In my opinion and as Drafter, said one of the huge let downs have been the characters that is supplied with Poser and if I were Smith micro I think I would change business strategy a little. Stop making so many different releases of Poser, like a Pro version etc. Make one version and sell it cheaper than it is now. Make sure that it releases with up to date characters, stop adding all those old Poser characters, but rather a few top characters/animals etc. They need to fix the face room again, the idea behind it was very cool. Add cameras that you can control in the viewpoint and same with lights (know you can do it already, but its not working very smooth i think). Make it possible to customize viewport navigation, so you can use the same controls as in other software for navigating the viewport, like 3ds max, maya etc. Improve the cloth rooms (wont go into details, but basically more options.) Update the material library with more Superfly shaders. Make the character pivot point easier to work with, so you faster can pose and move stuff around the viewport. Particle effect system is needed as well. Obviously they dont have to do all the stuff at once, but they should aim towards it.

Assuming they reduced the cost of Poser, what they should do instead, is selling high quality characters and animals that works well in Poser and are designed to work with the face room and so forth. I don't think its extremely bad that Poser is not on the front with all the newest features etc. Because as new features or more features are added it also requires a lot more from the users, which again might scare some people away that are using Poser because its fairly easy to use compared to other applications.

And as the OP mentioned about ManuelbastionIlab for blender, it looks cool, but at least from what I have seen its not mind blowing and looking at the workspace for setting it up, I doubt its anywhere as easy as in Poser. And not to have a bash at Blender as I really like the idea behind it being free. But after trying it and having to restart it 10-15 times in 20 minutes due to the user interface being the most weird user interface I have ever tried in a program. Im fairly sure that using Manuelbas.Ilab is not a walk in the park, if you dont already know blender :D (But have to say that I havent tried it so, Its just a guess and I might very well be wrong.)

Part of the problem with you guys is that you're looking at Poser from only one perspective. For you, If Poser doesn't have killer figures for you to use and render with, you see a failing product.. And yes, I will agree that a lot of people have joined you in that view. But as I said, it' only one view., and thankfully, not mine. Figures have never been the reason I buy Poser. Frankly, neither has rendering. Poser has lot's of features, that I'm still discovering. And DAZ has to literally give away the one thing that you all claim is so much better than Poser. You can also bet that if Poser does go under, Studio will stop being free the next day. People have been predicting Poser's demise now for the last 9 years, and yet it's still here. Look, if you guys want to see doom and gloom in the future, I won't try to stop you, but could you take it somewhere else? Because you're harshing my buzz.

People have been predicting the demise of Poser since at least Dec 2004 that I am personally aware of. Poser has outlasted multiple software houses and keeps on trucking. Poser isn't what drives the Profit/Loss statements at Smith Micro. The entire graphics division covers about 10% of the company's revenue. It's a "hobby" for them.

Folks don't seem to grasp is that DS & Poser have different business models. Daz puts all of their new tech into the characters - Poser puts the tech in the program.

This means that as a Poser user, we can use the figure we like; we can quickly & easily update a legacy figure. That isn't an option on the other platform. Think the facial bones in the G3 figures are neat? In Poser, one can easily add an equivalent (control surfaces) to any figure that doesn't have them. I've added them to my g1 & g2 figures, something that one can't do on the other platform. The 1st weight mapped figure that worked in Cararra wasn't a Daz figure, it was a SM figure (Alyson 2).

Poser figures are designed to show off the new technology in the Poser application; they aren't designed to do pin-up art (Although they certainly can do that). That is why we see the Poser figures in things like TV production, airline safety cards, and scanners at the local grocery store.

The hobbyist vendors love the g figures, because DS users buy the same products over and over. If they want the alleged greatest tech in the latest figure, they have to. It is a lot less work for vendors and most of the costs are already sunk. Some content for g3 was made originally for P6 Jesse & Miki 1020 - I know, because I have those original products.

As a Poser user, nearly everything can be grist for the mill. Wanna move clothing content from 1 figure to another - you have multiple ways of doing it. Wanna move hair from 1 figure to another? Add-ons are available. Found the perfect skin texture, but it was made for another figure? You can move it.

I could drop $18 - 25 bucks on each outfit for a new figure, or I can simply spend a few minutes of my time - and spend that money elsewhere - in my case, on content I don't already own for a new figure - which tends to be shoes. Shoes are the one thing that still has a fairly complex conversion process. Still can be done, but isn't at the 1 - 3 click steps everything else is.

Poser's future is bright - we're just hanging out waiting on Project E to arrive.

drafter69 posted at 6:12AM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317464

Just my opinion but if Smith Micro doesn't wake up soon and realize that they are falling father and father behind of the competition they will be out of business. Do not attack me for telling what I see as the truth. The competition is offering their programs for free. Then they are offering some really great characters. What is S.M. offering? Two of the dorkiest characters ever created. They seem to think that people will use V4 and M4 forever.

This is one singularly ill-informed comment. You want SM to give Poser away for free? How will giving away the one thing that makes them money and keeps them in business, keep them from going out of business? No, seriously, I want to hear this brilliant well thought out plan.

//Poser figures are designed to show off the new technology in the Poser application; they aren't designed to do pin-up art (Although they certainly can do that). That is why we see the Poser figures in things like TV production, airline safety cards, and scanners at the local grocery store.//

I agree with you to some point, but nothing prevent them from supplying high quality characters with Poser for each release, and it would make sense since a huge amount of their users are hobbyist, last release they did add 2 characters, which had some new features and so on. But it makes little sense to show off new features on characters that are bugged and not even close to the same quality of figures already on the market. If I remember right one of the new features were the facial controls, but this as far as I know, have not been adopted or used in any other character, so these features seems to be stuck in Paul and Pauline, which is sad. Because had these characters been good quality people would have used them. So its good to add all these things within the program but if they ain't used, its of little use and these features are aimed towards the hobbyist and not those using Poser for fliers, tv adds etc. In my country whenever a Poser character turns up on TV its one of the very old one and its clear that these people are not in need of these features.

Your last comment about waiting for Project E, i think is shared by a lot of Poser users, but to me this would be a most welcome character for Poser, but it shouldn't or didn't have to be necessary, had Poser released with decent characters. Project E in my opinion should be something that people should look at as a very nice addition to a library already filled with good quality figures released with Poser.

3D-Mobster posted at 7:49AM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317499

//Poser figures are designed to show off the new technology in the Poser application; they aren't designed to do pin-up art (Although they certainly can do that). That is why we see the Poser figures in things like TV production, airline safety cards, and scanners at the local grocery store.//

I agree with you to some point, but nothing prevent them from supplying high quality characters with Poser for each release, and it would make sense since a huge amount of their users are hobbyist, last release they did add 2 characters, which had some new features and so on. But it makes little sense to show off new features on characters that are bugged and not even close to the same quality of figures already on the market. If I remember right one of the new features were the facial controls, but this as far as I know, have not been adopted or used in any other character, so these features seems to be stuck in Paul and Pauline, which is sad. Because had these characters been good quality people would have used them. So its good to add all these things within the program but if they ain't used, its of little use and these features are aimed towards the hobbyist and not those using Poser for fliers, tv adds etc. In my country whenever a Poser character turns up on TV its one of the very old one and its clear that these people are not in need of these features.

Your last comment about waiting for Project E, i think is shared by a lot of Poser users, but to me this would be a most welcome character for Poser, but it shouldn't or didn't have to be necessary, had Poser released with decent characters. Project E in my opinion should be something that people should look at as a very nice addition to a library already filled with good quality figures released with Poser.

With all due respect, and even conceding some of your observations, let's not forget a couple of points. Poser was never meant to be a character driven program. It just kind of evolved that way. DAZ, in fact, was a spin-off of the company that first supplied Poser with it's original figures. And trust me, I have NOT been shy about criticisizing SM's lack of response to the growing threat of Studio. But in Poser's defense, Poser is just a small part of the SM machine. To be frank, I'm honestly starting to believe that SM is holding Poser back.

This is one singularly ill-informed comment. You want SM to give Poser away for free? How will giving away the one thing that makes them money and keeps them in business, keep them from going out of business? No, seriously, I want to hear this brilliant well thought out plan.

No one is saying give the program away for free but if Smith Micro thinks that all they have to do is create a program and then "others" will create assets that compare with other companies they are kidding themselves. My guess is that 99% of both Daz Studio and Poser users are hobbyists. Daz is adapting to the hobbyist while poser seems to think that they have no reason to adapt to the current user. I can only speak for myself but I jumped on the Daz bandwagon because of the content. If S.M. wants to live with M4 and V4 forever that's up to them but that thinking is want cost them a customer.. me!

//With all due respect, and even conceding some of your observations, let's not forget a couple of points. Poser was never meant to be a character driven program. It just kind of evolved that way. DAZ, in fact, was a spin-off of the company that first supplied Poser with it's original figures. And trust me, I have NOT been shy about criticisizing SM's lack of response to the growing threat of Studio. But in Poser's defense, Poser is just a small part of the SM machine. To be frank, I'm honestly starting to believe that SM is holding Poser back.//

But does it matter what it used to be or who copied who? Thats a lot of years ago now, Poser today is character driven as I see it and is its strongest feature. Everything evolve around the ability to use characters and figures. Whether they are humans or varies objects. The ability to import and work with these in order to create art is crucial for Poser I think. If Poser were only able to work with primitives supplied with Poser, there would be no use for it. I don't want to sound like im criticizing Poser as these discussion often gets misunderstood. I see nothing wrong in this, it might help SM to see what users want and don't want. And personally I don't see a problem between the varies program, I use those that will get the job done, doesn't matter if that envolve both Daz and Poser etc. What annoys me is that they cant find common ground so things made in one program would work equally well in the other.

Well, enjoy Poser as you seem determined to defend it to the end. Personally I think Smith Micro will drop it or sell it off. That's my opinion.

"What annoys me is that they cant find common ground so things made in one program would work equally well in the other." Why would two competitors want to work together? Most businesses do not want to play nice with other businesses.

drafter69 posted at 12:05PM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317516

Well, enjoy Poser as you seem determined to defend it to the end. Personally I think Smith Micro will drop it or sell it off. That's my opinion.

I will and certainly do. I'm curious, just what do you do with Poser? And I don't think SM will just stop developing Poser. I f any thing I agree with you that they're more likely to sell it. Despite the gloom and doom scenario you paint for it, Poser is actually doing pretty well for SM. It's other stuff they do that's actually dragging them down.

3D-Mobster posted at 12:11PM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317514

I see nothing wrong in this, it might help SM to see what users want and don't want. And personally I don't see a problem between the varies program, I use those that will get the job done, doesn't matter if that envolve both Daz and Poser etc. What annoys me is that they cant find common ground so things made in one program would work equally well in the other.

You seriously think that tying Poser to Studio's development would be a good thing? Studio is in constant beta. Poser would have to wait and see what they came up with next, and because of obligations they already have in place, they can't just get rid of some stuff. As I've said before, I'm not irrevocably tied to any one figure. I can and do find PLENTY of content for Poser to create the kind of renders I want to do. And if I can't find it, I could quite possibly model it for myself. So I have no problems.

You can also bet that if Poser does go under, Studio will stop being free the next day"

Sir Please explain from logical business economic perspective, why you keep repeating this gratuitous claim. (oh.. and sorry but " Daz is an evil greedy company", is not a valid explaination)

Will blender suddenly cost money because poser disappeared? what about the free Unity or unreal engine??. please make the connection for us here, from a rational business perspective not a wishful emotional one

The great majority of Poser&Daz user are still framers So if SM's focus is on the software why implement bullet & soft bodyphysics such dynamics only really look good in animated movies.

Poser needs native figures that new users and merchants will embrace this did NOT happen widely for Sydney,simon ,alison,ryan rex roxy ,paul pauline et al.

People can croon all they want about how easy it is to use the legacy figures etc. But poser needs to grow its user base and that wont happen with native figures that are not embraced by the content producers and by NEW incoming users.

My website

YouTube Channel

wolf359 posted at 1:19PM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317533

You can also bet that if Poser does go under, Studio will stop being free the next day"

Sir Please explain from logical business economic perspective, why you keep repeating this gratuitous claim. (oh.. and sorry but " Daz is an evil greedy company", is not a valid explaination)

Never said it was. I'd like to see how you think I said or thought that.

Will blender suddenly cost money because poser disappeared? what about the free Unity or unreal engine??. please make the connection for us here, from a rational business perspective not a wishful emotional one

I can't draw a connection that doesn't exist, Wolf. Blender and Poser aren't even remotely connected together.

Poser and Studio though share a market. If Poser disappeared tomorrow, what would be the reason to give Studio away fro free? Right now, that decision is based on the inducement to lure new users and old users away from Poser and to using Studio. What led me to this conclusion? History, dude. Studio wasn't always free, you remember. Used to cost roughly the same as Poser. The free part of it was only supposed to last a short while. I didn't say this, DAZ did. DAZ decided to continue that business model when Studio's downloads began to increase and more new users came aboard. The reason I believe that Studio would no longer be free if Poser disappeared is because there's no reason to make it free. It would make no sense economically to keep it as a free program. It doesn't have to return to it's old price point, but there's no reason to keep it free either.

The great majority of Poser&Daz user are still framers So if SM's focus is on the software why implement bullet & soft bodyphysics such dynamics only really look good in animated movies.

On the other hand, DAZ is also introducing those same features into Studio and their main focus is content. So I'm not really seeing your point.

Interesting comments but since Smith Micro has never given me the feeling that they give a crap about what people are saying so 'time will tell"

Smith Micro's Poser integrated features from Blender's Cycle engine. Has anyone looked at the new upcoming Evee engine? I hope (once Blender has all the bugs out of it) that SM consider's adding it as a feature. For animators it would be a huge addition as it does a faster realtime render than ray tracing previews. It is amazingly fast. Primarily it looks to be used for gaming rendering but it can and will most likely be used for full renders, as well as super fast preview renders! Who hasn't been made crazy by a preview render that took too long in either program?

The dust settled, thinking "what a fine home, at least for now" not realizing that doom would soon be coming in the form of a vacuum cleaner.

Sadly both software developers don't really talk very much about upcoming builds or features. Here's a good question. Does anyone like hearing or reading roadmap news about future builds and development? I do, and read things like Firefox's upcoming builds. BTW, Nov 14, Firefox Quantum is coming so be aware some Firefox features may change drastically (speed yes, extensions and addons... well... sad some may stop working).

The dust settled, thinking "what a fine home, at least for now" not realizing that doom would soon be coming in the form of a vacuum cleaner.

EClark1894

Studio is in constant beta.

It's not constantly in beta any more than any other program in the process of being developed. There are stable releases, and they are soon followed by beta releases. That is something you can do when you are giving the program away, and technically SM do the same thing as we are always waiting on SRs to fix things. If you don't like using beta software, limit yourself to the most recent stable release. Just don't disingenuously make it sound like the program is in some kind of perpetually unusable state.

wolf359 posted at 8:14PM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317533

The great majority of Poser&Daz user are still framers So if SM's focus is on the software why implement bullet & soft bodyphysics such dynamics only really look good in animated movies.

Poser needs native figures that new users and merchants will embrace this did NOT happen widely for Sydney,simon ,alison,ryan rex roxy ,paul pauline et al.

People can croon all they want about how easy it is to use the legacy figures etc. But poser needs to grow its user base and that wont happen with native figures that are not embraced by the content producers and by NEW incoming users.

Gee, I wonder why most users are still framers... Outdated viewport, slow CPU based rendering, native cloth and hair simulations that take way too long to learn and set up properly. If Poser had a viewport like blender's Eevee I guarantee more people would start animating. But I could not disagree more with the importance of dynamics to still framing. When a person is seated, the buttocks deform differently according to surface... Breasts take a different shape when a woman is standing, leaning or laying down... Hair should fall naturally over the body and clothing... These aren't things that should have to be "fixed" for each and every frame with a morph, magnets, or the morph brush. Without actually modernizing the way figures work, without something like elastic implicit skinning to fix joint creasing and the intersections that occur in the most basic of poses, what exactly can new figures really bring to the table? I don't get the figure obsession. I mean sure, some are better than others, but I just don't imagine there will ever be a single figure that suits everyone's needs equally. What is now considered the best figure for Poser, and why is it not good enough? The problem with the legacy figures is that they should have been updated with each release in which they were part of the provided content, or left as an optional download with clear warnings regarding use. The community has made numerous improvements to a number of the official figures, it's a shame that none of those improvements ever make it back into the supplied content. Maybe if the base figures for every release were properly weight mapped, had soft bodies set up, didn't use Poser4 materials etc. their inclusion in the official content would actually be a selling point.

EClark1894 posted at 3:02AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317527

3D-Mobster posted at 12:11PM Tue, 07 November 2017 - #4317514

I see nothing wrong in this, it might help SM to see what users want and don't want. And personally I don't see a problem between the varies program, I use those that will get the job done, doesn't matter if that envolve both Daz and Poser etc. What annoys me is that they cant find common ground so things made in one program would work equally well in the other.

You seriously think that tying Poser to Studio's development would be a good thing? Studio is in constant beta. Poser would have to wait and see what they came up with next, and because of obligations they already have in place, they can't just get rid of some stuff. As I've said before, I'm not irrevocably tied to any one figure. I can and do find PLENTY of content for Poser to create the kind of renders I want to do. And if I can't find it, I could quite possibly model it for myself. So I have no problems.

I don't think Poser should follow in the heels of Daz studio just as I don't think Daz should follow Poser. But Daz must have had great success in selling their models to Poser users as well as Daz users. Since they are not making any money selling Daz studio in it self. Obviously with the development of the new Genesis characters, Im not pointing fingers as Daz, as they should develop their software to be able to work with the type of characters that they believe are the best regardless of Smith Micro, anything else would be stupid. So maybe "find common ground" is a bad word and can see why it gets misunderstood, But what I mean is that Smith micro should have reacted with an update that would allow Poser to import these new genesis characters with ease, since it obviously was demanded by a lot of poser users after the disappointment of Paul and Pauline. And if Smith Micro are not interested in releasing decent characters, at least they should make it so it can use Daz ones. But I personally think they should do both, make their own characters and make support for Daz ones and hopefully Daz would make support for Posers as well, should it be needed or demanded by their users. That is what i meant with finding common grounds.

moogal posted at 1:54AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317562

If Poser had a viewport like blender's Eevee I guarantee more people would start animating.

Not necessarily. A real time renderer would be great in Poser, but one factor I think you might be missing there is poly count. How well does Eevee handle 1million+ poly count scenes? Poser content artists tend to often ignore this aspect of content creation, but there's a ton of content out there that has tens of thousands of polys, sometimes hundreds of thousands, and that sort of content doesn't function too well in a real time engine. In fact it can bring your system to its knees if you don't have a high end machine. I've seen hair models with upwards of 300K polys. Once you dress a single figure in Poser, with hair, shoes, clothes, accessories, you could quite easily be approaching the 500K - 1million poly count, and that's without adding in additional clothed figures, buildings and other props. The reason real time rendering works so well in game engines is because most game engines use very low poly models. Poser generally does not. You also don't see weight mapped joints in game engines because that again draws on processor resources that are needed for the rendering engine to do its job.

