"Don't get the DS 4.5 Beta, if you Wanted/Got the DS4-Pro give-away."

There is no charge for the 4.5 update and I strongly suspect that before long (if not already) the free version that people receive will be 4.5.

"It says right in the review that the OLD PLUGINS WON'T WORK! "

Till they are recompiled to work with the new SDK. DAZ will update all of the plugin's it owns and most other people will as well. It is unlikely anyone will charge for those upgrades. It is doubtful however that plug in's not updated to version 4 will be. Though since the SDK has not be finalized till now some may be.

"Not a bad business idea, give away the out-dated old to try and sell the new,"

The new will be free as far as anyone knows.

"but for now I'm firewalling DS4Pro from updating. "

That feature is not functional at this time anyway.

Anyone know if reality will work in 4.5?

"1) setting up lights and skin textures is very long and time consuming process and end result is almost never as good as Poser's default render......."

That is very much a your mileage may vary sort of thing. It takes me forever to set up poser lights and half the time I am not pleased with the results. Lights in studio are so much easier and faster to me. And fixing skin textures in poser is a nightmare as far as I am concerned. And I finally realized they did need fixing to go with the lightning I have selected. Because it is such a pain in the behind I tend to just go and get an elite texture and have done with it rather than try and fix other ones. Generally when I do promos for products they take about 4 times as long to do in poser as they took me in studio.

I agree about more backwards compatability. That was always one of my pet peeves though I have had less hassle with it of late.

Faster rendering is always nice, but truth to tell I suspect I would need a newer computer for it to help me out much.

For 5 I'd want a more intuitive set up for shader mixer and dynamic hair. Hey, a girl can dream can't she?

When 4 first came out I didn't much care for it. Now when I have to work in version 3 I get really frustrated. I needed to check a fit on V4 in 3 tonight and just cringed at how she looks. I admit that the geometry switching freaked me out once but other than that I have had no real issues in 4.

Technically it is untrue that only optitex is able to make the dynamic cloth. Anyone who has bought their program could do it. For most of us the cost is prohibitive however. About $3000 and it is generally sold to people in the fashion business who no doubt are more interested in its other potential rather than trying to sell or give away for studio.

Frankly they were foolish to make them free to begin with. I'm sure the hope was to see the niche sales increase and I doubt that happened. I don't have any problems with the niche bases no longer being free personally. Even getting them free didn't encourage me to use most of them. As long as M4 and V4 are free I doubt it will be any impact most new users or what products get created.

"pc items discontinued because of the costs involved" The reason should have been they are old as the hills and frankly do not look good in the store any more.

"subtle hints of DAZ Studio not being free in the future anymore" They have already said some of what will be in the next free version vs pay for version so those hints must be for Version 5 of studio.

You may need to update the clothing control plug in as well by the way. We have the same OS so its more a matter of getting the versions of studio, dynamic cloth, and the cloth control plug in that all work well together.

Martin who works with optitex has several tutorials on his site. You will have to register to get to the forum where they are. It is worth it as he has pages and pages of freebies.

http://www.optitex-dynamiccloth.com/

When you can load in the dynamic clothing be sure that you select the top level (Not the rig) and then "fit to" your character. The clothing will conform to the character but not exactly. Do not panic that is fine. Now in the dynamic clothing tab your going to drape the fabric over the character. But before you can do that you need to select which parts of the character and the scene the clothing is going to interact with and set it to collide with the fabrics. You have two options, one is a time line drape and the other is static. Which you chose will depend on the clothing and the pose. If the clothes fall off and you have fit it to the character and set to collide the most common problem is that the character is scaled down. Be sure that for some crazy reason v4 did not load in with a stephany morph or a reby morph as those will shrink her whole body. The dynamics can be used with the smaller bodies but there is a bit more fiddling.

 "I drape the cloth with success and save the figure with cloth .I quit DAz studio , and try to open the file saved and oup error message"

Is there other stuff in the scene as well? I've had that happen with one piece of dynamic clothing but only when I was saving the reby hair in the same scene. In other situations I saved the skirt fine and reused the scene multiple times.

Supported

"I hope you noticed that tiling is now a standard surface feature in DS 3? And it's fully implemented in the viewport, which is quite cool."

I did I did! And I expect to get as much joy from that as some of the advertised add ons!

Honestly, I think if anyone has a computer that will run a version of 3.0 they would be silly not to go ahead and upgrade. The renders are just so much better!

Dynamics are already out. 3.0 is still in beta and while it does still have the dynamics it also has quite a few new additions. Some will be in both the free and pay for versions and some will be exclusive to the pay for version. 3.0 adds things like figure mixer, baker, morph follower, map transfer, shader mixer and builder. Of those only shader mixer has something comparable in poser. I it would depend on how useful you find being able to swap textures between character models so on if you should stick with Studio or get Poser8 when its available. If they are not deep in production yet they may even choose to adopt similar abilities for Poser as well.

Dynamics isn't really one of the additions for 3.0.

I have to admit that right now I am pretty disappointed with the prospects for 3.0 advanced. I have not seen any recent changes to make the advanced surfaces more friendly for the average user and they look to me to still be aimed at "making it easier for the RSL user". I suspect that it will still be a plug in based system with the negative addition that we will end up buying a bunch of little "bricks" much like the shaders that were brought over from Bryce for Studio earlier this year. Something that can be tweaked minimally but hardly used as a real creative outlet.

The fact that something as necessary and simple as tiling still has not been made a standard surface feature leads me to believe they still see little value in increasing the ability for content creators to have better cross compatability with Poser (as an example) . Unless I am wrong and they do suddenly unveil easier to use advanced surfaces that include many of the more simple to use surface settings that are standard in Poser there will be no more interest by content creators to include settings for studio or create content especially for Studio.

I hope I am wrong about how all of this is going to go. The fact that surfaces created in 3.0 advanced should be usable in the free version is hopeful, but unless its easy enough for the standard user to handle there will be people who pay money for the advanced version and end up disappointed. Not to mention that the poser content creators will not be inclined to more fully support studio users with their products.

I've tried it and it does have some pluses, but I doubt that the average user will get much from some of the advanced features unless they make them more visual artist friendly.