in the thread where the price was mentioned Kupa responded thus; "Let's talk a little more about basic business. When structuring a deal, you put out a number. The party you're dealing with counters. The number mentioned above was never countered, even after direct comments from us that we were expecting a counter. nuff said on that... The face room relies on a database of difference vectors and morph targets. We licensed that database at a reasonable, yet significant cost from a third party. We invested many months polishing, tweaking, interfacing and correlating this data to work with both the application and with our set of figures. Every new set of figures added to the face room represents man-months of time. The new figure's head needs to be precisely correlated so that it's unique mesh can be modified by the face room vectors and morphs, it needs testing and fine tuning, and it needs an updater for the database so the new head will be recognized. All this is quite an investment in time and capital. The time on our end has a cost above the physical costs. It costs us opportunites. Finishing the MAC version, updating MAX/LightWave/C4D plug-ins, translating into German, French, Japanese and possibly Spanish, and addressing any issues with the current code along the way. All these experience some fashion of a delay if we divert that focus to correlating new figures for the face room. Those are lost opportunties that need to have some value assigned to them. For that opportunity, we estimate the time needed and established a fee. That fee isn't written in stone. And ultimately only you, the folks that will use the Poser 5 face room can gauge whether it's useful or not. It's all a crap shoot until this lovely technology is in your hands." perhaps Daz is not in a position to come up with even half that $30.000 it's a risky endevor with Poser5 just out, and no knowledge how many people will go the upgrade route. and I might go an extra 10 or 20 for a vicky figure that works in the face room but i'm guessing if sales are not spectacular it'll be far more then that. though he did say that becouse they share the same mesh mike and steffy would count as one figure. judging by his comment about holding up other developement i'm sure our Mac friends will agree that the millis in the face room are not primarily important

well if you can't do that kind of magic with meshes no one can blame CL for not providing and export system as the other programs would have to use the same system to render it. blame them for not keeping up with Poser if you have to blame someone. ;P

so the low rez Vicky should be practicly indisinguishable from Hi rez with a much shorter rendertime?

"they will mostly work with Millennium-figure poses." except they can move their tootsies independently. ;)

I'ts not that they don't want you to render in other programs its that the format for the hair is different then other programs take just as the node based shaders are but the dynamic clothing should export fine as the dynamics are calculated in poser and all you would be exporting is the final obj file. It is rediculous to think that you are not going to have some incompatabilities in new software technology.

Nice stuff sharen, at least somebody is tearing themselves away from the P5 speculation long enough to post something useful. ;)

so if CL can't do anything about it legaly and won't do anything about it, from a product acceptance point of view, Why worry about it? I for one am ready to move on from this subject, I already baught P5 and will not hesitate to install it, inevitable warts and all. anyone who doesn't want to doesn't have to. wishing happy times for all:)

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fyresprite Exactly. it is not in CL's best interest to styfle creativity which can only expand their user base. but any company would be crazy not to try to defend that user base from a direct competitor.

Ah Phoenix, a voice of reason. rather then argue semantics you cut to the chase and point to a solution that I'm sure would not be a hardship for CL and would protect the rights of programmers.

many of these things do not presently translate to other programs so if you render exclusively in bryce say, then no the p5 upgrades won't make your present figures better. but if you render in Poser there's no doubt they'll even make your High rez figures look better. for example displacement mapping is a much more realistic version of bump mapping where the map actualy does deform the skin causing lighting to model textures much more accurately. subdivision of surface poygons will make any curved surface smoother, in effect creating more polygons. the firefly renderer will put reflections on objects rather then using a texture map to simulate them. Node based shaders will allow a flexability of textures, layers, translucency, previously unavailable in a consumer level product (by consumer level I mean a program that costs less then the computer it's run on)

Actually It can easily be argued that that a file format created spacificly for a program is in fact a portion of that program and in that sense they did clearly state that "any portion of the program merged into or used in conjunction with another program will continue to be the property of the company." that was in you P4 EULA. but the fact is that this is legaleze to protect their buts from the whole program being reverse engineered and they would be stupid not to protect their rights, they are no more likely to sue anyone creating helper aps then anyone else with similar patants and copywrites such as PDF, DOC, etc.

It already says In the eula that you can do anything with light settings other then copywrite them and as I said EUlA or no EULA I don't think they are copywritable your first point would be the general argument "Lights settings, camara positions and so on are general concepts for 3D programs.". you're not importing the lights just the settings the CL EUlA cant stop you from importing those settings. original content however is always copywritable by their creator and that right cannot be taken away by a EULA agreement even if they wanted to, original content cannot be copywrited untill after it is produced.

the pose part was added by me and I have no knowledge of CL's stand on pose files but the agument is there that just like camera and lighting this is just a collection of dial settings. but i also believe that a cr2 copywrite solely comprised of preexisting morph dials would be impossable to defend in court for the same reason whether the CL EULA allowed it or not. but custom morphs or accompanying texture would be copywriteable.

as a famous ad campagn goes poser5 doesn't make better models Poser5 makes models better. firefly render engine with subdivision of surface polygons will do that. strand based hair will do that. node based material shaders will do that. displacement mapping will definately do that. as you said you'll believe it when you see it. I'm betting it wont be so long before you see it. :)