Not saying it's impossible, or shouldn't be a requested feature, but content artists would have to start learning how to build models more efficiently, and users would have to start learning how to decimate their models - once the decimation tools that currently exist get refined.

moogal posted at 10:24AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317550

EClark1894

Studio is in constant beta.

It's not constantly in beta any more than any other program in the process of being developed. There are stable releases, and they are soon followed by beta releases. That is something you can do when you are giving the program away, and technically SM do the same thing as we are always waiting on SRs to fix things. If you don't like using beta software, limit yourself to the most recent stable release. Just don't disingenuously make it sound like the program is in some kind of perpetually unusable state.

Gee, wonder where I might have gotten that idea? Oh, I know... And I never said Studio was in a perpetually unusable state. Those are your words. You use 'em, then take all the credit for them.

From the DAZ Studio Software forum:

General Release, Public Build, BETA... What is the difference?

General Release and Public Build are release channels, while BETA is a phase of development.

Daz Studio is distributed through five separate channels:

**•General Release **- This channel is where the production ready build is distributed, and is open to the general public.

**•Publishing Build **- This channel is where [optional] builds that are not considered ready for General Release, but are considered stable enough to introduce into a production environment by early adopters, are provided to our Published Artists—determined by the Publishing department. This channel typically provides a build that is in the BETA or Release Candidate (RC) phase of development.

**•Public Build **- This channel is where the builds that are not considered stable yet are provided for testing by the general public. This channel typically provides a build that is in the BETA phase of development, but technically can provide a build in the ALPHA phase.

**•Private Build **- This channel is similar to the Public Build channel, except it is limited to a select group of individuals that serve as the "front line" or the "canary in a coal mine" for a time before the build is promoted to a less restricted channel. This channel is more likely to see an ALPHA build than the Public Build channel is.

**•Dev Build **- This channel provides "bleeding edge" ALPHA builds; sometimes referred to as the "nightly build"; although the builds are not limited to one per night or to strictly occurring at night.

As far as I can see there's not much difference between each of these stages except for how it's distributed. That's not me saying it, it's THEM.

And for the record, I don't often update Poser's SRs. If my program's working fine for me, I'm good with it.

Poser and Studio though share a market. If Poser disappeared tomorrow, what would be the reason to give Studio away fro free?

The same reason that exists now ..a low cost of entry for CONTENT CREATORS and new users to have a place to sell and buy and use daz CONTENT straight away.

Right now, that decision is based on the inducement to lure new users and old users away from Poser and to using Studio. What led me to this conclusion? History, dude. Studio wasn't always free, you remember. Used to cost roughly the same as Poser. The free part of it was only supposed to last a short while. I didn't say this, DAZ did..

You are revising history or possibly projecting your own fantasies to supplant the actual facts.

Daz promised there will away be a free "base version" of studio there has always been a free version, even during that period when the so called "pro"version was over $300 USD near the end of Dan farr's tenure.

The new parent company took over and realized that a constant income stream can be had from new daily & weekly figure content in thier store.

They quicky dropped the price of DS "pro" to zero and offered a full refund/or store credit to people who paid for the "Pro "version within a certain grace period

The reason I believe that Studio would no longer be free if Poser disappeared is because there's no reason to make it free.

This is yet more wishful thinking that is based on your personal desire to believe that the QUALITY of the native figures are not a factor at all only the Free price of the program makes Daz studio an attractive option

This also assumes that Poser is Daz's only true paid competition this is a false assumption as Iclone Pro is a more viable competior for DAZ inc. as it improves its native figures and supports genesis1,2, 3,8 natively for animation an export to games& other pro applications for rendering. SEE VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQIxCVcHyM

It would make no sense economically to keep it as a free program.

You say this because your understanding of economic business models is sadly quite limited.

Daz is using a classic, old school "loss leader" business model. You lead with a money losing asset by offering it free .

Free DAZ studio. Free Smart phone hand set Free bowl of peanuts at the bar

You recoup your initial loss with Paid figure content , morphs & props(Daz)

paid monthly Data Charges and other useless add ons like"live" TV(phones)

Ridiculously over priced& watered down drinks to quench the thirst caused by those dry starchy "free"peanuts (the Bar).

My website

YouTube Channel

EClark1894 posted at 11:18AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317582

As far as I can see there's not much difference between each of these stages except for how it's distributed. That's not me saying it, it's THEM.

If you'd ever been a tester for any major software - free or paid - then you'd understand the distinct differences between each of those stages. You'd also understand that Poser and every other piece of software out there goes through nearly the exact same process, with every major release and every service update. The only real difference I can see between Poser and DS in this process is that DS has a public beta period (Which I only discovered recently during the release of 4.10) while Poser does not. How about let's not create baseless arguments where there doesn't need to be one.

AmbientShade posted at 1:02PM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317589

EClark1894 posted at 11:18AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317582

As far as I can see there's not much difference between each of these stages except for how it's distributed. That's not me saying it, it's THEM.

If you'd ever been a tester for any major software - free or paid - then you'd understand the distinct differences between each of those stages. You'd also understand that Poser and every other piece of software out there goes through nearly the exact same process, with every major release and every service update. The only real difference I can see between Poser and DS in this process is that DS has a public beta period (Which I only discovered recently during the release of 4.10) while Poser does not. How about let's not create baseless arguments where there doesn't need to be one.

You know, it's interesting. I've actually been tougher on SM and Poser in this thread, and no one says a word in disagreement. In fact most they're saying worse things. The worst thing I've said about Studio is that it's in "constant beta". And I'm attacked and rebuked as not knowing what I'm talking about , my "wishful thinking", and "revising history" oh and creating "baseless arguments" that is based on stuff I've read and quoted from people who should know, the people at DAZ.

I especially like the part where Wolf 359 just for some reason assumed that I have a problem with Genesis's Quality. I've never said one bad thing about Genesis EVER. I've never even said anything bad about Studio But I guess that's the nature of debates on the internet, don't argue the facts, just insult your opponent. That's okay. I'm used to it. Happened in the thread where I disagreed about making Dr. Who a woman. Got called a misogynist in that one. Talk about a "baseless argument". No one disagreed in that thread either. Funny isn't it?

By the way, the person who apparently thinks I'm "revising history", I never asked for or bought Daz 4.xx Pro, but they manually added it to my product library.

But this was in the product copy.

"Simply put, this makes up the most powerful collection of 3D software available for FREE for a limited time." "Limited time"? Now where have I heard that before? Well, what do I know? I'm just a liar who's making stuff up and revising history, and oh yes, my " understanding of economic business models is sadly quite limited".

Where Poser is going? I never knew it had feet to walk? LOL.

EClark1894 posted at 9:27PM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317597

The worst thing I've said about Studio is that it's in "constant beta". And I'm attacked and rebuked as not knowing what I'm talking about.

I wasn't attacking you, nor did I specifically state that you didn't know what you're talking about. The "constant beta" myth has been batted around for a number of years now, mostly by the anti-daz crowd, and it perpetuates arguments that lead to getting threads locked and deleted, and prevents any of us from having a mature, open discussion about the state of Poser and it's issues without it breaking down to insults and personal attacks. The 'constant beta' argument is simply not true. No more so than it is true of any other software out there, including Poser. So it would be nice to see it stop being stated as though it were truth.

AmbientShade posted at 8:23PM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317628

EClark1894 posted at 9:27PM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317597

The worst thing I've said about Studio is that it's in "constant beta". And I'm attacked and rebuked as not knowing what I'm talking about.

I wasn't attacking you, nor did I specifically state that you didn't know what you're talking about. The "constant beta" myth has been batted around for a number of years now, mostly by the anti-daz crowd, and it perpetuates arguments that lead to getting threads locked and deleted, and prevents any of us from having a mature, open discussion about the state of Poser and it's issues without it breaking down to insults and personal attacks. The 'constant beta' argument is simply not true. No more so than it is true of any other software out there, including Poser. So it would be nice to see it stop being stated as though it were truth.

By all means, let us know when it gets to feature freeze. Anytime something doesn't work, the 1st response is that the feature is in beta.

Or gets proper documentation - FInd someone to help you isn't exactly the definition of proper documentation.

"By all means, let us know when it gets to feature freeze. Anytime something doesn't work, the 1st response is that the feature is in beta."

My God, then Poser must be in alpha stages. I won't go there on features that are still broken and didn't work properly when officially released. No comment on the broken figures.

"Or gets proper documentation - FInd someone to help you isn't exactly the definition of proper documentation."

Who cares about proper documentation? You can get faster answers by asking fellow users rather than trolling through a chapter in a manual regarding your issue that only vaguely describes a process. If you happy with old traditional methods then fine, but more and more people ask live questions regarding issues and get quicker responses. And the forums are active enough to make that process work are they not? And there are plenty of youtube tutorials which cover basically everything, and in more detail than a manual or proper documentation ever could. Posers manual is quite extensive yet many users still prefer to ask questions via the forums. That tells you how viable proper documentation really is among the general public. Most won't even bother to read chapters when they can just make a forum post and fellow users will give them the answers they looking for.

MartinX posted at 11:58AM Thu, 09 November 2017 - #4317642

Most won't even bother to read chapters when they can just make a forum post and fellow users will give them the answers they looking for.

Yes that's the world today: "Im just too lazy to waste my time reading a manual by myself. I rather go to a forum and let other people waste their time to solve my problems."

Very nice, really.

Umm it is no more effort than you responding to my post? Same amount of time taken:) My point is documentation just gives basic functions of features, but does not explain how to do something specific to most user requests. That get's answered quicker via formats such as forums. And FYI those who respond want to help, nobody forces them to. Otherwise there would be no such thing as a community if everyones response was "read the documentation" whenever a question was asked.

I especially like the part where Wolf 359 just for some reason assumed that I have a problem with Genesis's Quality. I've never said one bad thing about Genesis EVER.

I havent assumed you dont like the quality of the genesis figures I have observered that you seem ignore their obvious superior quality to rex/roxy/paul/pauline etc, when you insist that the free price is the only factor in determing DS's popularity...it is the figures plain and simple.

put, this makes up the most powerful collection of 3D software available for FREE for a limited time." "Limited time"? Now where have I heard that before? Well, what do I know? I'm just a liar who's making stuff up and revising history,

Congratulations!!! you found some old expired ad copy** from the former owners of Daz inc** that was clealry superceded by the new owners Loss leader business model.

"Limited time" describes that period BEFORE Dann Farr & Company introduced

DS advanced/"Pro" with the merchant content,creation & figure setup tools This was the Paid version with more features than the base FREE version that remained available.

How about I go and find some 12 year old marketing hype copy from Apple ,Microsoft, Ford, EA games etc and use that as a contextual basis for my arguments & Dire warnings about what evil those companies are planning in late 2017

It does not not change the fact that there was alway a "free base" version of Daz studio even during that period when the"pro" version with the Figure set up tools and other content creation tools was costing money. I know because I refused to pay for them and continued to download the free base version until The new Management took over.

Since most people,even today, dont use the content creation tools the click load & render crowd Always had a free version of studio to use . That is the correct version of history...sorry

By all means, let us know when it gets to feature freeze.

Sure mate, you mean like the "feature freeze" that entombed posers graph editor Dope sheet& useless IK system in the glorious year of 1997???

"Feature freeze" is just an excuse for not spending money on Development Consider that if Blender had settled on a "feature freeze" ten years ago poser would not have the free PBR Cycles engine as a render option.

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MartinX posted at 10:38AM Thu, 09 November 2017 - #4317646

Umm it is no more effort than you responding to my post? Same amount of time taken:) My point is documentation just gives basic functions of features, but does not explain how to do something specific to most user requests. That get's answered quicker via formats such as forums. And FYI those who respond want to help, nobody forces them to. Otherwise there would be no such thing as a community if everyones response was "read the documentation" whenever a question was asked.

I have to agree with this. Not everyone can visualize from reading a technical manual. I rely heavily on video tutorials and the forums for help in understanding some areas of both programs. As for where Poser is going, I'm hoping SM pays attention to these discussions. I fought against using Studio until recently. Now I use it more than Poser and for the first time since version 4 I may not upgrade if it's hundreds and doesn't include something new and exciting. Not to mention taking out that ridiculous re-activation feature. I went to open Poser last week and couldn't because I was away from home. I still haven't had the chance to re-activate.

...... Kendra

I want to add something here. We are being constructive in this thread and I thank you for that. But keep in mind, we want to be helpful. Over criticism is counter productive. Speculating on features and directions is good. Gloom and doom ... not so much.

Boni

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Nice to see this thread is doing well and not descending into a brawl. Personally I think they need to start by fixing the engine, I say fix in relation not to it being broken, but to building a good base for a new and frankly good male and female figure to be used in. I say this because if you look at Daz and how they implemented Genesis they first built in the weight mapping etc that allows Genesis to work in daz. Poser needs things like muscle attachments etc at its core to then have these new figures, along with a better face room, cameras, animation, hair, etc that need updating as they are woefully behind their competition. making poser free is not the answer, making it better is. will we see that? I hope so. And on a side note perhaps then if all that happens Iray and amd's new free render engine will support poser out of the box?

Getting old and still making "art" without soiling myself, now that's success.

Has anyone looked at the ManuelbastioniLAB 1.6.0 for blender and seen muscles in action, I would love this in poser.

Getting old and still making "art" without soiling myself, now that's success.

First of all Poser is going to Portugal! LOL

If you're thinking of a 'Feature Freeze' as a way to get stability into the program, that's not the best way to get it.

I would always prefer Feature Previews instead. For example the current Cinema has an early version of the new AMD Pro Renderer, with the clear proviso that it is not production ready.

I think the major item that is in Beta is Superfly.

...for me, the excitement of hearing that Cycles code was being incorporated into Poser was tempered by remembering Poser's history with Firefly. I'm expecting a perpetually unfinished Superfly to go with the perpetually unfinished Firefly!

regards
prixat

I don't come in here much these days, as many people can attest to, but since I'm waiting for a $@&^! code change to finish propagation across a massive infrastructure...

Disclosure: I stopped using Poser years ago, so some of what I say may be out of date. I also worked for DAZ, though roughly 12 years ago. I am today someone who farts around with CG for fun in his spare time, and rarely (and in the last decade definitely not) for profit.

That said...

As others have said, it's all about what you use the software for. Some use it as a digital barbie-doll set. Others use it as part of their professional production pipeline, or to whip something up quickly for a small CG job. Others still use it to mock-up something for a non-CG project. I am not you, and we are not him, etc.

This means that whatever priorities SmithMicro may settle on, I can say for certain that they're going to have just as hard of a time trying to figure out which part of Poser's declining userbase should be catered to, or if they should try at capturing a different demographic entirely.

However, Poser is facing a couple of problems here that need to be addressed, both externally and internally.

I watched as Poser went from an ambitious (and awesome, and quite groundbreaking) project, to being abandonware, to being brought back to life by a hotly passionate userbase, to being a redheaded orphan that got passed around from one corporate foster home to another**, and then ended up living quietly as a latch-key product, mostly kept alive by an absentee father of a corporation.

I should explain that last bit. Smith Micro is a company that is known as more of a caretaker than as an innovator. They have historically bought-up orphan products, and kept them going just enough to milk whatever small profit margin the product can muster. They're not well-known for taking something and overhauling it into a new, exciting product (SM marketing droids' assertions be damned). One only needs to look at their product catalog for proof - it's a jangled disconnected bag of once-novel software that industry at large has long since cast off (e.g. Stuffit - once a stalwart of Mac Users everywhere, now just something used occasionally by folks with a massive jones for nostalgia). On the plus side, without SM keeping it on life support, Poser would have probably died about 10 years ago, so there is that...

I want to make it clear that I mean no insult to SmithMicro (or to anyone) by saying any of this, but I am however stating facts here, and it helps explain the environment that we're working in during the discussion.

Now - given all of this, I don't hold out much hope of Poser doing much in the way of overhauling what it is, or of innovating too much beyond just keeping up with the Joneses, feature-wise (mind, DAZ ain't the only Jones in CG-town, either). It's just not Smith Micro's style.

That's the internal problem.

Meanwhile, externally, DAZ Studio has bled Poser's userbase count white, and has then went on to swell their own userbase count, mostly by bringing in fresh blood from the world at large. Poser pretty much relies on DAZ to stay alive long-term, but the opposite is certainly no longer true (it used to be true up until 2007 or so, but not these days.) There are of course perennial competitors that crop up (anyone else remember MakeHuman?), but they're nothing like the DAZ juggernaut. DAZ also has competition of sorts (HiveWire 3D, founded by one of the most awesome mesh-mongers on the planet in my estimation), but they make stuff that works just fine with DAZ' software, so it's not much of a threat on their radar... shrug. Now, HiveWire3D could be a benefit to SmithMicro, and SmithMicro would do well to boost their support of Mr. Creek's venture, but that only solves the native-content shortage issue... and currently, only by a little.

Did I mention that one has to pay $349 just to get the full suite, and $129 for the gimped version - meanwhile DS is a whopping $0.00 for the full version?

Give me all the justifications you want, but the days of pricey CG suite software died when they stopped selling Maya for $22k a seat, and potential newbies aren't going to care about your subtle arguments, no matter how many times you use the word 'value' in them.

Unless these problems are addressed, I don't see much more than continuing decline into obscurity for Poser. This obviously needs to be fixed.

This is what you and all other Poser users are looking at. I'm sorry if it's not rosy, but it is what it is. I promise I'm not just naysaying here. I've offered solutions over and over in these forums for years on end, but to no success. Too much work, too much time, not enough profit to be realized, 'Sorry Mr. Miller, but we don't see much future in going that direction', etc... the excuses were plentiful and staggering.

"So why do you care, you old butthead!?"

I care mostly out of nostalgia. Poser has changed a lot since the late 1990s when I first stumbled on it. DAZ has changed a lot since I last set foot in their offices. From a cursory glance in here, Rendo hasn't changed all that much though ( ).

That said, it looks like my work email has informed me that propagation is complete, so now I get to go do some sampling to ensure that the changes took hold where I needed them to.

PS: @EClark1894: Your argument has value to it, certainly - but given the fact that the advertising copy you quoted has had that phrase 'limited time' in it since DS Version 1.0 was released in late 2005? Meh. Not going to put too much stock in DAZ suddenly trying to sell the razor and the razor blades - it wouldn't fit their business model at all, and I daresay would be counterproductive to it (if not suicidal).

Tschüss for now (or so), /P

** Historical note: DAZ|Studio was first made as an insurance policy for DAZ, should Poser go under back in those turbulent, uncertain years.

wolf359 posted at 1:27PM Fri, 10 November 2017 - #4317656

I especially like the part where Wolf 359 just for some reason assumed that I have a problem with Genesis's Quality. I've never said one bad thing about Genesis EVER.

