Dunno if its already been said, but I'm strongly reminded of my old favourite , Posette.

Yup, that's pretty much what I had in mind. It would be a boon to be able to easily add displacement maps to whatever part of the mesh you fancied.

I was thinking of something more like C4D's Bodypaint, which removes the tedious switching and juggling between aps. like Poser Gimp and uvmapper. See http://www.maxon.net/products/bodypaint-3d/why-this-package.html

It doesn't have to be a fully blown image transformation app, with all bells and whistles, just as long as it does basic editing and manages the images properly, e.g. preserves the original and keeps track of copies. (BTW Gimp 2.0 which has much more power than would be required takes up 34M on my hard drive. Hardly boated)

While we're at it, I would also like support for stereo 3d. I'd love to create stereo animations in Poser.

How about SM providing a rentable renderfarm? Nice side earner for 'em.

I would really like to see swapable body parts. Don't like the head? Just change it.

It would mean that instead of a provider having to create a whole new mesh, they could just supply the bit that they specialise in. Sort of like hair, only more integrated.

New boobs? No problem.

It could work for animal or fantasy creatures as well. Chimera? Minotaur? Just pick 'n mix.

I would like to have a painting room with some drawing and painting tools to allow direct modification to the surface maps etc. Great for makeup, tatoos etc.

Also, as the app is capable of rendering in buckets, how about some simple way of distributing the rendering load across several machines arranged as a rendergarden.

Figures: Publish a set of standardised bones and sections ( head, torso arms etc) under a royalty free licence as the start of a standard setting exercise, then let anyone develop meshes for them. This should facilitate swapable body parts.

I still like Posette. Boost the no of polys a bit and give her a decent hi res skin and violá.

I'm not sure if its workable, but could Poser incorporate 3rd party renderers like vray or maxwell ?

Please don't confuse GPU computations with CPU. Although a GPU can have thousands of individual processors, they are much slower than a CPU for the equivalent calculation, and have to be supervised, which results in considerable overhead. (Amdahl's Law), and suffer other limitations.

The basic rules of computation still apply.

In any case, most cracking records are set in circumstances that offer opportunites that seldom exist in reality, where delays are the norm and lock outs for incorrect passwords are applied.

Plus, how likely is it that some criminal mastermind is going to use the entire resources of his zombie computer army for several years to get his hands on your copy of V4?

I think BB's vision is very welcome. Just think of well maintained freeware libraries that we could automatically sign up to and access from anywhere. Bring it on!

Thank you, everyone who has contributed to this project. This is a fantastic achievment. I have few skills in this area, but if it is possible to contribute in any way, please let me know.

Enough room on the disk?

If there were a standard benchmark it would be very useful. There are a lot of people who would like to know if their rig was performing up to scratch. There is cinebench (from the C4D stable) but nothing for Poser afaik.

Are you sure that there are no illegal characters in the file name?

Fist things first. If you want to start animating, Poser isn't half bad for the price. The hardest thing in animation is just that - the animation bit. i.e getting your characters to move in a lifelike and natural way.

You really don't care what the quality of the render is like for this stage. You will want to be able to repeat and correct your work frequently, so Mike is 100% correct in suggesting using a low grade output like preview mode for this purpose.

Once you have your animation sorted, THEN you can start to worry about how it looks in a final render. Its a real pity that Poser only has the Firefly renderer, but again, for the money its OK, and reasonably fast if you keep the qualtiy at reasonable level. Animation will tolerate a lower quality of output than still shots anyway, because the eye is not dwelling on minute detail for any length of time.

The basic technique is the same we have always used, get it right in low res, then crank up the settings for the final output.

Cinema 4D appear to have changed their marketing strategy of late, and the current pricing structure (which was never cheap) is no longer attractive to the non professional.

As others have pointed out, if you need more grunt to process your final work, think about a render garden, as the management software is built into the last couple of Poser versions.

Okay, I took the plunge. I am buying 4 Athlon core 64 X2 machines for €125 (about $180) each. As my current set up is a single core 1.3 GHz 32 bit Athlon, this will be a big step up. First step on the ladder!!

Any interest in setting up some kind of standard benchmarking for Poser, Vue, Blender etc? I don't want to start a farm war, but I'm really interested in the relative performance of individual cows, processor, effect of the amount of memory, bios tweaks,mobo choice etc. 

I'm looking to get the best bang for my buck with a rendergarden. At the moment, the sweet spot looks like a core i5. (based on Cinebench) From the reviews, Bulldozer does not seem to have come up to expectations. Or am  I missing something ?

Since deciding to cut my cinema 4d XL bundle down to the core because of their changes to the bundling structure (another story),  I have been looking round for a renderer that will give a good price/performance tradeoff, to offset the loss of the Advanced Render module. As I am also an avid Poser user, and currently looking to upgrade my PC, the Octane render package looks like a good bet. Has anyone gone down the workflow path of Poser to Octane (via C4D) ?

One of the nice features of this renderer is that it uses the graphic card to do the rendering, and if you use more than one card, it will split the work between them, so it might be cost effective to get 2 (or 3?) less expensive cards rather than a single state of the art GPU.

The results on the Octane site look amazing.

Any experience of this setup out there?