DAZ and Poser
semidieu
Posts: 26
It started here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/64069/stonemason-no-more-poser-support
But it was a question specific to one vendor. So I'm starting a new one, with a more general question.
Before starting the discussion, I just want to make things clear: it's a question, not a rant, I do not want to blame vendors, say Poser or DAZ is better, ... It's just a question and I would like to understand.
I'm seeing more and more one thing: Poser is no more supported. I checked the latest 35 products and I counted only 5 that are Poser compatible (directly or using DSON - at least it's what is mentioned). I do understand that some are DAZ Studio only (IRay materials, IRay converter, ... for example), but why suddenly all props, scenes, hairs, ... are no more working in Poser?
I'm a Poser user and will stay with Poser. But to be honest, if less than 20% of the products are Poser compatible, why should I come back in this store? I am a Platinum Member since the beginning and bought lots of things here. I still think that lots of products here are very great and DAZ certainly have some Top Vendors. But without Poser support, I won't lost my time checking the products to see if they are working in Poser... or not.
Again, I do understand that supporting two applications takes some time. I just think that not supporting Poser anymore isn't the best things you can do. There are still lots of people using Poser.
Sincerely,
Basil
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Comments
I'm not a vendor, but I've been in business for some time; I am no longer involved, but what determined how products were made, supported, updated, and a myriad of other considerations still applies. It's about the effort required to bring a product to market; if the effort to support more than one market doesn't get the return that another brings, suppliers will concentrate their efforts where they get more return.
Time is finite, so the time spent making a product Poser Compatable (as an example) was the same as them making a new product for an alternative market; using sales data, not reading forums about what people say they want, but the actual figures from sales, a decission will be made. I know what I would do. Vendors, PAs (call them what you will) may on occasions make a product compatable; they will use that data to determine if the effort was worthwhile; did I sell more?
I can understand your frustration; I've used software and hardware that the support for ceased, I had no choice but to make some choices about what I was going to do.
I hope Smith Micro's new version of Poser lives up to their promises: I'm a big fan of competition.
I think you will find as time goes on it is not just this store where Poser support declines. If you look at the other main DAZ/Poser content site, ie: renderosity, that is also increasingly becoming more DAZ Studio orientated than it was in the past. A lot of Genesis 3 stuff there now, which does not work in Poser, plus iRay shaders etc. Still plenty of products there that supports Poser, but if the renderosity vendors see their Studio products selling better, then the decline will continue.
It maybe that the new version of Poser will reverse this trend, if not, then you might have to become more used to using the import/export of both products to get new stuff into Poser. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
You can't stop a trend, no matter how much you want it to be different. History proves it over and again. VHS vs Beta, HDDVD vs Bluray, CD vs Vinyl...
Innovation always wins. Catch up or get let behind. Vendors make business decisions that benefit them, They make choices based on sound economic reasoning. Not emotion. There is no going back.
And like I said, wanting it to be different, doesn't really matter. It is evolution, adapt or die. .
That's exactly what I thought... But it's very frustrating to see Poser pushed away. We just can hope that the next version of Poser will be much more attractive. Thanks all for the response...
It is not "some time" it is at least twice the work. What have a Poser and Studio products in common nowadays? the mesh (provided that you modeled keeping in mind at the same time Poser and Studio quirks) and the texture maps. Everything else has to be duplicated so we are already at the point of saying almost double work but the thing does not stop here. When you discover a "bug" in platform A, you fix it and then you have to go back to platform B and check that the fix does work in that environment; if the check fails, you have to fix the fix and go back to platform A to check again. Rinse and repeat until you get an adequate middle ground or you throw the towel.
Unless the "lots of people" are at least 50% of the customer base, supporting Poser together with Studio ends in a work overload that lowers your final hourly earning.
You're welcome Semi. Too be honest, I don't think the next version of Poser will make any difference or change anything. Without Iray or Genesis3 support, there is little incentive for vendors here to spend money on a new version of Poser just to support it when current sales trend is showing no promise. It is sad when these types of decisions are made, but that is just the way business goes. It's nothing personal. Maybe SM can turn things around, we will just have to wait and see. Maybe vendors that do this part time will offer duel support, but for those who do this full time, it just isn't viable anymore.
Innovation does not always win, but it certainly helps. VHS was way inferior to Betamax, but was much better marketed. Same is true to an extend between DAZ and Poser, DAZ has always been much better at marketing their products, and whilst some could say it initially had an inferior product (I am talking about the earliest versions of Studio), this is no longer true, and it has equalled or surpassed Poser in many areas now.
As PA's we keep a very close eye on the market, because we have to, it is our livelyhood (well, it is for me and those who do this full time). There was a time where poser was very dominant and warranted a majority of the support we could offer. I know I kept offering poser support as long as I could...probably longer than was truely profitable to do so. That was because I liked poser, I started with it, and I liked how it rendered. But it was never easy to develop products for, even in its hey-day. There was always so much hand editing and hacking code to make morphs and mat settings, the inj/rem was a real PITA. But back then, it was the way to do things, so that is what we did.
DAZ took the time to make things for product makers much easier to develop with, like without hand editing code has been a godsend. I and not a very techy guy, I am a dumb artist type, so code is a nightmare to me, like math class was LOL. So the development time difference between making poser products and making d/s products is on its own a huge varience. Plus now that D/S can render as nice or even better than poser (with iray), and the figures are much more usable, and there is little of no problem using legacy products with new figures in d/s, it is no surprise that a larger part of the market has moved over to d/s.
I know alot of poser users like to believe that poser is still strong, simply because it is their product of choice...I know I felt that way for a long time too, but the reality is that poser is rapidly going the way of bryce. Like bryce, there is a core of dedicated followers who like to keep going with it, but beyond that core, there is really little of no interest among the new generation of users. The community has moved along with the tech.