I havent assumed you dont like the quality of the genesis figures I have observered that you seem ignore their obvious superior quality to rex/roxy/paul/pauline etc, when you insist that the free price is the only factor in determing DS's popularity...it is the figures plain and simple.

Yes, You HAVE assumed it, because I haven't said anything about Rex,,or Roxie in this post. I'd have to go back and see if I mentioned Paul or Pauline, but I rather doubt it. I haven't ignored Genesis' quality one way or the other. In fact, I've often said I would probably have been using it EXCEPT, Studio wouldn't run on my Mac. It runs on my laptop, but I don't want to learn DS or move from Poser. So how in the world did you manage to find a post I never wrote about a figure I've never used denigrating it's quality? I'll tell you how, you didn't, cause I never did.

AmbientShade posted at 2:01PM Fri, 10 November 2017 - #4317628

EClark1894 posted at 9:27PM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317597

The worst thing I've said about Studio is that it's in "constant beta". And I'm attacked and rebuked as not knowing what I'm talking about.

I wasn't attacking you, nor did I specifically state that you didn't know what you're talking about. The "constant beta" myth has been batted around for a number of years now, mostly by the anti-daz crowd, and it perpetuates arguments that lead to getting threads locked and deleted, and prevents any of us from having a mature, open discussion about the state of Poser and it's issues without it breaking down to insults and personal attacks. The 'constant beta' argument is simply not true. No more so than it is true of any other software out there, including Poser. So it would be nice to see it stop being stated as though it were truth.

Isn't being in constant beta a good thing? I'll admit, as one who remembers ordering boxed 3D software with manuals, that I hate constantly updating something on my computer every few days... Between Windows updates, Radeon updates, CCleaner (once a week?), Firefox... Then 3d-Coat, blender, zBrush... And hey look, Wings3D and bloody Anim8or got a new version, too. So yeah, do you keep going with what works? Or do you keep everything up to date... Update the next time you use the program, or just make a mental note and install everything at once in an afternoon? But that's not the point... Daz Studio stable release is 4.10 Pro, beta version is 4.10.0.113. The stable release was on Oct. 26, so we can't say that it's in constant beta as it was not in beta for at least a brief moment on that day.

EClark1894 posted at 2:14PM Fri, 10 November 2017 - #4317582

moogal posted at 10:24AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317550

EClark1894

Studio is in constant beta.

It's not constantly in beta any more than any other program in the process of being developed. There are stable releases, and they are soon followed by beta releases. That is something you can do when you are giving the program away, and technically SM do the same thing as we are always waiting on SRs to fix things. If you don't like using beta software, limit yourself to the most recent stable release. Just don't disingenuously make it sound like the program is in some kind of perpetually unusable state.

Gee, wonder where I might have gotten that idea? Oh, I know... And I never said Studio was in a perpetually unusable state. Those are your words. You use 'em, then take all the credit for them.

It was the only reason I could infer for your making that statement, otherwise what is wrong with the availability of development versions? But let's just move on from that, I'll admit that often wanting to try the betas and resigning myself to the stable releases is a little annoying.

AmbientShade posted at 2:36PM Fri, 10 November 2017 - #4317570

moogal posted at 1:54AM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317562

If Poser had a viewport like blender's Eevee I guarantee more people would start animating.

Not necessarily. A real time renderer would be great in Poser, but one factor I think you might be missing there is poly count. How well does Eevee handle 1million+ poly count scenes? Poser content artists tend to often ignore this aspect of content creation, but there's a ton of content out there that has tens of thousands of polys, sometimes hundreds of thousands, and that sort of content doesn't function too well in a real time engine. In fact it can bring your system to its knees if you don't have a high end machine. I've seen hair models with upwards of 300K polys. Once you dress a single figure in Poser, with hair, shoes, clothes, accessories, you could quite easily be approaching the 500K - 1million poly count, and that's without adding in additional clothed figures, buildings and other props. The reason real time rendering works so well in game engines is because most game engines use very low poly models. Poser generally does not. You also don't see weight mapped joints in game engines because that again draws on processor resources that are needed for the rendering engine to do its job.

Not saying it's impossible, or shouldn't be a requested feature, but content artists would have to start learning how to build models more efficiently, and users would have to start learning how to decimate their models - once the decimation tools that currently exist get refined.

Oh, I've thought about the poly count problem. I don't know if it's the big deal people make it out to be. We're not talking about realtime response, simply using the GPU and modern PBR shaders that work across a far wider range of tools than Firefly or even Cycles materials. Older characters and simple scenes should update in very close to real time, but complex scenes would still display in seconds vs. hours. Again, why limit the development of the program to older content? Part of the reason we have high poly counts is that we didn't have subdivision back in the early days. Now we do, and it would make more sense moving forward to follow iClone's lead of using lighter character meshes and using displacements and subdivision at render time to provide the expected detail. Such characters could be promoted as background figures, as extras, and SM could communicate to users that render speed is dependent on scene complexity to allay unreasonable expectations.
I've long understood that Poser is catering to the still framers, and a lot of stubborn people who haven't kept pace with what is happening elsewhere. When I got into Poser things like Source Filmmaker, Unreal Engine, and iClone didn't exist. But those programs are actually trying to be the program I wanted Poser to be. Ideally I would be mixing Poser figures (stock and custom), iClone content, SFM models, figures from Mixamo etc. in the same scenes if that were actually possible. Perhaps that's why I don't see the need for a new end-all-be-all base figure, as there are hundreds of figures out there I would be using in Poser if the process of doing so were more refined. And as many of those figures were designed to work in a game engine, the poly count thing you mentioned wouldn't necessarily be an issue for me.

Poser has so many features and such awesome functionality, Poser 11 has some hidden gems.

But I think the majority of the users doesn’t even use 70% of what Poser is capable of.

I’m still discovering new options!

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I don't always agree with Peng - and in this case I don't want to - but there's a lot of truth in them words.

However...

For me, Poser has a much easier, more intuitive front end than DS; I still can't get comfortable with DAZ after many tries. Maybe it's just me getting old but I can't see me ditching Poser any time soon. I don't animate stuff and have no desire to do so but the new features in Poser's rendering are stuff I need to get me head around. When I upgrade fro Pro 2012, that is.

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Biscuits posted at 10:26AM Sat, 11 November 2017 - #4317753

Poser has so many features and such awesome functionality, Poser 11 has some hidden gems.

But I think the majority of the users doesn’t even use 70% of what Poser is capable of.

I’m still discovering new options!

I am sure you are correct but I wish that Smith Micro would realize that a large percentage of Poser users are "hobbyist" and not professionals. Gear their software to make the various functions simple and obvious to the hobbyist. I think it would be bad to see them go out of business as that would leave Daz free to do whatever they wanted. Competition is good.

The question for me is not so much where Poser is going but where I'm going and whether Poser can come with me. It's become clear that relying on one software, be it Poser or Studio, is a recipe for disaster. Too much control over my ability to make art. Too much control over the tools and content provided. Too much similarity of look in renders and content. Right now I mostly use Poser, Blender and Photoshop. Studio is more of a utility at this point. I'll use it more if it allows me to create what's in my mind but couldn't see making it my goto program. I plan to learn and use Blender more and more for stills, compositing and animation.

Back to the OP's mention of ManuelBastioniLab. It's an incredible add on. It's pretty much every figure and morph package we've used over the years in one package. It's emphasis on scientifically based ethnicities, ability to dial in various skin tones, randomizing of faces and body types, inclusion of elf, dwarf, multiple Anime figures, and aging displacement dials allow for pretty much any human figure you could ask for. It's output of advanced IK rigs and muscle system is on the cutting edge of figure creation. The lone developer has been putting out regular updates at an incredible pace. Oh, and it's free. Can't say enough about the potential of this tool.

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false1 posted at 11:11AM Sat, 11 November 2017 - #4317783

The question for me is not so much where Poser is going but where I'm going and whether Poser can come with me. It's become clear that relying on one software, be it Poser or Studio, is a recipe for disaster. Too much control over my ability to make art. Too much control over the tools and content provided. Too much similarity of look in renders and content. Right now I mostly use Poser, Blender and Photoshop. Studio is more of a utility at this point. I'll use it more if it allows me to create what's in my mind but couldn't see making it my goto program. I plan to learn and use Blender more and more for stills, compositing and animation.

Back to the OP's mention of ManuelBastioniLab. It's an incredible add on. It's pretty much every figure and morph package we've used over the years in one package. It's emphasis on scientifically based ethnicities, ability to dial in various skin tones, randomizing of faces and body types, inclusion of elf, dwarf, multiple Anime figures, and aging displacement dials allow for pretty much any human figure you could ask for. It's output of advanced IK rigs and muscle system is on the cutting edge of figure creation. The lone developer has been putting out regular updates at an incredible pace. Oh, and it's free. Can't say enough about the potential of this tool.

I think most users are using poser and daz for fun.... when programs become too complicated then they cease to be fun and people stop using them. Let's keep the fun simple

drafter69 posted at 12:10PM Sat, 11 November 2017 - #4317781

I am sure you are correct but I wish that Smith Micro would realize that a large percentage of Poser users are "hobbyist" and not professionals. Gear their software to make the various functions simple and obvious to the hobbyist. I think it would be bad to see them go out of business as that would leave Daz free to do whatever they wanted. Competition is good.

Daz and Smith Micro have very different business strategies.

If you want to use Poser to it's fullest, crack open the manual - seriously, it is just like any other artform, the enduser to learn to use the tools - and that requires actual work on the part of the enduser.

ssgbryan posted at 2:12PM Sat, 11 November 2017 - #4317791

drafter69 posted at 12:10PM Sat, 11 November 2017 - #4317781

I am sure you are correct but I wish that Smith Micro would realize that a large percentage of Poser users are "hobbyist" and not professionals. Gear their software to make the various functions simple and obvious to the hobbyist. I think it would be bad to see them go out of business as that would leave Daz free to do whatever they wanted. Competition is good.

Daz and Smith Micro have very different business strategies.

If you want to use Poser to it's fullest, crack open the manual - seriously, it is just like any other artform, the enduser to learn to use the tools - and that requires actual work on the part of the enduser.

So you are suggesting that only "serious people" should use the program??? For most it is a HOBBY nothing more. Read the instruction manual???? How many programs have ever achieved that goal????? Since you are determined that it is only for serious people I will not respond to this again. For me it is a HOBBY... nothing more and never will be.

drafter69 posted at 3:23PM Sat, 11 November 2017 - #4317784

I think most users are using poser and daz for fun.... when programs become too complicated then they cease to be fun and people stop using them. Let's keep the fun simple

I know what you mean. It can be tiresome jumping through digital hoops trying to get a simple idea into a decent render. But that's why I can only speak for myself and where I want to go. Everybody has a different need for their personal goals. I have an idea of what i want to do and if Poser can help me do it, awesome. If not, it will become less important to me.

On that same notion though, I think Daz has the fun factor locked up as far as the load, pose, render concept. Beyond that you have to create your own, which will require grappling with the technology. Poser may want to cater to a more "advanced" crowd just as a way of separating itself in the market. Or not. It's not my call. If you're referring to Blender, it's actually easier than Poser in many ways, especially if you're not totally focused on female figure renders.

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I love reading this stuff. I started with P4 and now use P11, Folks all of this is just a plaything for when I ain't hunting and fishing so why does everybody get so upset over these programs. I bought enough poser characters that I'll never use them all. Poser is easy were as I never got the hang of Daz. Don't get mad just have fun!!!

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drafter69 posted at 1:40AM Mon, 13 November 2017 - [#4317797](#msg4317797r.

So you are suggesting that only "serious people" should use the program??? For most it is a HOBBY nothing more. Read the instruction manual???? How many programs have ever achieved that goal????? Since you are determined that it is only for serious people I will not respond to this again. For me it is a HOBBY... nothing more and never will be.

No - You are the one that is suggesting that only serious people should use the program. You can spend hours trolling forums looking for answers, or you can simply crack the manual for about 5 minutes and find answers.

Every hobby requires skill and talent.

Drawing and painting needs to be practiced, looking at other artist’s paintings.

Following video tutorials and yes even read documentation.

A hobby is something you love doing and you’re passionate about.

Basically if you don’t want to spend time and effort on this hobby I highly doubt the love for it.

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Why are we always talking about the tool?

Some can sharpen a knife to razor sharp using a brick, others talk about how sharpening system X is better then sharpening system Y.

The end result is always in the fingertips. Certainly in something "artistic" as 3D.

Biscuits posted at 11:03AM Mon, 13 November 2017 - #4317859

Every hobby requires skill and talent.

Drawing and painting needs to be practiced, looking at other artist’s paintings.

Following video tutorials and yes even read documentation.

A hobby is something you love doing and you’re passionate about.

Basically if you don’t want to spend time and effort on this hobby I highly doubt the love for it.

I didn't realize that you were the judge of what hobbyist is or is not.... Just remember with great power comes great responsibility.......

Lol, Well the only hobby I know of that doesn't take any effort or skill is watching tv^^.

But it does take lotta time!

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tonyvilters posted at 6:17PM Mon, 13 November 2017 - #4317865

Why are we always talking about the tool?

Some can sharpen a knife to razor sharp using a brick, others talk about how sharpening system X is better then sharpening system Y.

The end result is always in the fingertips. Certainly in something "artistic" as 3D.

LOL, I just hope you be careful with your sharp knife and you fingertips Tony!!!

But I get what you're saying, more ways to Rome!

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Penguinisto posted at 7:48PM Mon, 13 November 2017 - #4317720

I don't come in here much these days, as many people can attest to, but since I'm waiting for a $@&^! code change to finish propagation across a massive infrastructure...

Disclosure: I stopped using Poser years ago, so some of what I say may be out of date. I also worked for DAZ, though roughly 12 years ago. I am today someone who farts around with CG for fun in his spare time, and rarely (and in the last decade definitely not) for profit....

Great to hear from you, Penguinisto; it's been a while. Good observations...

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drafter69 posted at 2:03AM Tue, 14 November 2017 - #4317781

I am sure you are correct but I wish that Smith Micro would realize that a large percentage of Poser users are "hobbyist" and not professionals.

Not sure about that .. Just because there are many people discovered 3D software hobby-wise does not mean the softwares are not used by professionals as much [or maybe more] ..

That being said it always surprises in almost a fun way that entering the Poser forum DS is discussed as being the most awesome tool .. Comparing those 2 over-and-over inside-and-out is like comparing windows to mac .. samsung to iPhone .. Nintendo to Playstation .. etc .. We don't suggest to all work together either

Poser focuses on this DS focusing on that .. pick your tool and enjoy it ..!! Cause no matter how you look at it : nothing in life is free but the air that you breathe ..

The original question where is Poser going ..??.. ask Smith Micro .. they're the only ones that know the correct answer ..

tonyvilters posted at 2:23AM Tue, 14 November 2017 - #4317614

Where Poser is going? I never knew it had feet to walk? LOL.

Lol .. this made me smile big time ..!!.. I always tell the Poser logo white guy to run faster when in a hurry for renders ..

For those who find reading the manual or scouring threads and videos a bit too tedious, it would be helpful if Poser had a Tool Tips feature, like zbrush and many other programs have. That way you could get at least a brief overview of what each function does just by hovering your mouse over the icon, dial, etc. Would save a lot of experimental rendering time if you got a clue that what you're about to change probably won't do what you think it does, instead of just having to guess. And if they're annoying you could turn them off in the Settings menu.

Wow, I leave for a couple days to care for my sick roommate and come back to this? Guys, you have really gone too far and I think you know it. This is a warning since I didn't say much earlier. Stick to civil constructive comments based on the OP ... or I lock this thread. Friends, thank you for trying to pull it back, but some people don't get the hint.

Boni

"Be Hero to Yourself" -- Peter Tork

Sorry Boni .. It just seems that none can pop questions about Poser no more without the constant DS comparing interruption .. :/

Hope your roommate feels better ..!?!

Kendra posted at 4:13PM Tue, 14 November 2017 - #4317660

Not to mention taking out that ridiculous re-activation feature. I went to open Poser last week and couldn't because I was away from home. I still haven't had the chance to re-activate.

You can permanently activate your license via SM's license manager page.

Not sure if I'm allowed to link directly but you can read about it here:

https://forum.smithmicro.com/topic/164/p-g-license-manager-currently-read-only-license-editing-coming-soon

(The 'coming soon' part is outdated - as the thread is 2 years old).

P3D-Art and AmbientShade, thank you .... Hopefully she will feel better soon. Just a cold, but it's kicked her bum!! Remember folks ... stick to the OP.

Boni

"Be Hero to Yourself" -- Peter Tork

Where is poser going?

Down the pub for a couple of pints, then for a kebab....

I started with TrueSpace .R.I.P. Since then I've used alot of different 3D n 2D app's n plugs.

If your CGI Studio only has one app ,then your putting your self in to a very small box.

It doesn't matter where Poser or Blender or anyone else goes for that matter.

All that matters is where your going.Get ALL the app's that you need to take you to where you want to go.

============================================================

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Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

Reading the various points of view has been interesting. Whatever Smith Micro decides to do should come soon as they continue to lose stock value. So I guess time will tell.

drafter69 posted at 10:37AM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318070

Reading the various points of view has been interesting. Whatever Smith Micro decides to do should come soon as they continue to lose stock value. So I guess time will tell.

You do realize the graphics division represents less than 10% of Smith Micro's incorme, right?

RorrKonn: You've made one of the best points on the thread. Maybe we can shift gear and ask ... "Where do we WANT Poser to go?" (keep it positive guys).

Boni

"Be Hero to Yourself" -- Peter Tork

ssgbryan posted at 5:59PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318082

drafter69 posted at 10:37AM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318070

Reading the various points of view has been interesting. Whatever Smith Micro decides to do should come soon as they continue to lose stock value. So I guess time will tell.

You do realize the graphics division represents less than 10% of Smith Micro's incorme, right?

10% is more than enough for a company to dump a product. As I said "time will tell"

drafter69 posted at 4:41AM Fri, 17 November 2017 - #4318120

ssgbryan posted at 5:59PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318082

drafter69 posted at 10:37AM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318070

Reading the various points of view has been interesting. Whatever Smith Micro decides to do should come soon as they continue to lose stock value. So I guess time will tell.

You do realize the graphics division represents less than 10% of Smith Micro's incorme, right?

10% is more than enough for a company to dump a product. As I said "time will tell"

So, it is just speculation. SM hired an entire new team just to dump a product.....

Boni posted at 3:26AM Fri, 17 November 2017 - #4318109

RorrKonn: You've made one of the best points on the thread. Maybe we can shift gear and ask ... "Where do we WANT Poser to go?" (keep it positive guys).

