Thats the great thing about 3d graphics it evolves all the time, i do agree that the sensational magic as you call it might have gone for some. But think a lot of people would enjoy being able to make such things if it werent to complicated. Which poser over time could help do, but with poser and any other 3d software out there, applying the newest technology is not very easy and also require that the end user have the computer needed to work with it.

But as computers gets more and more powerful and software gets more and more advanced, i dont see any reason why these new thngs shouldnt just be integrated into any software package in the future, its just a matter of time in my opinion.

Here are some examples that are pretty interesting i think:

GPU Technology Conference 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XISqvBVyASo

Realistic character hair 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cECnvJeXXE8 

These are from SM, thats a good starting point:

More information can be found here:

http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/2313.html

Personally when i make poses or store props. 

I save them without body transformation checked, which i guess is a matter of taste, or whether the pose is very specific. But for me at least my workflow doesnt suit that, as i move the characters roughly to where i want them and would like them to stay in that area, so its very annoying when applying a new poses if you have to move them back all the time. 

Then always save the poses without IK enabled as it can screw up the poses. And always make sure that IK is turned off when applying them as it can also mess things up. 

For any changes to props, i always delete the old one first through poser, if i want to use the same name and just want to make changes to it. 

Im not sure why people think the cloth room is so complicated, in my experience you rarely have to change any settings there. And if you do its very few of them. Otherwise its pretty much just to add the objects that you wish to collide with the cloth you have to add. Especially if the cloth is already made, then the vendor should have already set all the settings.

"But I do think that the cloth room, once the Poser team irons out a few more wrinkles and makes it more user friendly, and the hair room have the potential to be big marketing tools for Poser."

What they could do was to add predefine cloth settings, so you just selected the type of cloth you wanted in a list. But besides that i cant really see how they could make it a lot easier.

I do however wish they could improve the hair room, but then again these are really complicated in other apps as well and very hard to get good results with. Meaning the tools for working with dynamic hair are not easy to use to get something good out of. Also why you find very few tutorials on how to actually style hair for dynamic use, they are pretty much all just "then you can add hair or fur to this ball, just by doing this and that" but never how you create something that a human would wear, at least thats my impression :D

There have to be others who've found themselves in a similar situation.

For me its pretty much all stuff i make in 3ds max are going to be used in poser, unless I ofc have to do something for a company. But i like making images and as you i dont want to spend so much time making characters, first of all i dont have the required skills to model them of the standard that i would want nor do i want to spend the time doing it, rigging etc. So Poser is perfect in that regard, there are a lot of very high quality characters available and working with them is very easy as well. So for me at least Poser is pretty much always in my workflow one way or another.

So if there werent a program like poser or Daz which made it so easy to work with characters i doubt i would use any characters at all.

Whether its skrinking or not i have no clue. But I think some things to prevent it, if its the case, would be to stop releasing several different versions and just make one version. 

And then they need to push features such as a particle system so you could make smoke, water, snow etc. Which are stuff that have been in other 3d packages for a very long time now.

Then they should give the material room a huge update and expand the material library with lots of new shaders and at the same time switch to one of the more professional render engines, that can render all that is needed. 

And ofc the animation tools that have already been mentioned. 

I see no reason why you shouldnt be able to make very cool stuff in Poser, which some already are doing, but to take it further, I think it requires that they are willing to take some steps forward and start to redesign it a bit.

Cant see any images? :D

Here are some suggestions, might not be better, My drawing is not very precise :D

It seems that the cheek bones are a bit to exposed and the chin a little bit to large. And might just be the shadow, but also the cheek might be a bit to high. 

The nose tip as already mentioned :)

But its really nice i think.

Quote - 3D-Mobster :Oh I know there's a lot of very cool monsters that rock in zBrush and
I'm a fan of them all.
but it's way more difficult to model a realistic pretty girl then it is a scupt a ugly fantasy monster.

We know what a realistic girl is suspose to look like.
A ugly fantasy monster can look like anything.

So even though there both bipeds ,a pretty girl is still way more difficult to model .
So it's not really a fare comparison.

