in ref. to: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2674155 Okay folks... this has got me torqued a bit. If you're going to jump into some hurt-feelinged person's gallery and make arguments for Poser (or whatever), please, please at least use some critical reasoning and logic in your replies. Take for instance this reply: http://comments.deviantart.com/1/43564333/362009031 While incomplete, it is well reasoned, thought-out, and a man can certainly respect what the person has to say. The first response by some obvious troll was crap, but the other (and many like it) were damned solid, and damned true. I hope the reasons why will become clear as you read along... So, I scroll down to the 2nd page of the comments, and find... the same tired arguments that should've been cast off eons ago (and as someone guilty of using them myself long ago, I should know). Okay, let's go through some of these arguments, shall we? (quotations taken from the deviant art thread). First off, Poser isn't a fscking camera, it is an application. Poser art is NOT photography. The photography allegories don't wash. As a guy who has seriously delved into photography, I've come to appreciate the differences, and buddy, they are VAST. Photography is the art of the tangible, of reality. It is a moment in time. The very nature of photography is based on three things performed against a pre-existing tangible subject or event found within the scope of reality to produce art: composition, lighting, and color. In photography, you are taking something that exists and committing it to either film or pixel, in the hopes that the story you tell with it will last orders of magnitude longer than the short moment in which it was composed. Sometimes it is distorted (e.g. fashion photography), but is still grounded in either manipulating or fixing the fleeting reality into the permanent. Poser (and by extension 3D/CG art) is an expression of creativity, since its components are definitely not tangible or real. It is a test of how much creativity and imagination you have. Slap Vicky in a temple and stick a sword in her hand? Unless you have some damned good composition and lighting skills, it's BORING! it's CRAP! Please, drill that through your heads. If you want sterling examples of utter crap, large swaths of my gallery (on ANY site) await you. Now, secondly, let's dwell on that creativity angle, shall we? Back before 2002-2003, before Poserdom blew up into this merchant-centric thing we behold today, the CG world was (only somewhat, but still) okay with Poser, because it actually took some skill to get all the elements you needed together just to create a render that didn't look all plastic and default-looking. It took time and patience to render something that didn't turn out like crap. Creating something unique actually required some skill at hacking text files, using magnets, and actually pushing a program beyond what it was originally meant to do. People actually blended many programs together to create the final result (and those poor bastards using Bryce had to be the most patient of all if they wanted something of any decent-sized resolution). A lot of the best artists in Poserdom stand out because they took the meagre tools they had back then and did some damned fantastic things with them. They (--pay attention closely now--) they invested their own imaginations and creativity into their results. Much of what I see today, I can pretty much name which packages were bought(or P2P'd), and which plugins or add-ons were used to produce which effects. It's all plopped down and called "art", and Heaven help the real artists (whether they use Poser or not) out there who sigh at the sight of an obvious Poser churn-out and complain... it isn't "discrimination", it's the reasoned assumption made from enduring a crushing metric ton of mostly poser-generated dreck that people have (yes) polluted the better art sites with. Let's face it folks - the only thing that keeps the various Poser renders from being completely homogenous nowadays is the sheer variety of pre-built packages out there, and even then it looks to be a losing fight. Sure - there are a few who can make some damned fine artowrk out of just Poser and a few other bits of tools here and there - but they are only a mere fraction... they are the exception, not the rule. And right now, the rule in most artists' eyes is this: Poser = Crap. Why? Well, it's simple: In most CG communities, a budding CG artist will tweak the unholy hell out of his or her work, spending days or weeks making sure that everything is as perfect as possible (composition, mesh, lighting, textures, shadows, etc) before even daring to display it. They will take overwhelming care to detail, and will openly explain what they did to make it, and then learn from solicited opinions. They do not plop a couple of canned elements into a scene, chuck on some clothing (maybe), call it by some lofty name, and then post it two hours after "New Scene" and do the digital equaivalent of "...look ma, I'm a frickin' ARTIST now! LOVE ME! LOVE ME111!!!!!11!!!" Seen from that angle, can you understand now why it is that so many in the CG art community have a distaste for Poser-only results? It's like some seven-year-old kid busting into an art competition with a glued-together macaroni + glitter + A4 lash-up, and demanding equal respect among the