Improve workflow - take a leaf out of Pixologic's book and focus on productivity as a selling point. The key would be to add to what's there and not replace existing functions. The following examples are focused on rendering as not familiar with rigging so will leave that to someone else

Parenting - extend to include "group of figures/props" - assign separate figures and objects to a group so they can be manipulated together
Material room - Add inheritance to simplify setting up materials eg head,torso,limbs inherit sss attributes from a parent material called skin.
Add instancing and allow it to instance from animation frames to allow quick crowd generation
Intelligent integration with toolsets like Substance painter/designer - for example link designer attributes with the animation palette
Better camera handling, ie drag and drop
Active lighting - adjust light HSV after render, add colour profiles

The idea is to let the computer do more of the repetitive work and allow the user to spend more time creating

Why so much specualtion about what will happen if poser "disappears" Installed and backed up,NON CLOUD based, software can not "disappear" as long as your copy is still installed.

Take Natural Motion's "Endorphin" for example.

Probably the best , intelligent ragdoll physics program ever created.

no longer produced, updated or sold. .....Gone forever right??

Not for me I am using my old seat of version 2.52 extensivley in my current animated project LINK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6MnQuNDEVI

And there are still tutorials on youtube on how to use this "dissappeared"software

Even if SM "Dumps" poser and it becomes "abandonware" wont you poser loyalist still use poser9, 10, 11??

Sure there will be no future updates but what big project are you planning right now that will be canceled if poser 11 is the last official release??

Are you people actually using your software or just waiting for some future magical version of it that may never come??. the same goes for any program for that matter.

You love poser or Daz studio? the create something with the copy currently you have instead of sitting engaging in endless specultation about its future.

My website

YouTube Channel

wimvdb posted at 10:36AM Fri, 17 November 2017 - #4318129

drafter69 posted at 4:41AM Fri, 17 November 2017 - #4318120

ssgbryan posted at 5:59PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318082

drafter69 posted at 10:37AM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318070

Reading the various points of view has been interesting. Whatever Smith Micro decides to do should come soon as they continue to lose stock value. So I guess time will tell.

You do realize the graphics division represents less than 10% of Smith Micro's incorme, right?

10% is more than enough for a company to dump a product. As I said "time will tell"

So, it is just speculation. SM hired an entire new team just to dump a product.....

You seem to have a need to keep this going and I think it is interesting BUT as I said "time will tell"..... you can stomp your feet if you want but nothing will change until Smith Micro decides what direction they are going. From one investment councilor I use there suggestion was to avoid the stock for now as the company is listed as "in transition" (whatever that means)

I'd like to see Poser re-establish its identity. Whatever you use it for, there are likely only a few other options worth considering. You could use makehuman and a program like Max or Maya to render. You could use Manuel Bastioni Laboratory in blender. If you want to work with your current content your choices would be D|S, iClone, possibly Carrara or sticking with Poser.
Daz business model depends on brokered content, so I think that Poser needs to continue reducing a dependency on that. I know there are people who want to make money providing content for Poser, and who tend to feel that Poser needs a set of compelling base figures in order to drive that market. I think Daz will always have an edge there because it's their primary focus, their tools are just a delivery platform. Poser should be the program that lets you create the things people typically tend to buy for it, and should try to solve the problems of clothing and props being figure-specific, proportion changes breaking poses etc. If Daz are going to focus on glamour shots and pin-up art, it looks like iClone really wants to be the story telling program. And iClone is the only one of the three I would want to undertake a large animated production in. If every program played to their own strengths, is like a lot of users might find they are using the wrong one. Some Poser users rightly should be using D|S but are either too attached to Poser or maybe don't like Daz or for whatever reason refuse to use it. Some Daz users should probably be using Poser. Maybe they don't want to pay for it. Maybe they just don't know what its strengths are, the things it does that D|S does not. And of course, some Poser and D|S users should really take another look at iClone, even if just to see how much a program can mature in just a few releases.

wolf359 : I still box model in Basic C4D 9 "they changed basic to prime some where along the way" on windows 8.1 think is was made for xp I know one day a windows10 or what ever will not work .but to day textures stretch real bad on it. I'd advise not to use out dated or abandonware. TrueSpace was behind LW,C4D when it died so...

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

oh no plugs work any more

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

Maybe they don't want to pay for it. Maybe they just don't know what its strengths are, the things it does that D|S does not. And of course, some Poser and D|S users should really take another look at iClone, even if just to see how much a program can mature in just a few releases.

Hi I use Iclone for nearly all of my character bodymotion I am an animated filmmaker.

Iclone pro is designed for pure realtime character motion creation and its tools are on par with the mighty Autodesk Motionbuilder. What many may not know is that Iclone3D Xchange will import the BVH skeleton of the older daz figures (Mike&Vic 1,2,3,4) as well as the genesis figure and retarget Imotion to them with one mouse click.

However I doubt that poser or Daz users will ever seriously look at Iclone because they are still framers who wont touch the animation tools.

I clone has it user base.... us Character animators.

For the still framer majority the only real choice is poser or Daz studio.

My website

YouTube Channel

I'd advise not to use out dated or abandonware.

Why not??? if it runs on my OS and is producing the output I need what exactly is the problem?? particularly a motion/BVH creation app like Endorphin.

My website

YouTube Channel

wolf359 posted at 11:20AM Sun, 19 November 2017 - #4318209

I'd advise not to use out dated or abandonware.

Why not??? if it runs on my OS and is producing the output I need what exactly is the problem?? particularly a motion/BVH creation app like Endorphin.

and C4D 9 is only 32 bit, I think TS is only 32 bit also. TrueSpace was one of the first realtime app's.TS had vision and look beyond today. but had a odd workspace and did not even keep up with LW & now Foundry has blown Newtex away.

Pirates code ,same CGI code .Those that can't keep up get left behind.

Poser brought us dynamics,bullet physics n all but anyone using them was all ready using them in Max. They don't use them much in DS either.

The way it looks from here Poser,DS users want new click n render stuff and as soon as it's rendered they want new better click n render stuff and don't really care what it's rendered in. They care about the new stuff there buying to render. So who ever has the best stuff to render wins.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

wolf359 posted at 3:43PM Sun, 19 November 2017 - #4318208

Maybe they don't want to pay for it. Maybe they just don't know what its strengths are, the things it does that D|S does not. And of course, some Poser and D|S users should really take another look at iClone, even if just to see how much a program can mature in just a few releases.

However I doubt that poser or Daz users will ever seriously look at Iclone because they are still framers who wont touch the animation tools.

I clone has it user base.... us Character animators.

For the still framer majority the only real choice is poser or Daz studio.

There was only Poser when I first started coming around here, the rift leading to Daz Studio's creation was still a few years off. I guess my point is that while iClone is clearly focused on character animation, that was why I initially bought Poser. But from the time D|S arrived on the scene Poser and Daz have been locked in some kind of leapfrog game trying to appeal to the same category of users. There always seemed to be a fear of hardware accelerated rendering, and always people spreading the erroneous (IMHO) assumption that our figures' meshes were too dense to benefit from it. So my question is should Poser continue chasing Daz Studio, should it start chasing iClone, or is there another niche it could occupy and become its own program again? At first iClone looked like another attempt to nickel and dime users with content purchases, something I always hated with Poser and D|S. But with 3DXchange, it's possible to create custom figures in all three programs. I still think though that, of the three, Poser gives the user the most options for creating and modifying content. It just seems that the majority of users still want a "no muss no fuss" drag-and-drop program to host commercial content, which is the opposite of what I'd like Poser to be.

moogal posted at 6:31PM Sun, 19 November 2017 - #4318277

It just seems that the majority of users still want a "no muss no fuss" drag-and-drop program to host commercial content, which is the opposite of what I'd like Poser to be.

What many people want is to Load, Conform, and Make Art.

They have absolutely no interest in learning how to Make Art. They just expect it to appear Deus ex machina.

ssgbryan posted at 7:43AM Mon, 20 November 2017 - #4318293

moogal posted at 6:31PM Sun, 19 November 2017 - #4318277

It just seems that the majority of users still want a "no muss no fuss" drag-and-drop program to host commercial content, which is the opposite of what I'd like Poser to be.

What many people want is to Load, Conform, and Make Art.

They have absolutely no interest in learning how to Make Art. They just expect it to appear Deus ex machina.

Yes, probably safe to say for the majority of Poser and Daz users the goal is to make images and not content. Daz's decision to use IRay has certainly helped them to meet that demand. I thought SM's decision to use Blender was a good one, it supported a community driven project and also its still possible to use with non Nvidia cards. The inclusion of PBR support was also a good choice as its the closest we have to a materials standard and has the potential of sharing content between other applications. However with Daz supporting Iray for sometime it has been easier to switch applications than to learn a new system and with a render engine optmised for a particular hardware vendor the results are both faster and more easily controlled than a generic engine like Blender.

What many people want is to Load, Conform, and Make Art.

They have absolutely no interest in learning how to Make Art. They just expect it to appear Deus ex machina.

Quite correct sir ..even with all of the options we have to today.

And when you say many "people" we must certainly include the overwhelming majority of DS users.

I continue to be amazed at their utter dependancy on the PA's despite having the all mighty genesis& morph options at thier finger tips. It borders on worship.

You often see requests for more of certain ethnic/racial "characters".

when I suggest buying morphs and dialing in their own. I am promptly shouted down as though I had walked into a pre adolescent cancer ward and admonished those sick children for being too lazy to cure their own cancer.

My website

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Couple o' bits (spent last week in Chicago on business):

As far as using abandonware? Go for it - as long as it doesn't listen to or send out over a network, that is, and as long as the OS will run it. (Personally, this is why I'd dearly love to see any of these apps go Linux/GPL style, or at least do open source - that way, if the parent company dies, others can step in and maintain the thing. But that's just me.)

As far as where I'd like to see Poser go? I don't get any official vote here (I think Poser 7 was the last version I worked with), but...

I'd like to see it get refactored for speed and for footprint (disk and RAM). Make it smaller, faster, get rid of old cruft in the codebase, stop using that abomination framework from Adobe for the UI, etc. I bitched about this perennially back in the day, but it's worth lodging another shout towards those efforts.
overhaul the UI a bit, so it's possible for the user to make it friendly on smaller screens, for those of us whose lifestyle makes us laptop-bound. I ask because airlines would prolly get bitchy about wanting to haul two 24" OLED monitors and a Mac Pro as carry-on luggage, and I do not trust the baggage handlers to not demolish 'em in the cargo hold. (on the plus side, most hotel rooms do allow laptop connectivity to their big-screen TV's, though picture quality is always a question-mark, even in the pricier places.)
Being forced to use DSON and convert it all, just to use all my 10+ years of DS content, looks like madness. Just pay the boys in Draper a licensing fee so you can use the files natively. Failing that, make a damn conversion function to automate the process for the users. I don't say this out of selfish interest (though admittedly it does align with my wishes), but because if you want to steal customers back, you gotta make it easy for 'em to use what they already got.
Honest question asked out of ignorance - does Poser have auto-fit and (at least) collision detection for clothing? If so, good on 'em. If not, why not?
Most laptops have this awesome little trackpad and many have touchscreen that can behave as mini (or for the screens, maxi) Wacom tablets. I figure the accuracy of the typical Mac trackpad is about that of 2003-era dedicated tablets, truth be told. Might be worth exploring how to put that to use somehow - not a big priority, but a neat little gee-whiz thing.

You know? I wouldn't put down the "Make Art Button" crowd. Seriously... folks gotta start somewhere. Some never get past that stage, but enough of them eventually do, that it's worth courting them to an extent.

WandW posted at 8:05AM Mon, 20 November 2017 - #4317912

Great to hear from you, Penguinisto; it's been a while. Good observations...

Gratzi. I pop in as time and treasure allow :)

SamTherapy posted at 8:08AM Mon, 20 November 2017 - #4317780

For me, Poser has a much easier, more intuitive front end than DS; I still can't get comfortable with DAZ after many tries. Maybe it's just me getting old but I can't see me ditching Poser any time soon. I don't animate stuff and have no desire to do so but the new features in Poser's rendering are stuff I need to get me head around. When I upgrade fro Pro 2012, that is.

I understand perfectly. Everyone has their own use-case, comfort zones, etc. Last year's Nagios is this year's Zenoss is next year's NewRelic, umm, don't ask - the point is, some folks chase the new-shiny, some folks are cozy with what they have. Me, I like the DS interface because, well, I helped build it (though honestly? A lot has changed since then.)

That said, if something better still comes out, I'll chase that instead, but whoever has that 'better', had better make it easy to use the megatons of content I already have (or it had better be so mind-blowing that I'd be willing to ignore Sunk Cost entirely.) I'm sure the same goes for most other folks, no matter what they use and prefer now.

At the end of the day though, like all good things, what we use and prefer must come to an end, or it changes to an unrecognizable beast that bedevils us. SmithMicro may as well make those changes happen in a positive direction that attracts others to it... because that's pretty much what it will need to do to survive. The rub is that it's against SM's entire raison d'être. I hope they can overcome that.

The sooner we stop forcing a nonagon peg in to a heptagon hole. The better off well be.

Poser / DS is a drag n drop rendering tool ,mostly for fun. n that's fine buy me .I don't need another Max.That's what they are ,that's what there always be. No point in trying to change it. You can't change your mini van in to a Ferrari. but you can have a lot of fun in a mini van.

Since day one of CGI in 1902 something ;).The problem was Programmers not Artist was making the Art App's. How well do you think a programmer can paint the Sistine Chapel ?

Poser is run buy telecommunications business men and it shows in there content.

The viewer could care less what it was rendered in they don't know Max from Buon Fresco from Poser .

All they care about is how good it looks.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

The thing I have always like about Poser and its main competitors is the idea of separating figure creation from scene set-up and image/animation rendering. In practice, it makes it somewhat harder to fix and modify things... But my dream program would be one in which I can clothe and style my "cast" and bring them in ready to use and never have to worry about poke-through, intersecting body parts, hair popping off, anything that breaks the illusion. With blender or Maya you have absolute freedom to change or modify anything at any time, which is certainly not a bad thing in and of itself. But having started animation with stop motion and traditional models, I always wanted the process of creating characters, props and settings to be kept separate from setting up the cameras and actually directing a scene. I always looked at figure creation as "casting", prop creation/placement as "set design" and prefer production and pre-production not to overlap. But whenever I load a figure into a scene and pose it In almost no time I am cluttering up everything with pose-specific morphs, magnets, whatever.
So I suppose I actually do want a drag and drop, no muss no fuss solution as well, just one that lets me freely use my own custom content. Essentially I would like a streamlined version of Poser with clothing that always fits (or doesn't fit but the way real clothes might not) and maybe more character customization. Would really like geometry grafting so I could make cyborgs, centaurs, body-horror type stuff... The process of putting e.g. an existing figure's head on a custom body (without losing the morphs and visemes) or vice versa (with no visible seams) is IMHO prohibitively difficult. It can, as far as I know, be done, but how many hours minimum would one have to invest in Poser before successfully undertaking such a thing?

Moogal, you are asking a lot out of a low-end piece of software. You seem to be asking for Zbrush levels of modeling adjustment - just get a copy of Zbrush, or blender, or even Hexagon, if you are a masochist (Can you tell I have used Hexagon for too many years?).

Geo-grafting is simply parenting another object/prop to a character. We've been able to do that since at least Poser 5, that I am personally aware of. It does have a fancier name though.

There are ways to make the clothing fit better - the problem is that it takes more than just a couple of clicks, which means that most folks will simply whine that the software should do all of the work, so they don't actually have to do anything.

If you want clothing to always fit, use dynamic clothing. Once you use it, you'll be kicking yourself for not using it sooner.

If you insist on using conforming clothing, my suggestion is as follows:

After installing the clothing - delete every non-movement morph. Stay with me here.
Save clothing.
Load figure (with all of the morphs that the character needs).
Save the figure as an FBM. (Wardrobe Wizard - utilities - morphs - Dials to single morph.) I save mine as Alt- FBM.
Delete all morphs from figure. (I use Shaderworks' INJ Cleaner - it deletes every zeroed out morph. V4 drops from 400Mb to 7Mb or so. Don't forget to put the Expressions back in.)
Select clothing - from the Figures tab, select Copy morphs from.
Select the FBM and add it to the clothing (By naming the FBM -Alt- FBM_ it's near the top of the list and is easier to pick out.
Save out character & outfit (separately or together, depending on your workflow).

That is 8 steps, which is 5 more than most folks want to do. It takes about 3 minutes, mainly because I have several hundred morphs in my figures. (Sydney is just as heavy as V4 in my runtime).

If you need to move the clothing from 1 character mesh to another, I'd recommend the Fitting room, Lyrra's fit room magnet sets, and the Prefitter. If those don't work, there is always Wardrobe Wizard and XDresser. Again, none of this is hard, but it does require the end-user to do a little work. Oh, and it helps if the vendor does a decent job making the clothing.

These are simple steps that anyone can do, it's just that most folks on this board would rather whine than actually learn to use the software.

Are those steps actually necessary to use the clothing or just for morph management/housekeeping?

regards
prixat

For my workflow, it makes it easier to use the clothing - a little bit of work at the front end saves me hours on the back end.

Once one moves away from single character still images, one has to move away from a Poser 4 workflow and enter the 21st century. In Poser, one can easily decouple clothing from the figure it was designed for originally. If I slip Dawn, Pauline, or Sydney into a V4 outfit (And I have dozens of V4 outfits that have never been worn by V4), those V4 morphs are just hogging memory.

It also becomes necessary if you want to have a group scene. It is much easier to deal with a fully clothed figures in the 20 - 50Mb range than in the 1Gb range.

Poser gets a bit unresponsive once it goes past 6Gb in memory (On OSX). I used to hit that pretty regularly with 3 or 4 fully clothed figures. A Star Trek TOS Enterprise bridge has 13 positions to man. At 1 point I had 8 different bridges, based on camera angle, because I simply couldn't load all of the figures in a scene.

Even when there is only 1 character in the scene, I have found it necessary for the following reasons:

Conforming clothing NEVER has all of the morphs that come with dial-spun characters. If the character is a custom morph (and I have a number of those), then the chances of the FBM being in the clothing is 0, unless the clothing vendor made the character.
Conforming clothing never has any 3rd party morph sets.
It makes it easier to move the clothing from 1 base mesh to another, as mentioned earlier.
For me, characters as purchased, are a starting point not an end point. I adjust every figure, usually scaling back the size overall, and the boobage to where it actually matches real people.
Loading 500Mb of morphs into each piece of clothing can be a nightmare (example - add a morph that is already in the clothing and it never works again.)

It is about being productive - Not to mention the fact that the content takes up much less space in the runtime.

I hear people often talk down on Poser/Daz users that won’t create or mod their own content. I’ve done it myself, but wonder if it’s a bit unfair. I know when I got back into Poser 5 years ago after being away since about version 4 I was greatly excited by the content to be found at the various marketplaces that didn’t exist before. The ability to leverage a vendor’s technical skill and visual sense for your own art is very satisfying.

After Posering for a year or so it became obvious that even with the content now available there still wasn’t a enough of the things I needed for my own vision and concepts. Those items that did exist quickly drained my wallet. I started learning to kit bash, retexture, model, etc. because I had little choice. The reality is that any clothing or props I make at this point will pale in comparison to what the top quality vendors are selling in the marketplace. My currently feeble attempts at content creation will sit in the galleries next to the works of Aeon Soul, Stonemason, and the like. Plus I’ll spend untold hours trying to create these items. It’s a tremendous disincentive that I only pursue out of absolute necessity and the belief that I’ll slowly improve.

I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. I’m guessing that most of the more technically proficient, content creating users started out as load, pose, renderers. Many of the marketplace dependent users of today will graduate towards being more capable in the future. I think Daz has brought in a lot of new users recently. It’s hard to tell who is a neophyte and who is an old hand just from their forum comments. It is and should be an ongoing process of technical and artistic growth.

That said, it seems that Poser should allow for new users to get in and create easily with the ability for more experienced users to advance according to skill and desire. It will be difficult to attract new users long enough for them to explore advanced tools if they can’t excited about their initial attempts at Poser based art.

________________________________

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ssgbryan posted at 9:44AM Tue, 21 November 2017 - #4318399

There are ways to make the clothing fit better - the problem is that it takes more than just a couple of clicks, which means that most folks will simply whine that the software should do all of the work, so they don't actually have to do anything.

So Poser doesn't do basic Collision Detection and smoothing for clothing, then? Dang.

Dear SM, toss that onto the list of stuff to do. Seriously. I haven't loaded or used a Vicky 4 figure for like 3 years now, but I still use all the clothing and suchlike with very little adjustment (it's rare, and I know which items demand it by now - usually a poorly-built freebie that looks nice so I still use it, etc.)

I dig the DIY way you do that, and it future-proofs the stuff in a way, but seriously? 2-3 clicks, and I can park ancient Vicky 4 clothing on Genesis 3 and keep all the movement/deformation morphs, no sweat (though admittedly fitting V4 stuff on G8 won't happen automatically on my rig, all the other Genesis stuff works just fine, and I've got an easy enough workaround for V4 clothing which adds like a minute to the process w/o ever leaving the program to do it.)

Penguinisto posted at 11:50AM Tue, 21 November 2017 - #4318435

I dig the DIY way you do that, and it future-proofs the stuff in a way, but seriously? 2-3 clicks, and I can park ancient Vicky 4 clothing on Genesis 3 and keep all the movement/deformation morphs, no sweat (though admittedly fitting V4 stuff on G8 won't happen automatically on my rig, all the other Genesis stuff works just fine, and I've got an easy enough workaround for V4 clothing which adds like a minute to the process w/o ever leaving the program to do it.)

Seriously. It doesn't future proof it "in a way". It future proofs it, period. The clothing can go on ANY figure.

That isn't the only thing I do. With every outfit, I fix stuff that QA should have caught (convert material .pz2s to mc6s, delete ego folders, rationalize naming conventions, - with the g series, the added joy of putting ALL of the PCF in the correct folders - 1,000+ packages installed and not 1 has correct placement of PCFs, not 1).

This saves me hours of frustration when developing stories.

This is a Poser thread in the Poser forum - we're not here to talk about the g figures, if you want to limit yourself to the DS/g figures, have at it.

"This is a Poser thread in the Poser forum - we're not here to talk about the g figures, if you want to limit yourself to the DS/g figures, have at it."

Typical response here. The cloth fitting tech in Daz is simply more user friendly and quicker to apply. Stop being so defensive. It actually helps when admitting Posers problems, and finding a solution, not defending old techniques that are over complicated. You won't gain any new users that way. Unless the Poser method is better, faster or equal to the alternative, then it will fail to get new users onboard. Isn't that the point of the thread? Where can Poser go? It won't go anywhere unless it improves and simplifies it's application methods, and makes it simple to new users, NOT just to those who have sworn to the grave not to use anything else and are stuck in old ways of doing things.

The funny part is the easiest way to do it isn't Poser or DAZ it's Maya ,Ok OK I know it coast a lot of $$$ ,But Blender doesn't.

In the real world we don't buy one shirt to fit everyone.

Poser DAZ both made them self's very limited with the one mesh for all philosophy.

If you only know how the plugs work Poser ,DAZ Then you haven't even seen the CGI Universe. It's MAGNIFICENT !!!!!!

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

ssgbryan posted at 7:11PM Tue, 21 November 2017 - #4318399

Moogal, you are asking a lot out of a low-end piece of software. You seem to be asking for Zbrush levels of modeling adjustment - just get a copy of Zbrush, or blender, or even Hexagon, if you are a masochist (Can you tell I have used Hexagon for too many years?). Geo-grafting is simply parenting another object/prop to a character. We've been able to do that since at least Poser 5, that I am personally aware of. It does have a fancier name though. These are simple steps that anyone can do, it's just that most folks on this board would rather whine than actually learn to use the software.

Oh please. That apology stopped being valid when they first slapped "Pro" on the end. Poser's developers have asked for a few hundred dollars roughly every 18 months for the last 15 years and I'm supposed to settle for 20 year old rigging and 15 year old cloth and hair simulations simply because Daz hasn't managed to significantly leapfrog those particular aspects of Poser yet? I'm not complaining about what was given, I'm complaining about their failure to significantly improve on it over the many versions released since those features were first introduced. Look at Virtual World Dynamics' cloth. When SM could have been working on something similar, or even on integrating that into Poser, they were instead incorporating blender's open-source Cycles renderer into a program that already had several high-end options available.

It only sounds like I am asking for modeling tools as that is how we often have to fix thing based on how Poser has always worked. What I want is to have a library of unique characters that work as expected when I decide to use them, and don't bust out the seams of their clothes when I bend an elbow or lose their hair when I turn their heads. While the cause of poke through is obvious, a large percentage of it could simply be fixed at render time with forced z-sorting. Of course I could hide a body part (and then it becomes difficult to select) or make a transparency map (plus spec/diffuse/etc.), but why should I have to do this when the underlying problem is so well understood? Why not a hybrid sim that lets you conform your clothing and then makes it part of the original figure, and maintains relative distances throughout posing? The game dev tools did something similar with figure combining, but created a new figure in the process. I'm thinking that Poser could discard the hidden geometry and merge the figures but with the ability to restore the hidden or deleted mesh on the fly as clothing is removed or replaced. Again, just thinking outside of the box as we are often given general purpose solutions to very specific problems. If the problems are specific, why not have specific solutions?

If geografting is all you say it is, attaching a prop to a hidden body part, then that is not at all what I was asking for. I was asking for a way to replace a body part with an arbitrary mesh and have it seamlessly blend in to the figure, irrespective of UVs, materials or grouping. Something like the old Creature Creator which let you mix/match and scale body parts (but unfortunately did not provide tools for rigging). I think some programs call this meta-meshing.

I'd venture that a single shirt could fit, or at least be worn by, ~85% of the adult population. It would be big on some and small on others, but they could still wear it. Yet I can have two Poser figures of identical size and proportion and yet the clothing for one simply can not be worn by the other. I'm aware of the tools you suggested, but at the end of the day I would still have figure specific clothing and would need repeat the whole process again should a new figure come along.

I've got zBrush and 3D-Coat. I've got Poser (2014) and iClone and blender with Manuel Bastioni Laboratory. In 20 minutes I could have Daz Studio, too. I know what my options are as to what else is available and at what price points. My suggestions are specifically directed at improving Poser so that I would consider continuing to support it, as the current version is the first one I didn't purchase since version 5 was released.

MartinX posted at 5:42PM Tue, 21 November 2017 - #4318472

"This is a Poser thread in the Poser forum - we're not here to talk about the g figures, if you want to limit yourself to the DS/g figures, have at it."

Typical response here. The cloth fitting tech in Daz is simply more user friendly and quicker to apply. Stop being so defensive. It actually helps when admitting Posers problems, and finding a solution, not defending old techniques that are over complicated. You won't gain any new users that way. Unless the Poser method is better, faster or equal to the alternative, then it will fail to get new users onboard. Isn't that the point of the thread? Where can Poser go? It won't go anywhere unless it improves and simplifies it's application methods, and makes it simple to new users, NOT just to those who have sworn to the grave not to use anything else and are stuck in old ways of doing things.

Its a typical response here because we don't want to bring down the wrath of the moderators.

The moderators get whiny when we do feature vs. feature comparisons. They call it software bashing. They also don't like it when we discuss the results of TCO analysis for DS content/software. They also call that software bashing.

In my experience, DS is fine, if you don't have a lot of content, can remember who made every item that you own, and you are willing to limit yourself to what is available to DS. And are willing to live on a WinTel box with a Nvidia graphics card.

That isn't an option for me:

No, I don't have everything installed. Yes, I can quit at any time. This amount of content means that one has to spend time on the front end, optimizing content for the most efficient workflow. I don't do single character stills. I do graphic novels. That means that I do group scenes. I need many different age groups, ethnicities, and clothing options.

Consider the following example: I have an ensemble cast of over 70 main characters, ranging in age from 5 to 80+. All races and a number of non-human races. Not only do I need full wardrobes for each (Minimum 1 week), I also need to be able to get at least half of these folks into the same outfit (uniform).

Another example: Ship 1 - the Von der Tann. The bridge (Star Trek TOS) has 13 stations. 3 shifts. 39 people (that can't look like they are all related to each other). Crew is 90% human (but not 90% Caucasian) Then there are other departments. That is before the "walk ons and red shirts". Everybody needs to be in the same uniform. And that is only 1 ship (I have several).

Kinda hard to do when over 95% (that percentage was midway through the g2 life-cycle, it's higher now) of the g figures are early 20 something Caucasians ranging from 5'10 (Vicky) to 6' 7" (Scott), and at best, only 10% of the clothing content could be worn in a professional environment.

This is why I use every figure I have collected since 2004. I can upgrade each of those base meshes (and I have) to the latest and greatest tech. Even my oldest figures are weight-mapped, and subdivided (where necessary). The g3 figures have a neat feature (facial bones). Poser has an equivalent feature (Control Surfaces). I can (and have) added them to many other figures. How do you add facial bones (or it's equivalent) to older figures in DS?

Nothing wrong with DS, but it is simply too limited for what I do.

Moogal,

Have you ever been involved with software development? I have.

There are a series of trade-offs involved. Will the new feature sell enough copies of Poser to justify the cost of developing (AND supporting) the new feature.

People haven't been demanding a better dynamic cloth room - they have been demanding that SM (and e-Frontier, and Curious Labs) fix the d@#$%d UI to where it is comprehensible. It helps that we are finally to the point where the hardware isn't brought to its knees when doing a sim. (That has actually driven my computer purchases over the past decade). People were whining about the render engine. Superfly is easier to use than either Reality or LuxRender. Poser users want a 1-click solution, not a 3 click solution. And they are cheap.

I am sorry you haven't found any use for all of the new features that have been added over the years - myself, I couldn't go back to Poser 2014, much less earlier versions.

bust out the seams of their clothes when I bend an elbow. There are multiple solutions for this. Use dynamic clothing (the easiest); Merge clothing and figure into 1 figure; remember to magnetize clothing; add missing body morph; use the fitting room; use morph brush.

lose their hair when I turn their heads. The fact that you forgot to parent the hair figure to the character isn't a software problem.

Why not a hybrid sim that lets you conform your clothing and then makes it part of the original figure, and maintains relative distances throughout posing. Have you looked at the properties tab on the clothing? Match Endpoints; Follow Origins; Include translations should address those. Or use the Combine Figure command.

I was asking for a way to replace a body part with an arbitrary mesh and have it seamlessly blend in to the figure, irrespective of UVs, materials or grouping. You have Zbrush - sculpt what you want there and import it into Poser as a Morph Target.

I don't think Creature Creator did what you seem to think it did (As an added bonus, you couldn't undo a number of the morphs once they were used). We've been able to adjust scaling (and moving the joint centers) for a few versions now. I'd recommend spending some quality time with the joint editor (accessed from the Windows menu). Not only is it covered in the manual, SM covered how to do it in webinars back in the 2012 era.

Using your t-shirt example, we have that already - it's called dynamic clothing.

I would suggest that you submit to your requests to SM (There is a Submit Your Poser Suggestions to Smith Micro). As a minimum, you might want to spend some quality time over on the SM forums - that is where the action is. C'mon Project E.

Okay - first up, I'm not bashing anything. I used the Genesis figures and clothing as an illustration, not as the point.

The point is that Poser needs something like this. Sure, you can get the same results - with external apps, more time spent by the user, and a more convoluted workflow, but... why? Why should that be necessary?

Please don't dodge it by saying that software development is hard... I smack around code for a living as well (and simple/fast collision detection functions have been around since the days of DOOM, for cryin' out loud! And before you say it, we've got enough horsepower these days to get past the bounding box.)

Yes, SM has to balance features against ROI - so does everyone else, but most of them seem to do it well enough... So tell me: where would you not see an increased level of customer interest in having an in-app simple (to the customer) means of utilizing nearly every bit of clothing made in the past frickin' 12+ years (or more) for your default figures? Maybe expose the API so that folks at, say, HiveWire could add definitions to it to allow clothing fits to the Dawn and Dusk figures? Opens up a massive pile of good stuff for the customer, and since SM makes its money from the application (and not really from content)? Not like I'm asking them to supply a free MacBook Pro with every purchase here, and they'd see ROI fairly quickly from it, from newbie and old hand alike.

Sure, I could ask SM directly, but they likely already know about this, and I think they can hire who they need to. So what's holding them back? I've given my theories earlier; I hope they change their minds.

Penguinisto posted at 10:52PM Tue, 21 November 2017 - #4318488

Okay - first up, I'm not bashing anything. I used the Genesis figures and clothing as an illustration, not as the point.

The point is that Poser needs something like this. Sure, you can get the same results - with external apps, more time spent by the user, and a more convoluted workflow, but... why? Why should that be necessary?

Please don't dodge it by saying that software development is hard... I smack around code for a living as well (and simple/fast collision detection functions have been around since the days of DOOM, for cryin' out loud! And before you say it, we've got enough horsepower these days to get past the bounding box.)

Yes, SM has to balance features against ROI - so does everyone else, but most of them seem to do it well enough... So tell me: where would you not see an increased level of customer interest in having an in-app simple (to the customer) means of utilizing nearly every bit of clothing made in the past frickin' 12+ years (or more) for your default figures? Maybe expose the API so that folks at, say, HiveWire could add definitions to it to allow clothing fits to the Dawn and Dusk figures? Opens up a massive pile of good stuff for the customer, and since SM makes its money from the application (and not really from content)? Not like I'm asking them to supply a free MacBook Pro with every purchase here, and they'd see ROI fairly quickly from it, from newbie and old hand alike.

Sure, I could ask SM directly, but they likely already know about this, and I think they can hire who they need to. So what's holding them back? I've given my theories earlier; I hope they change their minds.

Using a g figure/DS comparison is a good way to get a flame war going.

We have in-app, simple to the customer, means of utilizing every bit of clothing made in the last 12+ years. It's called the fitting room. Before that, we had Wardrobe Wizard and/or Xdresser. The tools are there - it is up to the end user to use them. It's like the cloth room - once you muster up the courage use it, you kick yourself for not using it sooner.

Maybe expose the API so that folks at, say, HiveWire could add definitions to it to allow clothing fits to the Dawn and Dusk figures?

Have you ever used the fitting room? Poser doesn't use definitions for clothing fits - that is a DS thing. The fitting room works with all figures. It is easiest to use it with a developer rig, but isn't necessary.

If you are in a hurry, (or need to convert 50+Gb of V4 content) Lyrra made the Fit Room Magnets for Dawn, Dusk, Paul, and Pauline (I am hoping for more when Orion, Venus, and Project E are launched.), they automagically position the clothing so that a fitting room session is 30 second process instead of a 60 second process (On my computer, anyway). It isn't rocket science. It does however take 3 or 4 clicks. Which apparently is much too difficult for some users.

As I have stated before - I have lots of V4 outfits that have never been worn by V4 in my stories. My bloated V4 clothing runtimes are available for any figure I care to use. Hair is decoupled from figures thanks to Netherworks' Hair Control System. I harvest V4/M4 textures via Texture Transformer and Texture Converter (both excellent investments) for use with other meshes. I can even use them to replace the crap textures that come with the g characters I have purchased. (Look Ma! No more painted on underboob shadows on the latest and greatest g figures!).

If one uses all of the tools available, one's options expand exponentially. "Learned Helplessness" isn't a Poser thing.

My prep workflow for content massively smooths my workflow when I am actually Making Art.

My prep workflow is "convoluted" because too many vendors are still living in Oct 2007. They are unwilling to leverage any post-Poser 7 feature, even if it would make their lives easier. Example: I actually had a vendor tell me they didn't have time to learn the features of Poser 9, while they were developing their 1st clothing product for Dawn, a character that only works in Poser 9 or higher. If you don't understand how weight mapping works, your clothing product probably won't be all that good. Just Sayin'. I just fix what needs fixing and go about Making Art.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors drop character body morphs from clothing for example - it would make life easier for them and easier for the me. The reason they don't is because they cater to the rank beginners and folks that are aggressively uninterested in learning how to make the software go. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors at 'Rosity actually follow the sales guidelines for materials (material files in the materials subfolder, .mc6 required, .pz2s optional - Poser native PCFs for g content. DSON is a kludge); They don't, again because they cater to the folks that are still using a Poser 7 workflow, instead of leveraging the power of the current version (Even though 90+% of us are running Poser 9 or later) . This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors leave DOS naming conventions behind, so I don't have to restructure/rename nearly every d@#$ed file and folder (and as an added bonus, the search function in Poser would actually work). This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors actually THINK about how their product will be used by the end user. Example - hiding everything in an ego folder insures the customer can't find it. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Nothing would make me happier than to see clothing vendors THINK before they put everything in a runtime. If they make [cool add-on] for [Foo Outfit], use the same file structure as [Foo Outfit], so when it is installed, it is dropped in with the [Foo Outfit] materials, so the enduser can find it. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

A lot of features have been added to Poser due to vendor intransigence. It is why we have the fitting room, it is why we have access to the API via the add-on framework (it is where all of those little niche features are added by 3rd parties), it's why we have copy Morphs From, etc.

Tools are there, but for some, it is easier to whine than learn to use them.

If there's no Hot Babe that has a killer rig to Render. Debating about software ,tools etc etc is pointless. The #1 thing Poser has to have is a new Queen.There's no Kingdome with out her. All the trouble n civil war started when the old Queen left. It's simple No Queen ,No Poser.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

RorrKonn posted at 10:46AM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318498

If there's no Hot Babe that has a killer rig to Render. Debating about software ,tools etc etc is pointless. The #1 thing Poser has to have is a new Queen.There's no Kingdome with out her. All the trouble n civil war started when the old Queen left. It's simple No Queen ,No Poser.