I myself keep testing the market to see if there are any changes, I tried early on to work with the Dawn figure and make both poser and d/s versions of her. But that test showed me again how little demand there is for new figures. The sales for genesis characters were well over 100 time greater than those for Dawn (no exageration ...I was shocked too....I had hoped she would help the poser market grow)
So yeah...times change, software choices change, and if a PA wants to be successful, they have to follow the market.
Rawn
Hmmph
Yeah what Rawn said. Once you start developing using the tools in DS, you don't really want to go back to the old way of doing things. I felt the same way as Rawn. So unless SM makes the tools and features more attractive and easier to achieve a specific goal, developers who are experiencing what Daz offers won't really budge. So yeah, lot's of hurdles SM needs to overcome in order to stimulate Poser support and get developers interested again, or to attract new developers.
hah....no offence to bryce :)
Too late:) You could have used another app as an example but you just had to choose Bryce lol.
My answer is pretty simple.. I'm a Daz PA and I support Daz' current figures, that means G3 who doesn't work in Poser. I never made anything for G2 that didn't also work in Poser.. not an easy feat with some of them, let me tell you. I made a few sets of shaders that were DS only and then I started doing DS shaders and Poser materials in the the same product. I have no idea if the extra time spent to make the Poser materials made any difference in sales. I'm guessing not nearly enough to pay for the extra time it took to make them. I started with DS, I was forced to learn and use Poser (P5 at the time) because that's where the main market was for many years. I only started actually liking Poser at version 8. I still use it occationally for some of my development, draping cloth that's already modeled and splitting left and right morphs, it's a handy tool to have around. I do like the painterly quality of its renders that's different from 3Delight or Iray, but I can count on one hand the number of times per year I render something just to render it, everything else is promos, thumbnails, or tests.
I was one of the longest hangers on with Poser support of the PAs that do this work full time, mostly because I did start out with DS and I know exactly how frustraiting it is to see a wall of beautiful things that won't work or barely in your chosen program. But now it's the era of G3, and she's beautiful, and I have rent that needs to be paid and a husband and 4 furry and 1 scaly mouth to feed.
I did a product last year that had two full versions. One for Poser and one for Studio. The Poser version sold just at 20% of the studio version. After that the Studio version continued to sell but the Poser version pretty much died so that gap has continued to widen. It made it really clear to me that supporting Poser was no longer a viable financial choice.
I think Havos is correct and there has been a big marketing gap for the last few years. Because DAZ has very actively sought to bring in new users and not just to retain user numbers the percentages have continued to shift.
Yep, and with the "freemium" business model Daz is on, more new users are willing to try it out and will potentially buy content if they like it. Even if they don't buy content, they get to play with the latest PBR engine for free.
Don't mess with Bryce it's sacred ground, only the chosen can use the program !!!
"Hear that... it's the sound of inevitability"
Its called captialism, and the market always wins, and right now the market wants skimpy white girls made for DAZ Studio.
Havos: Right, and my point is not getting upset at the vendors but at all the customers who want bad things and should be ashamed of themselves for being horrible people.
(Joke! JOKE!)
I agree with what was said by Semidieu as well as with different things said by DS users. For me being a Poser and a DS user at the same time is more interesting and Less frustrating. Yes, I use both... After all DS is free and it is a good thing. I have never stopped purchasing items here (even when Genesis was introduced and that it was not Posrer compatible) and now (as I already wrote in this forum when IRay was implemented in DS) I am glad to be able to purchase something even if it is not Poser compatible. I do not master DS yet but I think that I will probably improve with it in the future. Well I hope... ;)
Well, for me, I don't own it, so it would be difficult for me to make anything poser compatible. (I have tried poser on 2 seperate occasions and found it slightly less easy to use than blender 2.4). On top of everything thing else we may be hitting a point where new vendors simply don't know poser.
carrara is also a daz software.
it has dynamic har, and has dynamic cloth without extra s/w
and is cheaper than poser usually
Hey I dont just like skimpy white girls. I like, I like, errr, ok guilty.
All joking aside; when it comes down to it, and you're bemoaning the loss of your favourite (3d software in this instance), ask yourself a question: has my loyalty to company X been repayed in a similar loyalty? It may make switching easier.
All companies should remember, that they're popular now, but take their eye off the ball and treat their customers like cash cows, and that can quickly change.
As a long time Poser user (I have every version starting with Poser 2), it's sad to see the rift between Poser and DS continually get wider. With the latest announcement from SM it seems that they are putting more development effort into their own figures with no mention of integrated DAZ3D figure support. Carrara has been my primary 3D software for years, so the new Poser figures since the introduction of weight mapping are of little use to me as they won't work in Carrara (or DS).
If the compatibility gap contiues to increase between Poser and DS, then I will be forced to chose between them, because I can't afford to support two different figure systems. Unless the next version of Poser has some really compelling new features, I'm affraid the current version of Poser may be my last. However, the GAP bwtween Carrara and DS is also growing wider now that there is no support for Genesis 3 in Carrara. So ..... some great new features in Poser that provide funtionality available in Carrara that currently is not available in DS (and some really good Poser figures to rival genesis 2/3) would push me back toward Poser and away from DAZ3D.
Only time will tell, but I do get the feeling there are more Poser users moving to DS and very few DS users migrating to Poser. It will be interesting to see what the new version of Poser will have to offer.
Well, there's loyalty in a kinship sense, and then loyalty in the analogous 'compatible product' sense. I think people often confuse the two.
I'm 'loyal' to Daz in that there's a network of compatible stuff that I like working with, that makes it harder and unappealing to work with other apps, like, say, