As I said, SM gave me a free download. (Though they said they don't ordinarily for purchasers of physical disks.)

It was the correct disk. 

I was able to get a free digital download by contacting SM through their web chat support. I had to provide my serial and order numbers.

Sorry to waste a thread, but maybe this will help someone else in the future.

Other than very specific issues related to Freak4, toddlers and ZBrush, which have garnered a lot of attention here, what are some of the biggest changes / improvements in SR3? I have read the ReadMe file, so don't need SM's list, but I am interested in real-world experience. Mostly in the area of stability.

The original PP2012 and SRs 1 and 2 were about as stable as a house of cards on a windy day on my Mac, so that I did most work on PP2010 and went to 2012 to render. Any Mac-heads doing all their work within 2012 with SR3?

Actually, I thought PP 2013 might be due soon, because they reduced PP 2012 by $200.

Quote - This pretty much explains why I said not to bother. Until there something that easy to export, the steps are clear and the results are worth the effort (resolution, clothing), you're better off not going through the trouble. And it's not even finished and probably won't be for the forseeable future.

Sound advice regarding Genesis, and pretty much my understanding of the situation. Kudos to those who are getting some fun or practical use out of the thing, but for me... why bother.

I don't have an answer to your question, but Poser shouldn't require you to locate textures. Just set preferences to do deep searches and it will find textures wherever they are, as long as just their locations have changed and not their file names.

Unfortunately, Poser's programmers did not extend that functionality to OBJ files. Geometries must be exactly where the scene or figure files expect them to be.

Quote - Apple could at least have them made in friendly country.

Apple and every other major electronics manufacturer.

I can't blame Apple for becoming a bit anal with its patent claims. Not when some Chinese electronics company is churning out look-alikes (but not work-alikes; think of the $20 "Rolexes" for sale in Times Square) within 48 hours of Apple launching a product. And when even mainstream electronics firms promptly redesign their product to look as much like the Apple one as possible without actually having the Apple logo on it. Yeah, sometimes it seems a bit obsessive about things that begin with the letter "i" but everyone wants a piece of Apple pie. Thus they have more lawyers than some tech companies have employees.

Quote - I'm just sad that I never once saw any of them in concert. What a treat that must have been!

Did they get to the point where they could play well enough to put on their own concert? Or did they sing in front of another band? You know, like Elvis wore a guitar just for visual effect.

It was interesting that on their biggest hits (like Last Train, Pleasant Valley Sunday, I'm A Believer), Mickey Dolenz was the singer. I wonder where Mickey is today?

Quote - Note that I don't know if svdl's free "SpawnCharacterP6 update" py script still works in the latest Poser versions, but the other methods should.

Unfortunately not. We were lucky that this script, last updated for P6, continued to work through Poser 8 / 2010. But the current Poser breaks many of those old scripts. A few vendors, but too few, have converted their commercial scripts to wxpython, which avoids the tkinter-based problems in thenew Posers.

I would think a script to remove all facial morphs from an expression woild be fairly easy to create, but as far as I know it hasn't been done yet. It sure is tedious to uncheck all the non-expression boxes when saving an expression. There are so MANY of them.

It's usually freebies posted by newbies who use expressions like Smile or Pucker as part of a character face, or facial morphs to create an expression, or a mix of both. I think it's because default V4 has a ton of facial morphs and expressions, and it isn't really clear that they shouldn't be used interchangably. Even if they do that part of it right, they often leave the facial morphs checked, so those get zeroed out when applied to a dial-morphed face. As Jafo said, it wouldn't have any effect if the custom face were saved as a new morph rather than a bunch of dial settings.

Quote - **While going through this initiative, it occurred to us that our repeated, deep discounting on 3D content was unfair to some of our customers.  A large disparity between the amount one customer paid vs. another is unfair. **Everyone should pay a fair price always. We hope you agree.

Still, we want to offer our faithful and loyal customers added value and bonuses. And we want to motivate you to purchase new items right away instead of waiting by offering true value and not artificial or arbitrary discount periods.

coldrake is right, it does not explicitly say here that they won't do it any more (at least in this final version after 3 edits). But, boy, it sure does sound like an apology to paying customers for having done it in the past, admitting the practice is unfair.

Which is an odd thing to acknowledge while giving away their most expensive product, and two other 3D software packages as well.

I'm not defending the new management's plan as good or successful. Just saying what I perceive it to be... and I could be wrong. kerwin isn't the only Daz vendor who has spoken of "broken trust." One vendor told me a few weeks ago she is getting nervous that her Genesis products are not selling as she expected, and she hopes this giveaway will turn things around.

Honestly, we should hope it does, even if Genesis never becomes something we can use painlessly in Poser. Indirectly, we need Daz to be successful. The fewer "mainstream" players in our hobby, the less incentive there is for innovation, and for keeping prices reasonable.

As for the Daz Marketplace, well, for me personally it has become less and less worthwhile to visit. I have pretty much sucked what I wanted out of their back catalog, and there is not enough new coming out for V4, or props / scenes that interest me. I still look a coiuple times a week, and occasionally there's an Instant Alert that tempts me at the price. But often I go away disappointed, money unspent.

Which is probably just as well, I have about 50 discount purchases from Daz and Rendo that I haven't even installed yet. Now that's pathetic!

kerwin, nice thoughtful post. Hard to argue with much of what you said. But I would just make a couple observations.

Daz is under new management and is not necessarily going to adhere to previous schedules and strategies. They're certainly not adhering to promises made by previous management to the customer base. They're doing what they think they must do for the good of the company and it's affiliated vendors, to heck with what the previous management did or said.

By offering their most expensive product for free for a month, and then extending that for at least another month, they don't seem to be much worried about deferring software revenues ... for DS4. They're more concerned with encouraging purchases of aftermarket Genesis stuff. That is ALL this version of DS is about these days.

So I don't think it's out of the question that the new bosses at Daz might follow this giveaway (and steep discounts that will doubtless come next) by bringing out DS5 sooner than the company had done in the past. I'm not saying next week, but maybe in a few months when this promotion has exhausted itself.

They're ignoring requests for bug fixes in DS4? Well, maybe they're saving those fixes and other improvements for the next, paid version.