Xmas 2017.

By MLK weekend, the Poser community will be saying Vicky Who?

ssgbryan posted at 5:43PM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318531

RorrKonn posted at 10:46AM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318498

If there's no Hot Babe that has a killer rig to Render. Debating about software ,tools etc etc is pointless. The #1 thing Poser has to have is a new Queen.There's no Kingdome with out her. All the trouble n civil war started when the old Queen left. It's simple No Queen ,No Poser.

Xmas 2017.

By MLK weekend, the Poser community will be saying Vicky Who?

You mean like they did years and years ago when Genesis came out?

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

ssgbryan posted at 6:57PM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318531

RorrKonn posted at 10:46AM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318498

If there's no Hot Babe that has a killer rig to Render. Debating about software ,tools etc etc is pointless. The #1 thing Poser has to have is a new Queen.There's no Kingdome with out her. All the trouble n civil war started when the old Queen left. It's simple No Queen ,No Poser.

Xmas 2017.

By MLK weekend, the Poser community will be saying Vicky Who?

Talk about cruelty to animals .Must have a lot more in info and renders lots n lots n a wireframe or two :)

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

'Geo-grafting is simply parenting another object/prop to a character. We've been able to do that since at least Poser 5, that I am personally aware of. It does have a fancier name though.'

Actually it is far more, a geograft becomes part of the mesh, not a parented prop in any way.

3anson posted at 6:12PM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318552

'Geo-grafting is simply parenting another object/prop to a character. We've been able to do that since at least Poser 5, that I am personally aware of. It does have a fancier name though.'

Actually it is far more, a geograft becomes part of the mesh, not a parented prop in any way.

And how does that become an advantage?

Boolean is Boolean OK .ssgbryan Show n tell us about this hot new character for Poser ,ya :)

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

ssgbryan posted at 7:12AM Thu, 23 November 2017 - #4318558

3anson posted at 6:12PM Wed, 22 November 2017 - #4318552

'Geo-grafting is simply parenting another object/prop to a character. We've been able to do that since at least Poser 5, that I am personally aware of. It does have a fancier name though.'

Actually it is far more, a geograft becomes part of the mesh, not a parented prop in any way.

And how does that become an advantage?

the advantage is, that it becomes "part of the mesh". No gap between the conformed figure and the host figure. No transparency map for the edges needed. Poser needs something like that. Agree to RorrKonn. Poser will finally have a Queen. I'd say: the first real Queen. Xmas will be special this year. :-)

How we got stuck on Boolean I'll never know and why are we calling Boolean geo-grafting I'll never know that either. Would be so helpful if all the app's called the same tools the same thing.

Anyways if you geo-graft 2 rigged meshes together .Does the rigs n morphs still work ?Does it mess the UV Maps up ?If not you would still have a odd place where the 2 different textures are. you know like a seem. right ? Does normal n displacement maps still work ?

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

I have stated before - I have lots of V4 outfits that have never been worn by V4 in my stories. My bloated V4 clothing runtimes are available for any figure I care to use. Hair is decoupled from figures thanks to Netherworks' Hair Control System. I harvest V4/M4 textures via Texture Transformer and Texture Converter (both excellent investments) for use with other meshes.">>snip<<

Hmm...... here is the problem (from a marketing& businees survival perspective) Poser loyalists are still using V4 and her content as their standard. poser will not survive unless there is growth its user base from NEW users.That is the reality of market growth.

New users want to see NEW stuff.

No new user gets excited about an Iphone because it is promoted as being able to run some 10 year old app from IOS 1.5 with some "extra steps" involved

No new user gets excited about an android phone because it still supports some 10 year old app from android 3.1 with some "extra steps" involved.

No video gamer gets excited about a game platform because technically you can get it run/play "Duke Nukem"with some "extra steps" involved.

Sure it remains possible for us DS users to still use V4 's catalogue on the genesis figures via the autofit technology in DS, but spend some time in the Daz forums and it becomes obvious that content buyers have long since moved on to the new stuff being sold.

And V4 Clothing is made even less relevant by the new built in hybrid Dforce cloth engine in DS that makes any CONFORMER dynamic.

Put the $349 VS $0 USD price disparity aside for a moment.

And try to convince a new user to learn those clever 8 step hacks to use older V4 clothing from the crumbling caves of the past.

Or give them the option of DS ,the lates genesis figures and automatic use of the new and shiny content being sold in the Daz store daily and it is a no brainer which platform the new user is going to choose.

My website

YouTube Channel

wolf359 posted at 3:15PM Sun, 26 November 2017 - #4318687

I have stated before - I have lots of V4 outfits that have never been worn by V4 in my stories. My bloated V4 clothing runtimes are available for any figure I care to use. Hair is decoupled from figures thanks to Netherworks' Hair Control System. I harvest V4/M4 textures via Texture Transformer and Texture Converter (both excellent investments) for use with other meshes.">>snip<<

Hmm...... here is the problem (from a marketing& businees survival perspective) Poser loyalists are still using V4 and her content as their standard. poser will not survive unless there is growth its user base from NEW users.That is the reality of market growth.

New users want to see NEW stuff.

No new user gets excited about an Iphone because it is promoted as being able to run some 10 year old app from IOS 1.5 with some "extra steps" involved

No new user gets excited about an android phone because it still supports some 10 year old app from android 3.1 with some "extra steps" involved.

No video gamer gets excited about a game platform because technically you can get it run/play "Duke Nukem"with some "extra steps" involved.

Sure it remains possible for us DS users to still use V4 's catalogue on the genesis figures via the autofit technology in DS, but spend some time in the Daz forums and it becomes obvious that content buyers have long since moved on to the new stuff being sold.

And V4 Clothing is made even less relevant by the new built in hybrid Dforce cloth engine in DS that makes any CONFORMER dynamic.

Put the $349 VS $0 USD price disparity aside for a moment.

And try to convince a new user to learn those clever 8 step hacks to use older V4 clothing from the crumbling caves of the past.

Or give them the option of DS ,the lates genesis figures and automatic use of the new and shiny content being sold in the Daz store daily and it is a no brainer which platform the new user is going to choose.

I object ,I object .to the $0,000,000.00 Cause after you go shopping it's a long long very long ways from $0,000,000.00 ;)

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

oh & Posers is only $64.99

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

wolf359 posted at 1:38PM Sun, 26 November 2017 - #4318687

I have stated before - I have lots of V4 outfits that have never been worn by V4 in my stories. My bloated V4 clothing runtimes are available for any figure I care to use. Hair is decoupled from figures thanks to Netherworks' Hair Control System. I harvest V4/M4 textures via Texture Transformer and Texture Converter (both excellent investments) for use with other meshes.">>snip<<

Hmm...... here is the problem (from a marketing& businees survival perspective) Poser loyalists are still using V4 and her content as their standard. poser will not survive unless there is growth its user base from NEW users.That is the reality of market growth.

New users want to see NEW stuff.

No new user gets excited about an Iphone because it is promoted as being able to run some 10 year old app from IOS 1.5 with some "extra steps" involved

No new user gets excited about an android phone because it still supports some 10 year old app from android 3.1 with some "extra steps" involved.

No video gamer gets excited about a game platform because technically you can get it run/play "Duke Nukem"with some "extra steps" involved.

Sure it remains possible for us DS users to still use V4 's catalogue on the genesis figures via the autofit technology in DS, but spend some time in the Daz forums and it becomes obvious that content buyers have long since moved on to the new stuff being sold.

And V4 Clothing is made even less relevant by the new built in hybrid Dforce cloth engine in DS that makes any CONFORMER dynamic.

Put the $349 VS $0 USD price disparity aside for a moment.

And try to convince a new user to learn those clever 8 step hacks to use older V4 clothing from the crumbling caves of the past.

Or give them the option of DS ,the lates genesis figures and automatic use of the new and shiny content being sold in the Daz store daily and it is a no brainer which platform the new user is going to choose.

Is that really the hill you want to die on?

I've been haunting the DS forums since 2004 - those fine folks have been recycling the same "vision" of art since V3 - single image pinup/fantasy art. DS is fine, IF one is willing to live with it's small, walled garden - it is limited in both content and tools available. Dforce? Yay! DS is catching up to Poser 5.

I'm a Poser Pro 11 user - I don't have a walled garden, I have 40 acres and a mule. Yes, my workflow is a bit convoluted, I don't live with a Poser 4 workflow - but if I was doing the same, single image pin up art that beginners do, 90% of those steps aren't necessary. What I do CAN'T be done in DS, because DS doesn't have the tools necessary to execute my vision.

New users aren't going to see NEW stuff, regardless of figure, when vendors are hell-bent that they aren't going to make NEW stuff. There are a LOT of things I would like to buy, but vendors don't make it. So I have two choices - not execute my vision, or bend, fold, mutilate, or kitbash what I own. I choose to execute my vision.

On to specifics......

Go look at characters being made - doesn't matter what the base mesh is, they all look alike. Vendors use the same exact features, regardless of base mesh - they use the exact same physical features, and/or they use the same skin textures with no changes. (Pick a vendor and look at their main promo images for each character they make - they all look related.)

AFA content, we had a much wider variety of content back in the V3/M3 era than we do today. Fortunately, that doesn't matter for Poser users - we pick the figures we want to use, the clothing we want to use, and have at it. We have magnitudes of more content than the competition. We can do this because the tools are in the software, not the figures.

BTW, let me know when a DS vendor figures out how to make movement morphs for their clothing, like we had with that "ancient" V4 (or V3 for that matter). BTW, how much of that "new" content is recycled from earlier figures? Here's a hint - if it can use textures from earlier content - it is the same product. Take a look at the period content for the g figures - a lot of it is just recycled V4/M4 content, as are shoes.

As a Poser user, I am not repurchasing content I already own. Nor am I dropping $20 on an outfit (with 1 or 2 textures), when I can get literally hundreds of them for $1.99 (or less). I was picking up characters and clothing for V4/M4 for 52 cents apiece.

DS is great, IF your goal is to be a 3rd rate Elvgrin wannabe. But, to move beyond that - they have to expand their skills, just like Poser users.

If I limit myself to any figure OTHER than M4/V4, how do I clothe characters in a period (any period) piece? How do I clothe characters in a professional environment? How do I clothe characters in the spring, fall or winter?

Answer - you can't, without either autofitting (for DS) or Fit room (Poser) M4/V4 content. V4/M4 is the common language for Poser/DS, due to the length of time those meshes were available, and the sheer glut of content made for them.

Think I'm kidding? Pick any figure not named M4/V4 and try to get them a very basic wardrobe (1 week of clothing, per season) using only clothing for that g figure.

A DS user will be autofitting the hell out of clothing content (usually M4/V4), just like a Poser user.

Here's another one for you - I need stock a Star Trek ship with figures - they need to be in the same uniform. As you try to get everyone in the same outfit, how many ethnic groups can you manage? I can get Sydney (Jessi, Olivia), Dawn, Roxie, Miki (1-4), P6Jessi, Pauline, Eroko, Alyson, Kez, Scarlett, V2, V3, V4, V5, V6, and V7 in the same V4 Courageous outfit. The same can be said for male figures. SM characters, Daz Characters, 3rd party characters - it's all grist for the mill.

Why do all of those figures matter? Because I need more than early 20's Caucasians. Each mesh may only have 2 or 3 separate ethnic characters, BUT with enough base characters, I can get a nice, diverse group. Try that with only using 1 base figure. As a Poser user, I can do that, because I have many more figures available to me.

As far as that "price disparity"? If you want Poser Pro's tool set - you'll be spending more than $349 for add-ons. And you still can't leverage as much as one can with Poser.

"BTW, let me know when a DS vendor figures out how to make movement morphs for their clothing"

Most of them have tons of movement morphs. It helps if you look at the what's included list. If you are going to make an argument, please do so without bias.

" Because I need more than early 20's Caucasians. Each mesh may only have 2 or 3 separate ethnic characters, BUT with enough base characters, I can get a nice, diverse group. Try that with only using 1 base figure. As a Poser user, I can do that, because I have many more figures available to me."

You can get all that on one base and be able to blend them together. Nothing is more powerful than that system. Why do you think more people use it? The days of loading different meshes for specific characters are long gone my friend, when they can all exist on a single mesh. The G tech is the standard for figure diversity and flexibility. Please loose the old school way of thinking. It is not convenient at all. If this is your argument then sadly you have failed.

Ok you talk all this Oh Poser can do this and that. Can we see your results? Let us put your theories to the test. Let us see if your images based on your preferences are of standard that most uses want as an end result vs effort involved. Let us see if your comments can be justified end result wise, or if it is just personal preference. Show us some of your work?

MartinX posted at 4:48AM Mon, 27 November 2017 - #4318699

"BTW, let me know when a DS vendor figures out how to make movement morphs for their clothing"

Most of them have tons of movement morphs. It helps if you look at the what's included list. If you are going to make an argument, please do so without bias.

" Because I need more than early 20's Caucasians. Each mesh may only have 2 or 3 separate ethnic characters, BUT with enough base characters, I can get a nice, diverse group. Try that with only using 1 base figure. As a Poser user, I can do that, because I have many more figures available to me."

You can get all that on one base and be able to blend them together. Nothing is more powerful than that system. Why do you think more people use it? The days of loading different meshes for specific characters are long gone my friend, when they can all exist on a single mesh. The G tech is the standard for figure diversity and flexibility. Please loose the old school way of thinking. It is not convenient at all. If this is your argument then sadly you have failed.

Ok you talk all this Oh Poser can do this and that. Can we see your results? Let us put your theories to the test. Let us see if your images based on your preferences are of standard that most uses want as an end result vs effort involved. Let us see if your comments can be justified end result wise, or if it is just personal preference. Show us some of your work?

And can we see YOUR results?

wimvdb posted at 11:09PM Sun, 26 November 2017 - #4318705

MartinX posted at 4:48AM Mon, 27 November 2017 - #4318699

"BTW, let me know when a DS vendor figures out how to make movement morphs for their clothing"

Most of them have tons of movement morphs. It helps if you look at the what's included list. If you are going to make an argument, please do so without bias.

" Because I need more than early 20's Caucasians. Each mesh may only have 2 or 3 separate ethnic characters, BUT with enough base characters, I can get a nice, diverse group. Try that with only using 1 base figure. As a Poser user, I can do that, because I have many more figures available to me."

You can get all that on one base and be able to blend them together. Nothing is more powerful than that system. Why do you think more people use it? The days of loading different meshes for specific characters are long gone my friend, when they can all exist on a single mesh. The G tech is the standard for figure diversity and flexibility. Please loose the old school way of thinking. It is not convenient at all. If this is your argument then sadly you have failed.

Ok you talk all this Oh Poser can do this and that. Can we see your results? Let us put your theories to the test. Let us see if your images based on your preferences are of standard that most uses want as an end result vs effort involved. Let us see if your comments can be justified end result wise, or if it is just personal preference. Show us some of your work?

And can we see YOUR results?

I'll accept MartinX's challenge....

MartinX will start moving the goal posts, just as he did here. I don't see DS characters out it the wild (outside of 3d porn), but I do see the SM figures - sometimes in the most unlikely places. The reality is that Poser is the 3d worlds dirty little secret. If you need to whip something up using human figures on a very tight deadline, a lot of art departments whip out their copy of Poser, pose the SM figures and import it into another part of their workflow - which is why I see the SM figures at the grocery store, on safety cards when I am flying, etc.

What he is demanding is subjective, which is precisely why he moved those goal posts. All images are based on the artist's personal preferences, as I am sure he is well aware of. In the end, he is demanding that I work within his views as to what DS "uses" want. Like I care what they want.

There are two schools of thought on figures - right tool for the right job, or try to do everything with one tool. I belong to the former.

My position is that in Poser, clothing is divorced from figures. As such, I can use any character that strikes my fancy. As an example (V4 Courageous Test):

V4 Courageous Test copy.png

In this example, I have from left to right - Dawn, Kez, The Girl (V3 gen), Michelle, Anastasia (Alyson 2), P6 Jessi, Miki 2, Mariko, G2 Jessi, & V3. I don't have Roxie, or Pauline here (running out of memory) - and Eroko is still tied up down in security (Bonus points if you get the reference.) The only thing that is difficult to move is shoes. There is no 1-click solution for those, since it depends on how the base character's foot is posed.

My position is that I have more characters to choose from than he does. I can use every one he does, along with literally hundreds that he can't.

My position is that I can put any character into any outfit. I can use every outfit he can use, along with literally hundreds that he can't - short of pulling it into a modeling program and rebuilding it.

My position is that I don't have to go buy a bunch of new characters, outfits, etc every time a new version of Poser is released. I can simply leverage what I already own, and add new tech to legacy meshes, which lowers my TCO costs.

My question is how does MartinX get the V4 Courageous outfit on non-g figures in DS.

Outside of the DS version of Dawn, the answer is that he can't - so he will prattle on about he he doesn't "need" or "want" any non-g figure.

I'm guessing that DS users are getting a little concerned with Project E just having a projected Xmas release date. We usually see an uptick of concern trolls when a new Poser figure approaches release.

Poser Pro 11 - 40 acres and a mule.......

ssgbryan posted at 7:57AM Mon, 27 November 2017 - #4318710

My question is how does MartinX get the V4 Courageous outfit on non-g figures in DS.

Outside of the DS version of Dawn, the answer is that he can't - so he will prattle on about he he doesn't "need" or "want" any non-g figure.

Isn't that the different workflow in the programs that MartinX is pointing out?

As you say, in Poser, the program has become flexible to be able to handle multiple characters, while DS has made the figure flexible to be able handle multiple characters.

Each approach has it advantages and disadvantages.

Is the poser approach really offering you more figures, or are you forced to use more figures because Poser can't morph them too far from their original shapes?

regards
prixat

prixat posted at 3:52AM Mon, 27 November 2017 - #4318711

Each approach has it advantages and disadvantages.

Is the poser approach really offering you more figures, or are you forced to use more figures because Poser can't morph them too far from their original shapes?

Poser can handle as many morphs as you can throw at it in a figure. Even Paul was morphed to a preteen boy. Using ColorCurvature's PML script, I was able to convert all of my DAZ Generation 3 figures into one master base mesh. (I think I used M3 as the master mesh, IIRC). Everybody from the Freak to the mill kids are now morphs of the same mesh in Poser. The only two that I don't have are She Freak and the Girl 3. I haven't copied all of their joint parameters over yet, (because it was just another one of my rigging experiments) but Poser's automated joint center tool didn't do such a bad job, just needs some cleaning up in spots. Mostly in fingers.

You are right - each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, and each program has made moves in terms of tools and utilities that diminish the end user's dependency on waiting for vendors to build the clothing they want for the figure they want to use.

prixat posted at 1:46AM Mon, 27 November 2017 - [#4318711](#msg4318711

Isn't that the different workflow in the programs that MartinX is pointing out?

