1. Please look at your ads carefully before posting them in the store. Showing Poser figures poking through their clothing looks bad. I've seen 2 in the last few days guilty of this. I know that photoshop touch-ups are not allowed, but you can always change the pose slightly. (Even worse, one was simply guilty of not conforming the clothes. It would have been okay, otherwise.) 2) Please proof read your stuff. I realize that English is a difficult language. If you have problems with English, ask for a volunteer who is fluent in English. I've turned down a few products because the product information was confusing. 3) If you put poses in your Poser sets, DO NOT include the morph channels in the poses!!! I've lost hours of work tweaking a character to my liking, then having it re-arranged when I applied a commercial pose. DO NOT do this. I will hunt you down!!! Realistically, I'll either delete the poses or spend a lot of time recreating the poses without the morph channels. You're wasting your time, and my time and money by including poses that screw up my work. 4) Please do not name your folders starting with a special character like the exclamation point. A lot of merchants are doing that, so your folder will not be the first one any way. I'll immediately rename all folders that start with '!' so you're wasting your time. 5) I appreciate the extras like cameras, etc. but realize that I have tons of folders with a few items in each folder. I have to condense them down so that all the folders will load. Please do not have names like a.cm2, b.cm2, etc. I have to go in and rename them to vendor-a.cm2, vendor-b.cm2, etc. This is also true for eye colors. I really appreciate them, but I have to rename them so I can move them and remember who made which ones. Naming readme files as just readme.txt pretty much guarantees I'll lose them. (BTW, renamefiles-v2.4 is a great batch renamer! I had to give it a workout today. Go to downloads at cnet.com. It's free.) Names have been omitted to protect the guilty.

I agree with just about everything you say here (as a merchant and a customer) except for the !/special character thing. I hate installing a product and then hunting around for the files. I have over 230 folders in my Pose directory along. As a result, I always rename everything (as I imagine most Poser users do, otherise they could never get their folders open or ever find a thing) and the special character helps me find my new stuff faster. This is why, as a merchant, I use the special character. I don't expect anyone to keep my products at the top of their list all the time; I am simply trying to help them find their new things faster after installation.

hehe, a good renamer is hard to find. I've gotten a few that made a terrible mess! BTW, I totally agree with it all, especially the ! character, though I do understand Kiers's point too :) I hate when the library file points to an .obj that is somewhere other than the Geometry folder. Then I have to go in with Metapad and change the references. Especially a pain when it is a set of clothes...

I agree with all the above. Folder names, however - I don't care about them, I rename everything anyway. But file names MUST be unique - not 'Pose 1, Pose 2' etc. Call them 'Johnny Sit 1, Johnny Sit 2' etc. I also want to add - Merchants: Make sure that your images are well composed, posed and lit - a little professionalism in the execution of your presentation goes a LONG way. If a thumb for a new product is lousy, I tend to ignore it. If the larger images are lousy, I tend to give them a quick look, and if the presentation is bad, I come to the (logical) assumption that if this merchant can't even present the product right, they can hardly have made it right. I just don't have faith in the product, since I don't have faith in the merchant. Sloppiness is unacceptable if you want to sell. So if you haven't bothered to correct English or spell check, you have hardly bothered to create usable products. Just think: if a major manufacturer of software were to misspell the name of their new app, would anyone dare buy the stupid thing? I don't think so. Just imagine if Windows XP had been called Widnose XP...... And don't give me nonsense about being bad at spelling. We're talking commercial quality here. Remember, your competitors are people like DAZ. Spell check in a word processor or ask someone else for help.... Then there's the problem of all the irrelevant little doodads that get sold for $5 or $8, stuff that is fine as a freebie but just wastes space in the Marketplace, bringing down the overall quality level. I get the feeling sometimes that the people who run the Marketplace don't have any kind of quality check at all.... The place turns into a flea market if it is allowed to. Don't get me wrong, I love good stuff at a low price, but there are SO MANY bits and pieces in the Marketplace that just don't belong there, from people who've never given way a freebie. And remember, fellow Posers - where does this 'home from home', Renderosity, have its origins? It was originally a primitive forum for people who loved to use Poser, and gave away to each other, both advice and freebies. The marketplace was a much later invention, to finance the running of the place. So NEVER tell me that we should be thankful for the freebies - they are the reason this place exists at all. I've been here since way before it was called Renderosity. Enough ranting. Disagree with me if you dare! (You're welcome to, I love a good debate) :] FishNose

