This was just release for DAZ Studio:

www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/

Is there something similar available for Poser export? I really want this ability, but I'd much rather export from Poser, since I rarely use DS.

Curious Labs dabbled with the idea roughly eight years ago, using Viewpoint VET technology and Adobe Atmosphere, but it never really caught on.

Thanks, Little Dragon.

The nice thing about the item linked above is that it doesn't require a special plugin in the user's browser, as it's Flash-based.

I guess I could buy this one - the price is reasonable - but I don't want the hassle of working with DS. I'm dabbling into enough apps as it is.

Well technically, Flash requires a plugin as well, though most people probably do have it installed. I'm guessing that the The Java option is closer to plugin free though users would have to have Javascript enabled. some folks block Javascript and/or Flash these days. 

For interaction as opposed to just an animation, exporting vrml from Poser. should give the same viewing functionality that this application seems to offer but of course anyone who wants to view the model would have to have a vrml plugin installed. Also, vrml seems to produce some pretty large files, which the compression this thing touts might alleviate. I'd be interested to know how big a file with a clothed V4 would be.

Hopefully it would be a matter of just loading your model in DS, invoking the plugin and hitting export, so maybe not too much dabbling.

Well, Flash is the plugin, but very few people need to install it, as it is probably at about 98% right now. Of course, I know someone who had Adobe Reader not installed, so there are always those. But let's face it - anyone with a computer no more than, say a half-dozen years old, is likely to have Flash unless they're deliberately avoiding interactive stuff. Well, you're not going to show them anything no matter what, anyway, so no use worrying about them on that score.

I think you're right that the best bet would probably be just to load the model in DS. Plus there's a script to import Poser scenes.

Maybe I'll wishlist for now.... would be kinda nice to get at the introductory price, but I don't need it right away. Kinda would like it for when I redo my web business site - show some examples of what I can offer. Ah well.

I don't understand how it is legal to use this thing. Legal to own, OK, but not legal to use with bought content.

If I understand correctly, it exports 3D models, derivative to be sure, and no longer pose-able, but still derivative works of the mesh and the texture. I thought such use is illegal for Daz figures and props. Only images made with the 3D content are free to distribute.

Encryption is no protection either. If the content can be recovered by the player, then it has been distributed and is no longer personal use. Otherwise, one could get away with just encrypting V4, post it to a web site, and then let everyone "accidentally" learn the key to decode it.

Quote - I don't understand how it is legal to use this thing. Legal to own, OK, but not legal to use with bought content.

If I understand correctly, it exports 3D models, derivative to be sure, and no longer pose-able, but still derivative works of the mesh and the texture. I thought such use is illegal for Daz figures and props. Only images made with the 3D content are free to distribute.

Encryption is no protection either. If the content can be recovered by the player, then it has been distributed and is no longer personal use. Otherwise, one could get away with just encrypting V4, post it to a web site, and then let everyone "accidentally" learn the key to decode it.

Interesting.

I wonder if it's the thing PhilC used lately on his page where you could semi-rotate his latest freebie. I suppose it is. But IF the models can be in any way extracted from this.. then no, it's probably not legal to use...

BB, it's perhaps not surprising that this issue was discussed on the DAZ forums when the product was first announced as in development. It was developed with full support of figure developers like DAZ, precisely on the level of rights. What you are seeing is not "really" Victoria 4 etc - it's a highly compressed version of the model that apparently wouldn't be usable for much apart from the exported file.

Curious. I'm pretty sure I've seen people told it is ilegal to:

1) Reproduce any geometry derived mathematically from the original geometry. For example, you can't make gloves using V4 hand vertices. You have to fit new geometry by hand. (Forgive the pun.) It is not a defense to show that the original geometry cannot be recovered from this derived geometry. It is a violation of the EULA to generate a mesh from the V4 mesh in any way using software, and distribute the derivative mesh. This is only allowed for personal use.

2) Reproduce any textures derived from the original textures, even if greatly reduced in resolution, altered in tone, etc.

Maybe the people who had these discussions simply tolerate inconsistency and contradiction. I can't stand it. And hearing that the DAZ forum members concluded it was OK doesn't convince me. These are the same people who argue that I do not supply any information, and also argue that gamma correction is an adjustment you make to calibrate your monitor, not an adjustment you make to produce images targeted for your monitor. In other words, anything beyond "ooh pretty"  or "ooh easy" seems to go over the heads of some people at DAZ forums. Not everybody, for sure, but there are quite a few with big mouths and small ability to parse complex concepts.

I'm not talking about DAZ forum members.

Quote - this issue was discussed on the DAZ forums

Quote - I'm not talking about DAZ forum members.

You mean it was people who were NOT forum members talking in the forum? I'm confused. How is that possible?

I was about to write "or do you mean ..."  and then "or possibly you mean", but I've done that too much today. Could you just tell me what you mean?

What I mean is that as I recall it was someone from DAZ directly who helped clarify things. Since they're distributing it themselves, they're obviously satisfied with it. Personally, I don't know the ins and outs of the rights sufficiently in a case like this to guess whether they're being "soft" or what.

Attached Link: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=107818

I found and read the thread before you posted it, nr. I've been noodling on its implications.

The official posting from DAZ in the thread was naive. The only comfort given was that DAZ management was assured by the developer that the model and textures could not be recovered by anybody. The developer did this by claiming that the model is much reduced and encrypted using a proprietary format.

This is a classic defense made by a developer who has little experience in secure software. It is called "security through obscurity", and offers no real protection. Experienced  security developers know the proper technique to ensure protection is this:

• You do not attempt to hide your raw data format - you publish the format specification.
• You identify the exact mechanism used to encrypt the raw data format, for example Triple DES.
• You set up a reward system for somebody to crack your protection, then run a public beta program during which you invite every thief in the world to win the reward by cracking it.

