Only the cynical part of me, ma'am. Only the cynical part.

but the world of textures will keep spinning without any one, two or three artists. You sorta miss the point, Soul. Once those textures were released, they become a source point for a lot of people who... hmm... "borrowed" pieces of them for their own work. That's the cynic in me talking.

Maybe there are 4,472 Goddess texs for vicki, but the standard of texs has risen dramatically in the past 2 years Forgive the cynic in me, but they've risen because of folks like Catharina and Steffy -- and as we've just seen, it's their work that raises the quality bar for everyone else through the Magic of Photoshop. Yeah, that's harsh. But dammit, it's probably far closer to the truth than any of us are willing to accept. Hell, this is just the photo-based textures -- I seriously wonder how many of the hand-painted ones out there are guilty of the same sin, if not more egregiously since they would be harder to track? >> I think we've barely scraped the surface of the market Sorry, Mac, but that just scares the bee-jezuz out of me. OK, gotta go put on my love beads and my bell bottoms and sing about Love and Happiness and a Joyful, Peaceful Planet for a while.... :)

What do we have to do to prove our integrity? I don't know, Sam. Honest, I don't. But when I see a long-time, well-established merchant guilty of having ripped off from two other long-time, well-established sources, on the heels of so many smaller, similar accusations directed at others not quite so established, I seriously begin to wonder about the integrity of the whole place. I don't think it's an issue of testers not catching this stuff, because there's so damn much to wade through these days, with a lot of it looking real similar in the first place. But right now, this last catfight made everything suspect, even from vendors whose work I know and very deeply love. >> this marketplace of Poser content (third party characters, props, textures, etc) sustains the Poser user base and is the primary reason why the program still exists And here, respectfully, I must disagree. It wasnt the vendors keeping this program alive. It was the users. The vendors supported the users, no doubt, by feeding that need for the latest and shiniest... but it was the users who kept the whole thing -- program, fora, and markets -- afloat. >> In fact, I'd say this marketplace is more robust than its software engine Of course it is. But Poser is like CAD: a tool and nothing more. It's not a modelling program and never has been (unless, like Geep, you know how to draw the damndest things out of it), so everything has to be brought into it to make it "creative". DAZ Studio, whenever it comes out, will probably have the same restriction slapped on it because it just takes too much power to have this kind of detailed human figure software attached to a high-end modelling program. I mean, this is no surprise, and it shouldn't be seen as something against Poser; it's just the way it is, period. I dunno. The thread has probably run its course anyway.

If one wants to see the overt commercialization of our community in all its glory, just look at the front page of just about any Poser site out there. You know as well as I what you'll find: ads. Lots of them. The email newsletters? Ads. Lots and lots of them. Yeah, I know, it takes money to run a site, and merchandise pays for it. But I've gotten to the point where I don't even look at the ads any more. I don't care that someone has come up with the 1,547th armour design for Vicky, let alone the 4,893rd texture "to make her look like a goddess". After last week, my suspicion now is that that 4,893rd texture is based on taking the 2,417th, 1,895th, and 357th "goddess" textures and just putting them together and slapping a twenty-five dollar price tag on it. It has nothing to do with bandwidth in that case; it has everything to do with "well, everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn't I?" I buy on occasion, mostly for Ichiro and Koshini, increasingly rarely for anything else. Like Sparrowheart, I find myself going back into the CDs and finding something in an old runtime that can be retextured and refitted, and that these days is a helluva lot more fun than plunking down the credit card for some thirty-dollar prop that might be amusing for one or two images and then shoved into an archive and forgotten. I guess the bottom line is: the last week really opened my eyes a lot about this community. I feel like I can't trust anything from anyone, most importantly from a vendor. Before, in those grand old days of innocence, you could trust, because you knew in advance that it'd no likely came from another source and got to where it is now with the complete blessing of whoever the now-long-lost originator might have been. Few people worried about leaving a signature on their work, save those who were laying the groundwork to become a merchant. Now, you turn around, and folks are slapping a circle-c on anything that moves. Just my two cents. YMMV.

let's face facts...99.9% of the free stuff for poser sucks Uh, no, not really. It may need a little adjustment to meet its full potential, but I can only think of a very few things that outright "suck". But I can go into the RMP and find a couple of dozen for-pay pieces that seriously suck. Not because I might have to pay for them, but because someone somewhere actually thought people would spend money on them. A more innocent time? Could be. But certainly one where you didn't see catfights over textures and almost monthly threats of lawsuits over copyright violations. And yeah, I had to walk to school uphill both ways in six feet of snow, even in the summer. :)

Oh, those are sweeeeeeeeeeet.

Another beauty. Thanks, Ed!

Or you do your own thing on top BUT FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T SELL IT!!!

Punto, get with the program, huh? :)

Shoot, Snow, the Vickybuster has been one of my favs for well over a year.

... and another fledgling pornographer leaves the nest. You raise them your very best, and now all you can do is hope they'll turn out OK... ::sigh:: It makes ya wanna cry, y'know?

No question about it, Veritas, but this stuff is truly spectacular. I'd downloaded almost 300 megs of the stuff before I knew it was useless in Poser; it really is that good.

And maybe the naked artist just wanted to make the naked model feel more comfortable. :)

Don't think there was, actually. The only pose sets I have are the ones from DAZ (not the MilCat, but the original P4 cat). They're pretty decent, and not too pricey.