Disagree with you? Never :) I'm all for freebies. I'd love it if EVERYTHING for Poser was free, but then if everything was free, there would be alot less stuff to use. I think that a pretty big portion of those ccreating stuff for the store wouldn't be creating anything at all if there was no way to profit from it. It's just too time consuming to create items for free unless you have a decent income. If you have a decent income from a job or business or something, you sometimes have more time to play with. I, on the other hand, spend 12-14 hours a day just working to pay bills, so whatever I managed to create would be extremely valuable to me. Especially since my kids would have to deal without the extra mommy-time while I worked on it. Heh. Anyway, I agree that many of the items are low in quality and take up valuable space. I guess many of those merchants are just hoping to earn a little extra cash off the odd sale here and there to finance their own marketplace spending. I've even thought of selling a couple of items myself, but before I could get them ready to go in the store I had a HD crash and had to fdisk and I wasn't able to back them up :( I hate this old beast of a system. Anyway, my rant to merchants is: For god's sake, if you're going to offer a freebie that requires the purchase of your item, PLEASE state on the thumbnail that it requires purchase of (ITEM) and try to fit it in the text description, too, in case the thumb is broken, which happens sometimes. I hate getting really excited about an item only to find out I have to buy something in order to use it. Especially when I can't afford to buy anything at the moment :(

If I may add to this list... Please give us alternative views. Not all characters are going to be shown facing forward in the final art. Whether it is clothing or hair or whatever, I want to see the back and side views, too. Showing me 6 color variants without changing the orientation of the item merely tells me that you can use PhotoShop's hue and saturation dials; it doesn't give me any useful information as to the structure or shape of the mesh. Please be clear as to whether you are offering different textures (which means pattern variants, and maybe even transmaps) or offering different colors. Offering a selection of colors is helpful to those people who do not have a decent paint program, but it should not be sold as a group of textures. Please check, or have your testers check, to be sure that everything needed is in the file and under the proper locations and names. Having something refer to a file in a certain directory on YOUR harddrive doesn't do us much good (besides allowing us a peek at how you have your harddrive organized). Finally, please don't use self-extracting executables. .zips and .sits can be opened by both Mac and PC users. Perhaps a poll could be taken, but I suspect that a large number of people would rather place items in folders of their choice... especially with the recent proliferation. There is a lot more competition these days. If we know exactly what we are getting, it makes it easier for us to rationalize and purchase an item. If we are in doubt, it is likely that we will pass it by in favor of something else. Carolly

...one persons' irrelevant doodad is another persons' key item !

Well, I am fairly sure we are required to make our products fit into the directory structure. Customers who wish to customize their installations can easily choose their own folders by extracting into a separate temp directory, renaming their folders, and then dragging the result on top of their Poser directory. Please remember that we often have to create for the "lowest common denominator"--meaning, Poser newbies who are not yet able to customize product installations because they aren't familiar with the poser file structure or types.

As for the marketing stuff.. well, I personally spent many, many hours on my promos, getting feedback as I went along, gritting my teeth, and fixing every little problem I was told about. "Looks great.. but that hair is no good. Change it. Better.. but the color clashes. Change it. An improvement.. but did you notice that she's crosseyed? Fix it." I have no problem admitting that promo work has reduced me to tears of frustration on at least one occasion. ;) I look at it this way: If I spent two weeks slaving away at a product for up to 14 hours a day, the promos should show it. I find the restrictions about postwork a challenge; how good can I make it look inside of Poser? And that's really what it's about.

Kiera - that's exactly what i do - unzip elsewhere, then move it later. Just as you suggest. Anything else is foolishness - you have no idea what was in there, or where it went.... or what it messed up. In fact, I do all unzipping and renaming and planning on a different harddisk. Your approach to promos and sale items is exactly right - do it well, do it before and not after. ming - do you mean, another unposable bookshelf, basic box type with 2 shelves in it, with simple wood tex, is terribly exciting - especially since there are about 10 well-made bookshelves of the same type available around the web for free? Nah..... :] FishNose

Oh, Please, please, please, show me characters at a decent 100mm camera focus. I can't tell anything from fisheyed monsters. Other than that, I love the automatic paths as long as everything in those folders has unique names and can be combined later. We'll buy more if we have enough folders to put them in-- simple as that. I Have To combine MAT/Pose files! If I have to rename too much, I'll toss it. It would help to have folders that mention the product, not the designer. But I can and do change those. And, 2 more things: if your readme is Really important, name it something that won't get over written; and give me a full detailed Read Me in the MarketPlace so I can check what I'm actually buying. I don't want to sound too bitchy, but I spend a Vast amount of money here -- enough that I need a search engine for my purchase page--and would like to continue to do that. Emily

...you're right, bookshelves are the only things that people are selling for 5-8 dollars...