I wouldnt personally think it makes a huge difference to these modellers. And also a pretty girl depends on the beholder i guess :D

But here is an example of someone modelling a female using a basic shape, i think she is pretty enough to compete :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAcZsMhxM0

You can put buttons and zippers on, I would however not model the zippers with individual locks as it will kill the cloth simulator and to be honest i doubt any software out there could handle that very well.

However you have several options, either you make it part of the dress texture, which would make it possible to open and close the dress using morphs.

Another way could be to make a long chamfer box or just a box and texture that as the zipper which would give it some depth. And then use soft body in Poser to make it follow the dress dynamics. This would prevent you from open and closing the dress. 

So you could split it into two shapes one for each side with half a zipper on each.

But in either case, to make the zipper you probably need to look into bump maps and preferable normal maps. And how to use them in poser.

Normal maps in basic allow you to make a very detailed zipper which you can then transfer to a simpler shape using a normal map, and thereby get more details into it. However i havent worked a lot with this so maybe someone knows how they work in poser and if you need to do something special for them to work. 

You can see an example of what it does here:

As you can see the mesh of the character is very low res but with the normal map you get a lot more details.

http://features.cgsociety.org/newgallerycrits/g18/172618/172618_1205029919_large.jpg

"I'm hoping that if I can't set up the groups for them in advance, the least I can do is give thej the proper settings  and groups for the things to work right."

When the dress is completed the zippers should end up being part of the dress object, and the groups are saved with the dress, so if you make the zippers soft bodies and save it to your librabry they are preserved with the dress everytime you load it in a scene. 

I would suggest that you start just by making a very simple button and test how it works in poser with the soft body, so you get a very good idea how to handle the zipper, as i would expect it to give you some problems, if not a lot, as its not the most easy thing to get to work i think. 

"All right let me exsplain my thinking .
All the app's even zBrush comes with pemade characters all ready.
Don't know if they still do but at one time AutoDesk came with Poser characters even.
So if there just modifying a premade character ,sure it looks cool.
but there not getting credit for making the character."

Im not really sure i understand what you mean, but its very common for modellers, if not all of them to start with some sort of basic shape that are modelled from a primitive. In certain cases they might use a base shape of some kind, but the shape would simply be to not having to make such over and over again, and is a simple step of modelling a character.

Here are some example of how some start modelling those characters. Even though these are not humans they are humanoids and i doubt they would have any problems modelling humans as well if they needed. 

If you see how they start and what they end up with, they are not using a premade model.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxRp8R62Nlc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8QHytHds7I

Its also very common to model a very simple model in Maya or max and then import it into zbrush and start from that.

But these are probably the most common ways to start modelling characters, compared to using a high res mesh where there might be a lot of details in that you dont need. But not sure thats what you referring to?

Yeah i see what you mean, you could however paint in the details and shading, and then work on the outline afterwards. But not sure it would actually work, now that i think about it :D

"Stills are great and Poser is surely one of the top dogs at it, but for years I've been wishing Poser would catch up and make animation easy as well.  DS is a lot better than Poser in that respect, but I prefer Poser's interface.  Right now, I can imagine that if iClone had Unreal's realtime renderer, that would be totally incredible.  Even better would be Poser with iClone-style animation tools and Unreal's realtime render engine in the Poser viewport."

*Yeah completely agree, and i didnt try to imply that poser is very good for making animations, just that you can do it and get decent results, if you are willing to spend the time needed to learn the tools. And as you i would also love to see some big improvements to this, since making animations is really fun. And since poser is so much aimed at being a product that makes use of finished products, being able to really work with them easily when animating would be a huge bonus.

I agree the animation tools in poser could be stronger, but i also think a lot of people might assume that its really bad, because you can see all these fancy animations on the internet made with varies programs. 

But to be fair animation takes a very long time, especially character animation and I dont think its much off if you assume that a professional animator working with an already rigged character will spend around a week or so to make around 20 second of animation. So taking that into account to make good animations requires time even if you are a proffesional and might have a specific animation packages to work with. I think you can make nice looking animations in poser, but it requires that you really know the tools available and also know how the character you are animating behaves, based on there anatomy etc.

"Here's an example from a few years down the road."

Thats looking really nice, did you just use the model from poser and then finishing it up in photoshop with colors, outline etc or how close to the final image do you get in poser?