It should be obvious that the exact same problem exists with secure digitial media files - movies and music. Microsoft and the RIAA and Hollywood have attempted repeatedly to come up with a way that such things can be viewed by an end user without that user being able to extract a copy of the un-encrypted media file. All have failed. All. I don't recall the details, but I remember something about a new DVD encryption scheme was broken in half an hour after it was released.

Now obviously the likelihood of recovery is decreased by the fact that these meshes are reduced resolution, and, according to one of the developers, that the textures are "munged" (very technical term - I like it). Nevertheless, munged or not, the developer and the DAZ official completely ignored what the other posters pointed out. Regardless of the security measures taken, it is a violation of most every EULA (including DAZ's) to produce a derivative mesh or texture and re-distribute it. I cannot, for example, make a RR version of M4 and include him in a game I wrote, even if I take extra steps to encrypt the content and to not actually include M4 in the content, but only a reduced polygon derivative of him. This is explicit. It is also explicit in the the EULA's of vendors such as RebelMommy and other famous texture artists at RDNA. Even if the only part I could extract is the face texture, and even if it only looks sort of like the original, if it was constructed from the original and is delivered as a flattened UV map, it is a violation of the EULA.

I see that quite a few forum posters in that thread understood this. The DAZ official and the program author did not.

As to whether the data is, in fact, secure or not, I assure you it is decidedly not secure. If it hasn't been broken, it is not because of the difficulty, but rather because nobody is interested. The format is simply not popular enough to attract the attention of hackers, or more likely because the most popular 3D content is already illegally available as torrent files with no need to decrypt them.

But if a competent software engineer wanted to extract the content, this is totally easy. The player is a Java program - no doubt it was built with one of several popular open-source encryption libraries. It would be less than a day's work to disassemble the code, and match up the encryption library. Once you know the library, you know where the secret keys are passed in. Once you know that, you can find the secret key embedded in the program, and voila - all content is plainly visible.

Another technique is this: if the viewer uses OpenGL, then all the data is being passed in the clear to OpenGL. Duh. So if I insert my own OpenGL wrapper I will be handed all the unencrypted data by the viewer itself. This is a technique often used to bypass movie protection, which is why Vista now refuses to play a movie in HD unless all the layers from viewer to screen, including hardware, claim to implement security. Of course, every protected DVD ever made has been cracked but Microsoft still pretends it isn't possible.

I used to do this sort of thing for games more than 20 years ago. In the 80's game companies were shipping "key disks" that prevented the software from working unless you had one of these manufactured disks with a physical error in it that could not be reproduced with home equipment. The games would knowingly ask for data from certain intentionally bad sectors and if they didn't get the specific errors they wanted, they would not play. It was very annoying to have to find the correct floppy disk, and wait the 30 seconds while the game verified that it failed the right way. Worse, what if you lost your key disk or couldn't find it?

So I'd load the game into a debugger, find the spot where it called the disk, and just bypass it. Then the games got smarter and started self-examination to see if they were being run in a debugger. If so, it would scramble itself. That slowed me down for about 2 hours until I got hold of a 100% software emulation of the CPU. Once I was running the program in an emulator and not real hardware, I was able to see everything and do anything to it. Then still later these games started more self-examination so that on startup they would checksum themselves to see if they'd been tampered with, and the game would move its protection pieces around so they could not be found reliably. Another joke here, as I simply tampered with them inside the device driver of the disk drive. I knew where the call to the disk came from using the return address on the stack, and then I'd patch the code on the fly that was going to check to see what came back from the disk.

Other games tried a passphrase challenge. It would give you a page and a word number and you had to find the word in the printed manual it was looking for. I used similar techniques to bypass the security.

I'm not trying to impress you that I'm a famous hacker. I'm not and never was. I was a duffer, a beginner, a total noob hacker, and I haven't done anything like that in 20 years. But other people do it every day, and they are very good at it. There is no such thing as secure digital media, period. If a player can play it, then the player is your key to how to extract the content. End of story. Anything else is totally naive.

I suspect that DAZ have come to the conclusion that as the "real thing" (i.e. paid for copies) are being illegally redistributed anyway, that the effort involved in obtaining a poor reflection of the original (and possibly reworking it) doesn't represent a significant risk to them.

Other vendors may or (more likely) may not take the same view.

Dassault already has a free app that will grab geometry from OpenGL or DirectX and I would agree that this app's protection can be cracked as well. Still, the auto companies, retailers and Lord knows who else either have or will be putting 3D on the web. If the 3D data IS your product, the equation is presumably somewhat different, but the urge to do so will probably seem pretty attractive to some. As LD said, Curious Labs dabbled with similar technology, and even before that Poser's VRML/H-Anim export AFAIK was a format partly, perhaps primarily targeted at the web, so the issue isn't entirely new to this market.

If I were a content producer, I'd have to weigh the marketing advantage vs. the risks. What's the quality/functionality of the data that can be retrieved. I assume that someone will extract it if only to prove that they can and worst case, spread it all over teh interwebs. How many Model X sales would I lose to a low polygon, no morph (and non morph compatible) model with tiny textures, even if someone went to the trouble to rig it. Personally, I probably would not lose any sleep over it. In an environment where those inclined to larceny can get Gucci for free, worrying about people stealing vastly inferior knockoffs doesn't make sense to me. It's not like movies or music where people are getting pristine full spectrum digital copies. If your product offers little more than what this grabber can extract, then you should worry.

Now I understand the argument that Daz is actually undermining ELUAs with this and maybe they can sue themselves under the DMCA for facilitating infringement or perhaps their vendors could, but IANAL. I will say that if they think it's OK then they should start using it themselves and see how their vendors feel about having their products marketed using it.