As you say, in Poser, the program has become flexible to be able to handle multiple characters, while DS has made the figure flexible to be able handle multiple characters.

Each approach has it advantages and disadvantages

Is the poser approach really offering you more figures, or are you forced to use more figures because Poser can't morph them too far from their original shapes?

More figures, More features. If the new tech is in the figure, it can't be backported to earlier figures. With Poser, I can take the Poser 2 Low Res figure, weight map it, subdivide it. In this example, the Poser2 LoRes Female in all of it's glory - stock on the left, updated on the right.

LoRez Poser 2 Female-sm.png

Why does this matter? Because in my Star Trek Universe, if a ship has 430 people, I shouldn't have empty corridors. I use these for filling empty spaces.

More Figures: If I load every morph set I have for Sydney (and I have about 100 characters for them), she has as many morphs (and is just as heavy, memory wise) as a fully loaded V4. Both approach 350Mb. The real difference between DAZ figures and other figures is that the DAZ figures have a cottage industry built around fixing the shortcomings of the figure. The others don't have that.

Do you know what the percentage of DAZ figures are Caucasian? It's over 92% (I've actually counted - that number has gone up since g3 dropped). In the stuff I do, I have people ranging in age from 5 to 90+. In addition, my cast of characters may not be up to David Weber proportions, but I still have lots of folks running around - all ages, all ethnicities. That is damned near impossible to using just 1 male and 1 female mesh.

The thing is - Vendors COULD do so much more with the g figures than they actually do. They were quite creative during the g1 era. Now everything is just a repeat of what they have done before.

More characters: Daz is the only platform with kids outside of the Hivewire baby, Luna. DAZ vendors are making little girls, but they aren't making little boys. What is being made is mostly dial-spins with no skin textures - It's kinda hard to use the g series skin textures on little boys, what with the facial stubble and all. Again, another reason I use many characters - back during the V3 era, we had this Bishi nonsense for H3 - I can move those textures over to my g male kids and I don't have to worry about excess body hair.

Back to using different base meshes. Consider the following:

Each figure has a completely different set of morphs, so I am more likely different looking figures. Especially when they use different texture maps. Too many Poser/DS vendors Caucasianize their ethnic characters - it went from being annoying to creepy a long time ago.

The most realistic black characters I have ever seen are those made by Reciecup. Reciecup is a black woman, so she gets all of the little details right. Most vendors simply slap a dark skin texture on their Caucasians and consider them done (and proceed to give them blue eyes, but no black ones).

If I need an Asian female, which makes more sense, loading one of the Miki series (a realistically sized, realistically proportioned Asian woman. I have 100+ of them) or an Asian Daz figure, that I have to wrestle with to get her to the right height, and correct eye colors. In fact, the main reason that the SM figures are my go-tos is because they ARE realistically sized. Victoria is 5'10" in DS and around 6' in Poser - that is less than 3% of the female population. The numbers for males are similar. I have to wrestle down every DAZ figure to ensure that they are around average (5' 5" female, 5'10 male.) V4/M4 have a quick fix - Lyrra's height scales. With other characters, I can use ColorCurvatures M4/K4 mixer - it works on any 2 characters based on the same mesh (I have the following mixes - V3/Sp3, V3/L3, Sp3/L3, V2/Mk, M3/D3, M3/L3, and D3/L3.) It's a bit harder to do in DS, with the way the dials/Layout is structured. Too much stuff to scroll through when you have either a large runtime, or make the mistake of letting DIM install everything, IMO.

In addition, vendors have a tendency to repeat features in every single character they make. It doesn't take long to go through a storefront and start to recognize tendencies that the vendors go back to repeatedly. I'll use Anagord as an example (because it starts with an A and I own a number of their products across several base meshes). Go look at their figures - they all have the exact same mouth structure. I like the characters, but I end up having to dial out the mouth. Thorne Sarsa (back when they made characters) same anime eyes, same small high breasts, same thin body structure. It follows through with all of the DAZ figures because the morphs are pretty much the same across all of the base meshes. Some vendors even use the exact same texture set across every single character they make (to include makeup). Which is annoying when paying the inflated prices of the g figures.

It is harder to do when the morph sets aren't the same (Which doesn't stop vendors from trying to replicate the exact same look across different meshes.).

More Features:

I don't feel the DS figures are more flexible. Consider the following:

To get new features, you have to purchase new characters. DS users can't add facial bones to g2 or earlier figures - but I can add control surfaces to any figure. If I want to use the Superfly render engine - I don't have to purchase Iray shaders. I load up EZSkin 3 and it converts them (at no cost to me.) It is much cheaper for me to move skin textures from 1 figure to another via Texture Transformer or Texture Converter (or both) than it is within DS.

Now let me combine the two. Over in the Star Trek thread, a couple of DS folks have been desperately looking for a g version of TNG's Borg Chick (Seven of Nine, aka Jerri Ryan).

So far, no joy (for them).

I have the V3 version made by Orion 1167. With a lot of work with Gen2x, DS users could get that into a g figure (if they have a copy of the V3 version AND are willing to do the work - most aren't - they want 1-click solutions).

I simply load the character into my WM version of V3, and run the skin through EZSkin 3. Easier, Faster. She is the Andoran on the far right side of the image I posted earlier. That isn't all I have done with it, however. I took that dial spin and converted it (2-clicks) into a single FBM. Now with the "Copy Morphs" command, I can copy that FBM into a blank, WM V3. It now only takes 50 or so Mb of memory instead of 200Mb. Memory becomes an issue when an artist moves outside of single image stills (On OSX, Poser starts to get sluggish over 7Gb). Now, if I don't like the results of that EZSkin 3 conversion, I can put almost any female skin I own onto the mesh (bounce from Texture Transformer and then final conversion via Texture Converter.

With Poser, it's all about the TCO (total cost of ownership).

Let's say, that Poser is the best programm ever. It still doesn't have one single good figure - yet. But there is hope. Looking foreward to christmas.

"To get new features, you have to purchase new characters. DS users can't add facial bones to g2 or earlier figures -

Wrong..again The figure set up tools, that ship with DS, allow adding bones for anyone who cares to do the work for a face bone rig.

Why would a DS want to add face bone to G2?? when they can just transfer any favorite V3,V4,G1,G2 character up to G3 using th GENX 2 plugin.

How did a face bone rig help "pauline's" campaign to be the "queen" of poser??

If I want to use the Superfly render engine - I don't have to purchase Iray shaders.

IRay will render any bitmapped based textures & do it with SSS obviously Iray metals and emssives need IRay shaders

It is much cheaper for me to move skin textures.

G1 and G2 can wear every skin map ever made for V4/M4 by clicking a button to switch UV's the Cayman studios UV set for G3/8 allows this same option but frankly most DS are using NEW textures from THIS Decade

"Now let me combine the two. Over in the Star Trek thread, a couple of DS folks have been desperately looking for a g version of TNG's Borg Chick (Seven of Nine, aka Jerri Ryan). So far, no joy (for them)."

Well darn!! you got us there friend in the realm of rendering a CG look alike of some old, bug eyed, post wall actress who has dissapeared from the scene, (much like V4's Dusty old content has)

Poser wins again!!

My website

YouTube Channel

I don't see DS characters out it the wild (outside of 3d porn),

Try looking at some professional CG online communities you see ,unlike paul& pauline, Daz Genesis is widely embrace and supported with plugins for use in professional environments

http://www.3dtoall.com/products/daztomaya</http:>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yub0-lKubrs

Go look at characters being made - doesn't matter what the base mesh is, they all look alike.

Dont blame peoples preferences/fetishes for 20 something, low BMI ,white girls on the Daz tech ..that is a social issue

After I quickly outgrew the whole "Digital Comic" thing I moved up to animated films here is a clip from one of my projects.

Figures are: Daz Mike 3 the original Daz Freak based on Mike3 A stand alone figure for poser Called 'BEO2K"

And Daz genesis 1 and Genesis 2 most wearing some variation of ONE Bodysuit from vendor "Hellfish studios" with no "fitting room" sessions or eight step workflows just move slider create different character both human& alien.

Video link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TYEp536iB8aVBBdHJWRE9jODg/view

My website

YouTube Channel

the one you love to hate

I can break you I can raise you Bring you to your knees Cause I'm the one you love to hate.

You can't fool me You can't rule me You only want to hang around Cause I'm the one you love to hate.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

wolf359 posted at 4:27PM Mon, 27 November 2017 - [#4318720](#msg4318720

Well darn!! you got us there friend in the realm of rendering a CG look alike of some old, bug eyed, post wall actress who has dissapeared from the scene, (much like V4's Dusty old content has)

Poser wins again!!

If you are doing a ST TNG comic, and want to use characters that the target audience would recognize, then yeah, it would be kinda important. These folks aren't invested in Cinema3d like you. They are hobbyists - you aren't.

For someone that doesn't use Poser, you spend an awful lot of time concern trolling in the Poser forums.

RorrKonn posted at 1:50AM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318735

the one you love to hate

I can break you I can raise you Bring you to your knees Cause I'm the one you love to hate.

You can't fool me You can't rule me You only want to hang around Cause I'm the one you love to hate.

O.T.: Love that album ;-)

What drives me mad about Poser is, that it is allmost amaizing. ALLMOST. If it was just bad, you could say meh and ignore it, but it excites brings you up and allmost there, right before the top, it lets you down. DARN !!!

AmbientShade posted at 8:31AM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318713

Poser can handle as many morphs as you can throw at it in a figure. Even Paul was morphed to a preteen boy. Using ColorCurvature's PML script, I was able to convert all of my DAZ Generation 3 figures into one master base mesh. (I think I used M3 as the master mesh, IIRC). Everybody from the Freak to the mill kids are now morphs of the same mesh in Poser. The only two that I don't have are She Freak and the Girl 3. I haven't copied all of their joint parameters over yet, (because it was just another one of my rigging experiments) but Poser's automated joint center tool didn't do such a bad job, just needs some cleaning up in spots. Mostly in fingers.

You are right - each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, and each program has made moves in terms of tools and utilities that diminish the end user's dependency on waiting for vendors to build the clothing they want for the figure they want to use.

Thanks, that was what I was asking, could all of ssgbryan's Star Trek characters have been morphed from G2 Jessi for example? ...and why weren't they?

regards
prixat

Whether one prefers to use one single mesh for all characters, or several different meshes to get the job done, is totally up to individual preferences. Neither is more 'correct' than the other, and I wish some people would stop preaching that other people are 'doing it wrong', just because they prefer a different method! The end result is the same, so why not just let people do what they want?

DreaminGirl posted at 2:59PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318768

Whether one prefers to use one single mesh for all characters, or several different meshes to get the job done, is totally up to individual preferences. Neither is more 'correct' than the other, and I wish some people would stop preaching that other people are 'doing it wrong', just because they prefer a different method! The end result is the same, so why not just let people do what they want?

I appreciate your attempt to ease the waves, but the question has been "where is Poser going?". It is obvious, that Poser cannot be taylored to everone's individual needs. It is natural, that users try to pull Poser in their direction. It doesn't make sense to surpress an argueing, it is more important, that this arguing remains fair, without personal attacks and insults.

-Timberwolf- posted at 3:23PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318773

I appreciate your attempt to ease the waves, but the question has been "where is Poser going?". It is obvious, that Poser cannot be taylored to everone's individual needs. It is natural, that users try to pull Poser in their direction. It doesn't make sense to surpress an argueing, it is more important, that this arguing remains fair, without personal attacks and insults.

Oh I agree, it's just that it seems so many doing the 'pulling' are people who don't even USE Poser. Like so many have said before, if Poser becomes a DS clone, what is the point of Poser?

prixat posted at 10:07AM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318765

Thanks, that was what I was asking, could all of ssgbryan's Star Trek characters have been morphed from G2 Jessi for example? ...and why weren't they?

Technically yes. It can be done with any set of figures that share the same base mesh. With Poser native figures, each of them have their own meshes, so in order to accomplish it with them you'd have to first choose a mesh you want to serve as your master mesh, then project all the shapes of the other figures you want to use onto that mesh using a program that is good at doing such a thing, such as zbrush. Bring each one back into Poser as an FBM and then adjust the rigging to match that morph via animated joint centers (Poser 11 will do the rigging part of it for you but the results are not always spot-on so there will be areas you need to adjust by hand). Rinse and repeat until you have all the figure shapes in that mesh that you want it to have.

AmbientShade posted at 4:45PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318778

Technically yes. It can be done with any set of figures that share the same base mesh. With Poser native figures, each of them have their own meshes, so in order to accomplish it with them you'd have to first choose a mesh you want to serve as your master mesh, then project all the shapes of the other figures you want to use onto that mesh using a program that is good at doing such a thing, such as zbrush. Bring each one back into Poser as an FBM and then adjust the rigging to match that morph via animated joint centers (Poser 11 will do the rigging part of it for you but the results are not always spot-on so there will be areas you need to adjust by hand). Rinse and repeat until you have all the figure shapes in that mesh that you want it to have.

Will doing all that save a lot of time eventually?

Or will it always be quicker to just use different figures with the fitting room etc.?

regards
prixat

DreaminGirl posted at 11:44AM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318775

Oh I agree, it's just that it seems so many doing the 'pulling' are people who don't even USE Poser. Like so many have said before, if Poser becomes a DS clone, what is the point of Poser?

The 'master mesh' concept doesn't make Poser a DS clone by itself. Technically it's been possible in Poser going back to Apollo Maximus. The tools Poser has provided over the last few versions have made it even easier to create a master mesh type figure, without making anyone dependent on it if they don't like that concept. There are a couple key ingredients it's lacking in order to be complete. UV swapping (so that textures don't get stretched with extreme morphs) and proper geometry swapping/grafting that doesn't break weight maps. That and removing the dependency on a mesh being broken into groups, so that all figures are truly single mesh. No more duplicated verts. If Poser 12 had just those 3 features I'd be happier than a sailor in a cat house and would buy 3 copies. But removing group dependency is apparently not an easy task, at least as I understand it. Adding features to the fitting room so that the results can be redistributed as morphs without violating copyrights would also be pretty awesome.

prixat posted at 12:10PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318786

Will doing all that save a lot of time eventually?

Or will it always be quicker to just use different figures with the fitting room etc.?

It's a time saver in the long run if you're willing to invest the time up front to make it all work. Because when you do it once you don't have to worry about it again. You'd have to go through and fit all your clothing to the mesh and all its shapes too of course, but again, once you do it once you don't have to worry about it later except for adding fits to any new clothing you buy - which you would be doing anyway if you wanted that new clothing to work on a figure it wasn't designed for. So I guess it depends on your point of view and workflow as to which approach would be easier.

To give a point of reference - it took me about an hour to convert all my generation 3 figures into one mesh and match the centers to the morph. That was using the PML script to load all the characters as morphs. Again I didn't go back and do any cleanup on the rigging and I didn't add any of the shaping morphs that each of those figures originally came with. So in all, once you get a rythm going, to get a fully functioning figure would probably take a couple dedicated days to do a clean job of it.

I wonder if there would be a market for that, like a "Shapes for Jesse" product?

(unless there's one I've missed or it's requires illegal distribution or something)

regards
prixat

ssgbryan posted at 12:49PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318716

prixat posted at 1:46AM Mon, 27 November 2017 - [#4318711](#msg4318711

Isn't that the different workflow in the programs that MartinX is pointing out?

As you say, in Poser, the program has become flexible to be able to handle multiple characters, while DS has made the figure flexible to be able handle multiple characters.

Each approach has it advantages and disadvantages

Is the poser approach really offering you more figures, or are you forced to use more figures because Poser can't morph them too far from their original shapes?

More figures, More features. If the new tech is in the figure, it can't be backported to earlier figures. With Poser, I can take the Poser 2 Low Res figure, weight map it, subdivide it. In this example, the Poser2 LoRes Female in all of it's glory - stock on the left, updated on the right.

And why hasn't SM done this with the content they supply? I have wished for ages at they would stop distributing the old content with its P4 materials and low-res .jpg textures. Instead, those could all be put somewhere online as optional content with a clear disclaimer as to why they are not part of the default content. And instead, updated versions of each should be released with each new version of Poser. When SSS was added to the mat room, the figures from version 2 on should have had their materials updated. When weight-mapping debuted in Poser, the figures from version 2 on should have been weight-mapped before the content was packaged. When bullet physics debuted, those figures should have all been set up for soft-body simulation. If I were a new user I either might never look at the older figures and see how they might still be useful, or I might look at them and misjudge how important the figure's level of modernization is to the final image and be left with a bad first impression of the program. Maybe the dream figure some people have been wanting is some ancient figure that's already out there but was never properly brought up to date with Poser itself.

And yes, I know that just like converting clothing from one figure to another this is something all of could each do ourselves. But why should so many community person hours need be eaten up by all of having to do these things when one person could do it and make the results available to everyone else? Every item of clothing could be retro-fitted to every character that the program ships with. It's great that the tools are finally there for us to do things ourselves, but that doesn't do any favors for the sizable percentage of users who do just expect to be able to drop something in and see it working as desired.

You could make your own shapes, but you couldn't use existing shapes like Sydney or Miki for a commercial project without getting SM's approval.

moogal posted at 1:09PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318797

More figures, More features. If the new tech is in the figure, it can't be backported to earlier figures. With Poser, I can take the Poser 2 Low Res figure, weight map it, subdivide it. In this example, the Poser2 LoRes Female in all of it's glory - stock on the left, updated on the right.

And why hasn't SM done this with the content they supply? I have wished for ages at they would stop distributing the old content with its P4 materials and low-res .jpg textures. Instead, those could all be put somewhere online as optional content with a clear disclaimer as to why they are not part of the default content. And instead, updated versions of each should be released with each new version of Poser. When SSS was added to the mat room, the figures from version 2 on should have had their materials updated. When weight-mapping debuted in Poser, the figures from version 2 on should have been weight-mapped before the content was packaged. When bullet physics debuted, those figures should have all been set up for soft-body simulation. If I were a new user I either might never look at the older figures and see how they might still be useful, or I might look at them and misjudge how important the figure's level of modernization is to the final image and be left with a bad first impression of the program. Maybe the dream figure some people have been wanting is some ancient figure that's already out there but was never properly brought up to date with Poser itself.

And yes, I know that just like converting clothing from one figure to another this is something all of could each do ourselves. But why should so many community person hours need be eaten up by all of having to do these things when one person could do it and make the results available to everyone else? Every item of clothing could be retro-fitted to every character that the program ships with. It's great that the tools are finally there for us to do things ourselves, but that doesn't do any favors for the sizable percentage of users who do just expect to be able to drop something in and see it working as desired.

A lot of us have been wanting the same thing. But some of that legacy content is blocked from being modified due to licensing issues. The rest of it is due to time and resource restraints. Some of the content was updated for P11, but there just wasn't enough manpower to do all of it. That would take a lot of time and people to get to all of it. Maybe if more people petitioned SM on their forums to allow updates to older content they would come up with a way to make it happen.

For someone that doesn't use Poser, you spend an awful lot of time concern trolling in the Poser forums."

Beleive what pleases you , but as an animator I still keep poser pro 2014 installed.

I have Commercial animated motion products over at Flipbook market DOTCOM for the DAZ G2 and G3 Figures Since Genesis 2 is technically " poser compatible" via DSON we animation vendors are required to provide QC tested PZ2's for any G2 products as well as DAZ .duf files.

Also I use natural motion Endorphin for my Character work requiring ragdoll physics. It exports PERFECT poser compatible BVH files.

Daz studio has a rubbish BVH importer as it does not offer the option to choose if your incoming BVH has the arms aligned on the X axis or Y axis.

So indeed ,some of my externally generated Motion is filtered through reliable old Mike 3( in poser pro 2014) before being resaved for use in Daz studio.

You understand now ??? ........these are tools to me........... nothing more

Not a religon

Not a fierce tribal affiliation where I must be at war with my hated enemies on the other side.

Unlike yourself , I have no Silly Emotional investment in this stuff

Relax mate.... its just a bit of disposable entertainment.

My website

YouTube Channel

wolf359 posted at 7:24PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318801

You understand now ??? ........these are tools to me........... nothing more

Not a religon

This should be written in big red Letters on top of any Poser and DAZ Studio forum.

-Timberwolf- posted at 5:34PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318803

wolf359 posted at 7:24PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318801

You understand now ??? ........these are tools to me........... nothing more

Not a religon

This should be written in big red Letters on top of any Poser and DAZ Studio forum.

blasphemer , Lite the fires. Summons the inquisition . LMAO. If Poser DAZ is your religion you seriously need to go n get you some real girls. Before you get Lost

I've watched this vs that for decades now .I thought it was a riot when Autodesk bought Softimage n Maya .But you know ,They still Autodesk Max vs Autodesk Maya ,so now it's Autodesk vs Autodesk LOL.

The best thing that happened to Poser was DAZ n DAZ Studio. DAZ got us Vicky.DAZ Studio got us SubD's. Competition is best for us as long as app's are competing for us .CGI won't stagnate. As long as it keeps growing and getting better I'm good n I so do not care witch company provides me with killer tools as long as there wicked.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

prixat posted at 2:30PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318765

Thanks, that was what I was asking, could all of ssgbryan's Star Trek characters have been morphed from G2 Jessi for example? ...and why weren't they?

That would be an awful lot of work to get the same result (TCO fail for me). My goal isn't to be a modeler. That's why Poser is a major part of my workflow and Zbrush (and DS) are helper programs.

It is faster for me to load a mesh, load a figure, make changes, and go. Go look at any storefront. Most character vendors are in a rinse, lather, repeat mode. After a couple it's pointless, unless you are harvesting skin textures.

My methodology is faster for what I do - telling stories. If my goal was stand alone, single image stills, that had no relationship to each other, then my methodology might not be the most efficient, but that isn't what I do.

Using Poser/DS content, I spend a bit of time on the front end, correcting everything that storefront QA's miss, along with bringing order to the chaos that is a typical vendors' runtime. Since I have to do that anyway, what is another few minutes deleting unneeded character morphs from clothing and running it through the fitting room?

Which is another selling point for Poser with me - with DS content, product clean up is several orders of magnitude more work than a typical Poser product.

DreaminGirl posted at 2:38PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318775

Oh I agree, it's just that it seems so many doing the 'pulling' are people who don't even USE Poser. Like so many have said before, if Poser becomes a DS clone, what is the point of Poser?

We see concern trolling by DS users and vendors in the Poser forums every time a new figure for Poser comes out. If they truly believed that they made the right choice, they wouldn't spend so much time here - they would be up in the DS forums (which they don't seem to spend much time in - funny that).

I expect them to be out in full force once Project E rolls out at Xmas.

BTW, SM would have to cut a lot of features out of Poser to make it a DS clone.

How do you harvest skin textures? I thought there were only a handful of TC-supported figures. Like V4 to Dawn, M4 to Dusk, etc. I've thought about getting it myself so that I can make a conversion for my figures, but I don't know what the restrictions are on that, and I'm not quite ready for it yet but would be good info for when I am.

I've never tried but seems like the tools in zBrush, Max, Substance, Unity or something would have the tools to transfer a textures or a skin . There's no tool for that in any one the apps ?

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

AmbientShade posted at 7:41PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318843

How do you harvest skin textures? I thought there were only a handful of TC-supported figures. Like V4 to Dawn, M4 to Dusk, etc. I've thought about getting it myself so that I can make a conversion for my figures, but I don't know what the restrictions are on that, and I'm not quite ready for it yet but would be good info for when I am.

Texture Converter modules I own: Miki 2, M3, M4, SP3, V3, V4. I don’t own the Skye plug-in or the Laura plug-in. TC is on a netbook I have.

Texture Transformer (female textures): V4 to Dawn/Dawn to V4, V4 to Roxie, V4 to g2f/g2f to V4, g2f to g3f, v4 to g3f, V4 to Pauline

(male textures): M4 to Dusk/Dusk to M4, M4 to Paul, M4 to g2m/g2m to M4, M4 to g3m, g2m to g3m,

M4/V4 is the lingua franca of DS & Poser.

TC lets me go backwards (V4 to V3; M4 to M3), TT lets me go forward (V4 to Dawn/Pauline; M4 to Dusk/Paul).

Dphoadley remapped Ty2, Miki 2, V2, & V4 to take V3 textures (RTE encoded) The V2 to V3/V3 to V2 remap is no longer for sale at Content Paradise, but the others are.

I can swap female textures between: Dawn, g2f, g3f, Miki 2, Pauline, Roxie, TY2, V2, V3, and V4

Male textures: Dusk, g2m, g3m, M3, M4, and Paul

From what I remember, Miki 2 is a 90% scaled Sydney w/Miki 1020’s head. I should be able to move any Miki 2 conversion to the SM g2f figures. I’ll experiment after the holidays. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take much.

I really wish 'Rosity would make more TT modules for the legacy SM figures and Apollo Maximus (or SM would fund development for them, along with Lyrra's fit room magnets).

RorrKonn posted at 11:22PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318847

I've never tried but seems like the tools in zBrush, Max, Substance, Unity or something would have the tools to transfer a textures or a skin . There's no tool for that in any one the apps ?

In ZBrush you can project texture info from one model to another, if the models are exactly the same shape, but that's only useful for personal work, and requires zbrush. Texture Transformer converts texture maps to fit another figure's UV maps. They don't have to be the same shape. So as long as someone has TT and the correct plug-in for the figures they want to convert from/to, then they can convert their own textures, without needing zbrush or some other projection painting software. I don't know if a figure artist (like myself) can use TT to create their own plugins for it or not tho. Never tried it in Max. Unity doesn't have projection painting that I know of (haven't used it in a long time so maybe they've added something). Substance allows you to load the same model with a different UV set but that's not quite the same thing.

ssgbryan posted at 9:26AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318494

Using a g figure/DS comparison is a good way to get a flame war going.

...then perhaps it's time for all of us to stop emoting and start looking at the 'why', instead of the 'what'?

We have in-app, simple to the customer, means of utilizing every bit of clothing made in the last 12+ years. It's called the fitting room. Before that, we had Wardrobe Wizard and/or Xdresser. The tools are there - it is up to the end user to use them. It's like the cloth room - once you muster up the courage use it, you kick yourself for not using it sooner.

Question - is this automatic, or does it require the user to get in and beat things up to make it work? I'll go look it up, but if the latter, that's gonna be a disadvantage for most folks (not for the prosumer crowd, but for the consumer crowd).

If you are in a hurry, (or need to convert 50+Gb of V4 content) Lyrra made the Fit Room Magnets for Dawn, Dusk, Paul, and Pauline (I am hoping for more when Orion, Venus, and Project E are launched.), they automagically position the clothing so that a fitting room session is 30 second process instead of a 60 second process (On my computer, anyway). It isn't rocket science. It does however take 3 or 4 clicks. Which apparently is much too difficult for some users.

Magnets. Ugh. (Don't move your knee just yet; I detest D-Form just as much, no matter how useful either one may be.)
30-60 seconds... compared to 5-15 seconds. Forget preferences and it's not bashing - the comparison is to point out what SM is up against. Maybe moving it to a dev rig isn't a bad idea after all? On the flip side it does remove a lot from the prosumer user.

My prep workflow is "convoluted" because too many vendors are still living in Oct 2007. They are unwilling to leverage any post-Poser 7 feature, even if it would make their lives easier.

The reason why is that vendors (at least the business-savvy ones) don't want to lock themselves into one market, when they can make something that will sell in two markets.

I promise, from this side of things, I get irritated that something cool still comes in only .cr2/.pz2/etc format, instead of .duf/.dsf - however, I fully understand the reason why, and as a result I still keep a small(-ish) Runtime-style directory hierarchy in my on-disk DS dir structure.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors drop character body morphs from clothing for example - it would make life easier for them and easier for the me. The reason they don't is because they cater to the rank beginners and folks that are aggressively uninterested in learning how to make the software go. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors at 'Rosity actually follow the sales guidelines for materials (material files in the materials subfolder, .mc6 required, .pz2s optional - Poser native PCFs for g content. DSON is a kludge); They don't, again because they cater to the folks that are still using a Poser 7 workflow, instead of leveraging the power of the current version (Even though 90+% of us are running Poser 9 or later) . This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

As alluded to earlier - the underlying reason isn't laziness, it's maximizing sales to more than one market and minimizing time spent doing that. Vendors aren't dumb, and unless they can get enough ROI on such changes, 'good enough' is going to be as far as they want to get. Make things easier on them programmatically, and problem shrinks.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors leave DOS naming conventions behind, so I don't have to restructure/rename nearly every d@#$ed file and folder (and as an added bonus, the search function in Poser would actually work). This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Heh - that ain't just a Poser thing (why do you think there's an actual Postgres DB (for CMS) involved on this side of the software fence?

This is something that's more akin to the honor system than anything you can enforce, and the moment you make it too onerous for the vendor (subjectively, from the vendor's POV), the moment they decide that one market (or the other) might not be worth catering to.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors actually THINK about how their product will be used by the end user. Example - hiding everything in an ego folder insures the customer can't find it. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Again, nothing new here, and nobody has a monopoly on avoiding that. This (and the fact that OSX is still, eons later, bitchy about auto-merging files) is why I normally install stuff by hand when I can, renaming or rearranging as I go (and when I cannot, I dump it into a dummy folder, copypasta wholesale into my main dir structure, etc.)

Tools are there, but for some, it is easier to whine than learn to use them.

Perhaps, but remember: The customer may not always be right, but they're still the customer.

-Timberwolf- posted at 10:03AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318718

Let's say, that Poser is the best programm ever. It still doesn't have one single good figure - yet. But there is hope. Looking foreward to christmas.

I'm kind of curious about this as well. Fortunately (and unlike a previous coughrendacough attempt) it's actually made from clean mesh, which I'm really interested in seeing.

Been a long time since the project was first mooted...

RorrKonn posted at 10:10AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318833

Competition is best for us as long as app's are competing for us .CGI won't stagnate. As long as it keeps growing and getting better I'm good n I so do not care witch company provides me with killer tools as long as there wicked.

Precisely. Last thing I want is for either application to reign supreme and then stagnate.

Penguinisto posted at 1:27PM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318904

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors drop character body morphs from clothing for example - it would make life easier for them and easier for the me. The reason they don't is because they cater to the rank beginners and folks that are aggressively uninterested in learning how to make the software go. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

That's how you get boob socks and clothes that behave like cling wrap. Unless you're using dynamics (which the majority of customers do not) ERC and body morphs in clothing are still a requirement in both apps if you want your clothes to actually look and behave like clothes. People no longer including them does not mean that the tech has advanced to the point that they aren't still required, it just means that content makers have gotten lazy. There is no algorithm currently available that tells a shirt to automagically create movement wrinkles and folds or fill in the gap between boobs or butt cheeks. And if you're relying on an algorithm to shrink pants from a size 28 to a size 58 you're getting stretched pockets and buttons. All that stuff still has to be corrected by hand, in DS and Poser.

AmbientShade posted at 1:48PM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318914

There is no algorithm currently available that tells a shirt to automagically create movement wrinkles and folds or fill in the gap between boobs or butt cheeks. And if you're relying on an algorithm to shrink pants from a size 28 to a size 58 you're getting stretched pockets and buttons. All that stuff still has to be corrected by hand, in DS and Poser.

Just a sec - first up, I was talking about character morphs, not movement or aesthetic ones (such as wrinkles). Solving the cleavage problem is also not a character morph, but I know that DS has it solved nonetheless (albeit via 3rd-party in-app morphs such as Fit Control.) I believe Poser has similar (also 3rd-party in-app?) solutions, so that's not much of an issue either.

I suspect you're always going to get deformation in fixed-point mesh regions on clothing (buttons, pockets, etc), though that's not going to be solved by keeping character morphs around (at least I don't think so.)

In any event, that's kind of why I went with suggesting an option to have the user click-remove morphs as he or she desires. Wanna keep 'em? Go for it. Want 'em gone to make things load faster? Go for it.

Penguinisto posted at 11:55AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318904

Question - is this automatic, or does it require the user to get in and beat things up to make it work? I'll go look it up, but if the latter, that's gonna be a disadvantage for most folks (not for the prosumer crowd, but for the consumer crowd).

3 or 4 clicks. OTOH, that may encapsulate the difference between the two user bases. One doesn't become a painter by only painting by numbers.

Magnets. Ugh. (Don't move your knee just yet; I detest D-Form just as much, no matter how useful either one may be.)

30-60 seconds... compared to 5-15 seconds. Forget preferences and it's not bashing - the comparison is to point out what SM is up against. Maybe moving it to a dev rig isn't a bad idea after all? On the flip side it does remove a lot from the prosumer user.

All the magnets do is position the clothing for the conversion (which is what takes the longest) they are deleted when you delete the original outfit. They don't stay with the clothing. There is very little DS clothing content available for females outside of "clubwear" or lingerie. For males, it is even worse. Platform is irrelevant, all of us are going to be converting V4/M4 content for a long time to come.

The reason why is that vendors (at least the business-savvy ones) don't want to lock themselves into one market, when they can make something that will sell in two markets.

DS has been able to read Poser native content since the release of DS 4 - there hasn't been a need for material .pz2s for over a decade now; that was a hack for Poser 4. Oh, and let me know when DS vendors learn what goes where in a Poser runtime - as I stated before, I have over 1,000 DS packages installed - not ONE has the content in the correct subfolder, not one.

If DS vendors want to maximize sales, maybe they should leave V3/V4 era production processes behind. With all of the lighting advances on both platforms, I still see painted on underboob shadows, or light reflections painted into the eye maps, for example. 8k by 8k textures don't help, when one still has that nonsense to deal with.

If DS vendors want to maximize sales to both platforms, then they should make those PCFs Poser native, instead of using DSON - there is at least 1 that does, so there isn't a technical limitation. It doesn't take much in the way of time (seconds, for the most part).

The question I would ask every clothing vendor There are 10,000 clubwear outfits available today. Why should I buy yours?

I promise, from this side of things, I get irritated that something cool still comes in only .cr2/.pz2/etc format, instead of .duf/.dsf - however, I fully understand the reason why, and as a result I still keep a small(-ish) Runtime-style directory hierarchy in my on-disk DS dir structure.

DS can read Poser native content - you don't even have to Find someone to help you. An actual quote from DS documentation, btw.

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

Outside of pinup/fantasy art - DS still doesn't have much in the way of native clothing content. Let me know when you can get a week's worth of professional clothing; or winter clothing; or period clothing; etc.

At the end of the day, you are limited to the g figure. And if you want the latest features, as a DS user, you are back on the upgrade train. Poser users aren't - we simply add new features to the characters we like.

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

We've had that capability for years. You seem to be behind on what Poser is actually capable of - it is in the users manual. We find that pretty useful. Certainly easier than trolling forums, desperately looking for that Someone to help us.

As alluded to earlier - the underlying reason isn't laziness, it's maximizing sales to more than one market and minimizing time spent doing that. Vendors aren't dumb, and unless they can get enough ROI on such changes, 'good enough' is going to be as far as they want to get. Make things easier on them programmatically, and problem shrinks.

How is keeping a Poser 4 workflow "maximizing sales"? Just out of curiosity, why is it an article of faith amongst DS users that no one that uses Poser started with a version after version 4?

Endusers aren't using Poser 8 or earlier. The only people using Poser 8 or earlier are the vendors - everyone else has moved on. Since you were away, 'Rosity collected some data on who uses what. 90% of us are using Poser 9 or later, so there isn't a need for material .pz2s, there is no need torunallofthefilenamestoghether, or to use 8.3 naming conventions, etc. Go up to the Poser Technical sub forums. Anything below Poser 9 has been dead since they were made.

I've actually had a vendor tell me they didn't have time to learn Poser 9 features While they were making content for Dawn, a figure that only runs on Poser 9 or later. It's all about the laziness.

Heh - that ain't just a Poser thing (why do you think there's an actual Postgres DB (for CMS) involved on this side of the software fence?

That isn't a plus. The fact that a database is necessary is a software design failure. The system architect failed at the most basic level. Telling the vendors Put your characters in the Character subfolder, it why it exists is easier for customers and the storefront's QA.

It would also be easier for everyone if vendors named their products [foo dress] by [vendor] rather than hiding it in an ego subfolder. It would be easier for everyone if vendors that make texture add-ons for clothing named their product [foo addon for foo dress] and used the same files structure as [foo dress], so the very appropriately named DIM installs them together, so the enduser doesn't have to spend time trying to remember the name of a product.

That however, would require the vendor to look at their product from the perspective of the customer, and we all know that isn't happening.

This is something that's more akin to the honor system than anything you can enforce, and the moment you make it too onerous for the vendor (subjectively, from the vendor's POV), the moment they decide that one market (or the other) might not be worth catering to.

If that is the case then apparently there is no honor among DS vendors.

And more work for the enduser means the customer may purchase from someone else in the future. I have a list of vendors that not only would I not buy from, even if they made the rug that tied the room together, I won't download any freebies they made, just because of all of the work I would have to do to fix their products.

Again, nothing new here, and nobody has a monopoly on avoiding that. This (and the fact that OSX is still, eons later, bitchy about auto-merging files) is why I normally install stuff by hand when I can, renaming or rearranging as I go (and when I cannot, I dump it into a dummy folder, copypasta wholesale into my main dir structure, etc.)

You might want to update your copy of OSX - hasn't been bitchy (in that respect) for a while now. Anyone that is more than a rank beginner on either platform has to have a temp runtime to sort things.

At the end of the day, like everything else, Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to the DS/Poserverse. The difference is Poser's 10% is larger.

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Where is Poser going?