, I already own all of those products (TC1 & 2 and TT, and I work them like a rented mule). But that doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, a Daz character is pretty easy to pick out with it's freak show proportions (Height wise the V series make up less than 5% of the population - didn't help that they killed their realistically sized figures). That was the whole reason I started migrating from Daz figures to SM figures. The goals for the products are different. SM figures are realistically sized and realistically proportioned figures - they are not runway models, nor were they ever designed to be. Because my fictional worlds are full of people of all sizes, that becomes an issue.

Yes Victoria's are tall girls.. and Aiko's, and the younger characters and Stephanies tend to be short. So a few out of dozens are model tall. Which actually does not make her freakishly tall as models are not the tallest women nor are they freaks. It isn't as if she is pro bball tall, or even tall club tall. And I will let you in on a secret. Victoria's are scalable just like every other shape.. that means that can be as short or tall as you want in the end. And by the way, in my not so fictional world women are allowed to be tall and impressive. Tall women are not in fact "freaks".

Speaking of textures - where to get a wider variety of them? The pron industry maybe?

Only if you can convince them to do detailed photographs of the whole body under ideal lighting systems and forgo the cash that they would see from the sales of real porn. I seriously doubt the world of porn is going to step up and take an income cut just so we can have more texture resources.

" You guys just don't get it. The figure fragmentation in the Poserverse has been a long time coming (and overdue in my opinion). I am glad I have choices other than V4. Poser gives me better tools than DS; and at the end of the day, figures are just another tool."

And I don't get what that has to do with anything. Is it a dig at Studio? It can use all those and genesis 3. And the tools is as always a matter of personal taste just like the user interface thing is a matter of taste.

"Once you move outside of the pinup niche, the genesis content is quite limited, as are the alleged "advantages" in the figures ability to bend over legacy figures (which I can fix in Poser - without dropping three or four hundred dollars and moving back to the Poser 4 era AFA software features)."

Aside from using all the old clothes from all those old figures of course...so the limit is to what you own more than what the figures can use. And I have no clue what you think you should spend 3 or 4 hundred dollars on unless your talking about to use something in poser...Maybe you would like to elaborate on what it is was so necessary and pricey and un-owned by so many of us? It must be something that no one has ever created for poser or else your thinking would be flawed.

"The biggest issue with the genesis lineup isn't the technology - it is the very limited vision of that handful of vendors that create for it. Here is a quick example - right now over on Fastgrab there are 2 male products by the same vendor, Jericho for M4 and Apollo for M6. Looking at the promo's, the only difference appears to be the chest hair."

Urm.. except for the whole use M4 textures on genesis and the ability to transfer any morphs from him which then gives you pretty much as much potential with genesis 1 and 2 as M4 plus anything created uniquely for him along with the addition of HD on top of those things. So M6 has the flexibility of anything M4, M5, and M6.

" Daz vendors are just rehashing what has come before - the same euro-trash early 20-somethings Poser vendors have been inflicting on us for the past decade. Sturgeon's Law in full effect. Not a good thing for a vendor, in my opinion."

Well if you can get some Americans, or south Americans, or Africans, or other non "euro-trash" persons to take all their clothes off and have scores of pictures taken of their entire body, including the naughty bits close up, for very little money please feel free to start selling them like hotcakes. The whole span of the 3d content providers will be thrilled to purchase these new and different resources. Until then everyone is stuck with the limited selections available.

That is the advantage of using many figures which Poser user can do, DS users can't. - the goals of the figure makers are different, the meshes are different, the morphs are different, the vendors making stuff for them are different. My stuff doesn't look like everyone else's. "

Why can't they? As far as I know Studio can still use ever one of those old figures that poser can.

"In my fan-fic, I need a multitude of characters - I can use any figure released in the past decade, with the exception of that fat chick Daz released."

Studio can still use all of those and it seems also some other character I am unaware of that is heavy set.

"How many black males are available in the genesis lineup? My options are several orders of magnitude larger than someone limited to genesis. I can use a genesis 1 or 2 character, I can use an Apollo Maximus character, I can use M1, 2, 3 or 4, I can use P6 James, I can use G2 Simon, or James, or Kelvin, I can use Dusk, or Rikishi. In my case, I have over 100 - how many does genesis have? Not a hundred, not even close.

If I need an Asian chick - in genesis I have about a dozen or so choices (blue eyed Asian are popular) - and only a couple come with black eyes. Wanna guess how many choices I have using Poser? Again, well over 100.

If I need a Caucasian chick - I have about 700 choices. What choices do genesis users have?"

If they are using genesis 1 or 2 they can use the skins from the v4/m4 line (actually with additional products they can go back even further texture wise) as well as the characters from their own generation and if it is Genesis 2 then the genesis one line as well. There are a few characters that use different UV's but that is not true of the majority. So most users would have as many DAZ based choices as you do. Plus they still have the use of any of the other figures created for poser excluding the poser weight mapped ones. I have to say I'm starting to wonder if you grasp how any of this works..