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If this means SM is abandonning Rex and Roxie development, she is not so welcome after all.

+1!

Definitely not a good thing. She seems to be a step backwards compared to the current Poser figures. I don't see the point.

And shouldn't it be one of the selling points of the program? If the figures are designed specifically to work with the latest features of Poser then shouldn't the marketing reflect this. There was some push for Tyler and Miki4 with the launch of the new website and an update to PP2012 and then almost nothing. Shouldn't the existence of Rex and Roxie be part of the reason I should want to upgrade Poser? Instead of the new figures being an afterthought? I'm sure no one's expecting Vicky levels of support for a Poser figure, but a bit of enthusiasm from SM would be nice. Then vendors would feel encouraged to make more for the Poser figures, people would use them more, more stuff would be made. They're good figures. It's a waste to promote Hivewire stuff instead.

Miki4 is lovely. If she had a more European version she'd be a great alternative to A3 in my runtime. But her European morph is a bit weird.

Poser figures just lurk in the runtime and get ignored and SM seem to be happy to leave them that way. I'd always believed what I read about Alyson and Ryan being horrible figures and never even tried them (except for Blackhearted's Anastasia) and then when I actually pulled them out and started rendering them as a result of a forum thread last year, I was really impressed.

Quote - Why do Smith Micro support/promote "Dawn" and not their own figures, like Roxie for example?

In my opinion Dawn is just another figure, not something to gather the poserverse around.

A statement like this from SM is really bad news....

I agree. I wish SM would put more effort into marketing their own figures. I like Alyson (esp. in her Anastasia form) and Ryan/Tyler and Miki4, but they're really a bit abandonware.
If SM had really pushed their latest pair of characters and made them seem worth having then there might have been some incentive to get the latest version of Poser, but SM seem really uninterested in their own figures. I really think it's a shame.

I like this. It's good to have some totally different figures. I need to use Adman more. He's been very neglected in my runtime lately, never enough time!

Yeah. You can do pretty much anything in MD. Provided you can work out how to do it! I'm seriously stumped by some things because I have the sewing abililty of a grapefruit and have no idea how real clothes are put together, so creating patterns is a total headache and usually involves a lot of shouting for me. There's a pirate outfit for sale in the MD store so that one is definitely doable for someone with clothes-making skills.

I have MD2 though on the old licence system, I didn't bother even looking at MD3.

Here for me are some beautiful examples of the perfect female body and what I'm usually trying to achieve in renders:

The Ballerina Project

(Don't think there's any nudity so far as I remember!)

In answer to the original question - I always use "statuesque" rather than "down to earth". My renders are dance, fantasy and sci-fi and especially for dance renders the body shape I want to use is very much like the "statuesque" pics Pumeco has been posting. Those are gorgeous! I think maybe it is a European thing. Tall, slender blondes are very popular here. (In the same way I like the shape of M3 much better than M4.)

All looks good!

I try to do as much in the render as possible. So most of the postwork is just fixing things that are easier to postwork than bother to rerender - small bits of pokethrough, wonky bit of texture, weird kinks in hair etc.

Sometimes I add some effects in Photoshop, depends what the final result is supposed to be. But I rarely overpaint anything unless there's some serious problem I need to get rid of.

(It's easier in Vue as a lot of post-render adjustment can be done to the render inside Vue anyway, so any postwork is for Vue renders is usually only a case of fixing any little glitches I hadn't noticed.)

Plus so far as new Poser figures go often they're only available with Poser. That's a lot more limiting than the Daz figures that you could always just go and buy, or get for free. So although I use Poser 2012 I don't have access to Rex and Roxie unless I upgrade.

It's got a lot quieter round here since the discussion of new and potential new figures died down, but I'm sure it's just cyclic and something will start up the discussions again.

Absolutely!

I do like Poser, but to me Poser scenes always look like something shot inside a studio (and sometimes that's good!). When I want outdoors I always go to Vue. And for lots of indoor scenes as well. Single figures I like to do in Poser, but anything else in Vue. And now that you can bring all the material settings from Poser to Vue it's much better. There are a lot of very good tutorials for Vue so it's not hard once you start learning.

I never bothered upgrading from PP2012 to 2014. There just wasn't anything in the upgrade that justified buying it for me.

I wasn't alienated by MD3, I'm just not bothering with it. MD2 is fine for what I need. The extra expense of MD3 isn't worth it for me.

I use Blender to model the props to go with the MD clothing, but I can't see myself ever needing to use it to create the clothes themselves. Maybe for solid armour, but I'm happy with MD for clothes.