entries. Trust me - the grown-ups are not amused. Now if you took that macaroni and glitter and built it into a 10-foot tall sculpture of fine detail that actually told a story? Okay... that would get some attention and respect. But that ain't what's coming out of most Poser installs, folks. You want to impress folks now (esp. in the larger community)? Then get off your butts and stretch your minds. Do something that shows you've grown a bit. Do something that shows you're not just playing with a digital barbie-doll set. Here's a few bits and tips, in no particular order, to get the majority of you started for anything that you might someday want to point at and call art: * Get your own backgrounds - with your own camera. Or with Photoshop - your own work, in other words. * Never use a light set... EVER! Put your own lights in there. If you're going to be playing with IBL, then build your own photographs or light maps, instead of the handful that everybody else seems to rely on. Any basic lighting tutorial (in ANY medium) is well worth reading, but the vast majority of stuff in this joint looks as if no one has ever read one. * Never buy a pose set... why? Because THE VERY NAME OF THE PROGRAM -- "POSER" -- SHOULD CLUE YOU IN THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO! If you must, use only partial poses as a starting point. Take DAZ|Studio's PowerPose plugin (it't free and comes with the proggy) and give it a bang-around. If you're going to pose anything, at least do me one favor: Please think about what that character is doing, what it is 'feeling' at the moment, and may be about to do - and take every body part into consideration, going over each one. Especially the face and eyes, please. * as a corollary of the above - you have dials for moving nearly every frickin' body part [i]including the eyes[/i]... would you do us all a favor and put more than just a couple of them to use? * ...will you do us all a favor and give some thought to composition, and not just of the "she'll be in this canned pose floating four inches off the floor" kind? Try to figure out WTF kind of story you're trying to tell before you put it together. Use a pencil and a sketch pad and use stick figures to explain it on paper to yourself if you can't draw. * make your own skin texture sometime. See how it turns out. No, seriously... try it sometime. I realize that half the merchants in here can't even do that without buying/swiping someone else's 'resource kit', but this'll be your golden opportunity to shine, and to do something useful. * Okay, if that was too tough, then how about making your own clothing textures? Don't even bother using someone else's. While you're at it, make your own transparency maps for them, and turn what you've got into whole different clothing... the things are damned easy to make, y'know? ...someday, you might even go through life without ever having the humiliation of buying a 'texture pack' again. * make your own unique character from a base figure, without resorting to buying someone else's and then just tweaking a few dials. Please. For me? * get a free modelling program (Wings ferinstance, or Amapi), and build your own set, your own props. It doesn't require a degree in graphic arts to build a few primitives tweaked out to resemble whatever it is you're trying to make. Once you've mastered that, get some clothing together, and make a bit. This way you don't have to go out and buy a bit of clothing and the 48 zillion add-on texture kits for it just to try to stand out. * Make your human-looking figures... umm, human. Enlarge Vicki 3's head a bit, shrink the tits, and for the love of Pete make 'em sag if she's not 15 yrs old or siliconed-up. And giver her a few pounds, or at least a set of love handles. And by the way, why do the vast majority of female figures in this joint have lips that look like an inflamed horse's anus? Unless you live on Planet ChapStick, human lips don't look like that! * Tell a story with the thing, even if it's a vague one. Just sticking a wood-elf into a bunch of trees in a dramatic sword-swinging pose ain't going to mean jack sh!t. If the figure is staring dead-on at the viewer and it ain't a pornographic render, at least try and show the viewer WHY with the rest of the scene elements. Make the viewer's eyes do some work in a good way, not by forcing them to jack around randomly in a vain attempt to discover WTF is going on in the image... Finally, Poser can be a movie camera of sorts (esp. when arguing about pre-made sets and props, vs. home-built, etc), but keep this in mind: For a movie to not be a total piece of shite that is best ignored, it has to tell a story. If you're going to compare Poser to a movie camera, at least have the sense to know what a movie camera is used for. Okay, that should hold ye, at least for now. Just do me one favor, if nothing else. Please? Pretty Please? In the future, if you're going to jump at someone for dissing poser (whether they really are or not), at least take the time to see their side of the story, and try to understand WHY there's so much frustration out there. And if you're going to argue in favor of it, at least show some intelligence and do so with reasoning, not just lash blindly out at anyone and everyone who expresses exasperation at their art site being flooded with purile insta-rendered results. Thx muchly in advance, /P