Why are most of the new DAZ Store offerings DAZ Studio only?

MMHouston

I realize I am probably in the minority, but I have used Poser from Poser 4 on and have a considerable amount of material for Poser.  As I browse through the DAZ Store and Platinum Club items, mostly sets and props, I find they are mostly for DAZ Studio 4.9 only.

I know DAZ Studio is free (I actually have downloaded it) but I really like the Poser program and would like to keep using it but it is becoming difficult to find material for it here.

Has the support for Poser been reduced on purpose to force us to use DAZ Studio?

Byrdie

If you dig a little deeper thru the forums you will find several long and sometimes convoluted threads on the whole issue of decreasing Poser support. It is a rather heated topic and has caused no end of argument, frustration and confusion on all sides. Not to mention driven the mods into fits trying to keep things civil. Anyway, from what I understand now, Daz (the Company) has made so many improvements to their figures such as Victoria, Michael, etc. in the newest generations that they are technically incompatible with Poser so it is  in Smith Micro's hands to catch up with that progress, or not, as they so choose. There's also the question of time and effort; a PA who produces for both programs has to do twice as much work as one who is supporting Studio only but for less return on their labour since the demand is growing for more Genesis 3 /Genesis 8 products. So for most it's purely a business decision to drop Poser support in favor of what earns them a living. Can't really fault 'em for that now can we?

That said, I keep hoping for the situation to improve so that neither side loses out. But considering how complicated this issue is, I'm not expecting to see the next version of Genesis being anywhere Poser-compatible. Even with the world's biggest sledgehammer trying to wallop it in there.  ;-) 

Leana

I don't think DAZ is pushing for less support for Poser, they probably would be really happy to make more money from Poser users (they're a business after all). Part of the purpose behind the RDNA merger was to bring back Poser content and creators at DAZ, for example, though I don't think that was really successful.

The sad truth is that a good number of Poser users don't shop at DAZ anymore (for various reasons), which means that for some PAs the market for Poser content is simply not profitable enough anymore to spend the time making content compatible for both.
Another factor is that a lot of recent PAs started with DS and probably don't even own a copy of Poser. Buying a copy of Poser Pro and learning to use it well enough to produce content for it would mean a big investment in term of money and time (time that they won't use to produce new content for the store, so that means lost revenue). For that investment to be worth it they would need more customer ready to buy those products.
Besides with the addition of superfly in P11, full support would mean 4 render engines to support. Right now it's already difficult to find DS content which still supports 3delight besides DAZ Originals....

 

Basically, to get more Poser content produced we would need more Poser customers here, which is not likely to happen if there isn't more Poser content produced...

MMHouston

I understand where the articulated/rigged figures are involved (Victoria, Michael, Genesis, etc) but the the not so complicated props and sets (clocks, furniture, etc) is there really that much more work to make them compatible in Poser as well as DAZ Studio? [I obviously don't model CGI meshes...]

Leana

The same mesh can usually be used in both programs, the main additional work (IMO) is creating the Poser-format library files, the Poser version of the materials, and of course testing all that.

Re-saving / exporting all individual items in a format that Poser can read directly (as opposed to relying on the DSON importer plugin) is not difficult, but if there are a lot of items it will take time.

All materials included will need to be redone, as Poser material system is completely different from both 3Delight and IRay materials. And if you want to support the new Superfly engine added in P11 then that's yet another set of materials. If your items load with textures applied you'll probably want to re-save each item so that it loads with the proper Poser materials once you've happy with the material conversion.

If your pack included pre-loaded scenes you'll probably want to recreate them in Poser too.

Then you'll also have to test that everything works as intended in Poser. As Poser and DS don't work exactly the same, there might be things you'll need to fix, especially if we're talking about rigged or morphing items in a set. Then you need to package it, have it beta-tested, fix whatever the beta-tester found (thing rarely work perfectly the first time), get it re-tested, and so on. Fixing things on the Poser version might require changes that impact the DS version, and vice versa.

 

Of course all that assumes that you own at least one version of Poser, have it installed on your computer, and know how to use it well enough to create content for it and fix whatever bugs your testers and/or QA might find...