That is one thing that drives me insane: people who use as many as 5 folders in the POSE directory for their product. My god, my names are all cut off and I have squished and smooshed as much as I POSSIBLY can. The first thing I have to do in those instances is make ONE folder and put everything inside of it. It's not so hard to organize things inside of ONE folder with creative naming. It may involve the use of ! and -, but it CAN be done. (In fact, special characters inside of folders is extremely helpful for organization--!MOR-blah, -bodytexa, -bodytexb, eye-blah, eye-blah, POSE-a, POSE-b..)

And for crying out loud, don't zip it all up where the paths begin with your name!!! The last thing I want to do with a purchase is unzip, rezip and unzip it correctly. I have a hard enough time getting items into correct folders.

Ha! As too th emerchants who put up poor renders, unconformed clothing, poorly lit stuff, they are, I assume, independantly wealthy, and don't really need to sell it, unlike me, who can actually use the money! I'd like to note that you can combine character, prop and pose folders youself, without any problems in Poser, but don't do that with geometry or texture folders (which you normaly don't see in Poser anyway), as they are cross-referenced. After saying that, I also dislike the idea of a character folder with 1 or 2 items in it, but the merchant does have to put it were you can find it. Mutiple pose folders and special (!) characters are silly, I agree. I do try and sort items in the pose folder on my items, though, I put real poses at the top by saving them with a blank leading space (an old Mac trick), and do names that will group them in sections, like "color redhead", "color blonde". Lots of things make it better for the customer, and should be done!

Gee, is Duke really in the store, and comes like that? Can you say the words "Quality Control" ;-)

This isn't a rant as much as some a little tidbit for any potential vendors. I have thought long and hard about a set of textures for a new clothing item, but decided against it because I was unable to see all of the different textures provided. They were present, I just couldn't actually see them because of lighting. After a few disappointments, I have decided to consider every purchase very thouroughly, and often 1 or 2 images aren't enough (are of poor quality) for me to feel comfortable hitting the "buy" button. just 1 opinion from one who has spent waaaay too much money on poser stuff. eric

It never ceases to amaze me how some merchants make their thumbs or previews so dark you cannot see the merchandise. Now, admittedly, my monitor is set with its brightness low - I find that easier on my eyes, which are pretty light sensative. But most thumbs from the good vendors show up fine, if just a trifle dark. If I have to turn up the brightness high enough to burn the monitor to try and see your product, the thumb is too dark - and if I can't see it, I won't buy it!

Oh, and here's another rant. If you are selling a model in another format as Poser-compatable, make sure it is. I'm working on a mideviel village sceene and am looking for buildings to fill it out - free, purchased, whatever. I'd already raided our marketplace and the Commune's, plus both group's freestuff; checked DAZ, 3dcafe, Avalon, and just every other site I have bookmarked for Poser - and I have a lot of them. Someone pointed me toward TurboSquid. I saw several great models in their Poser area that were JUST what I was looking for. They said quite clearly at the top that if the file was listed, it was in Poser's native format or an importable format. Last time I checked, .lwo (lightwave) models were not Poser compatable. And they had LOTS of lightwave models in the poser section, so it wasn't an isolated slipup.

I'd like to add: 1) Do not include Wig poses with any of your poses. Its a pain seeing your perfectly positioned wig pop a body length off the top of your character's head from a commercial pose. No commercial pose should pose anything BUT joints UNLESS its specifically labelled to do otherwise. Also like was stated earlier, do not include MT channels in poses UNLESS they are specifically MT poses. 2) I agree with the multiple pose directories. I have so many fricken pose directories already. If you're a merchant with several products, figure out a way to consolidate them into one or two directories. I don't like having 5 geometry folders with one item in each, 8 pose folders and 4 texture folders after installing 3 products from the same maker. 4) Please test your products. I bought someone's skin textures for Mike that had the texture misspelled in the cr2. Everytime I open this guy I have to tell poser what the real texture is. If I'm paying $20 I want this seamless. 5) I think every product should have a required list of exactly what's in it. 10 poses is not "lots of poses". An extra eye map is not "tons of cool stuff". 6) When making objects please name materials with sensable names. I forget which item I bought but it had 30 materials all named mat1, mat2, mat3, mat4... yeah good luck finding a part you wish to remap. 7) Don't make a prop a figure unless it needs to be a figure. This personally pisses me off to no end and I end up remaking the figure into a prop. And you'd be amazed at how many items work better as props than as figures. Shoes are a perfect example. You get much more out of a shoe making it a smart prop than to make it a conforming figure. The toe bend is just not worth a two part figure. Its just not worth the hassle to conform these items, especially if my figure has scaled legs and arms etc. Think prop first, figure second. Wigs are another example, especially if the wig has no articulated parts. I always end up just parenting the wig figure to the head anyway. If no part of the wig moves, why make it a figure?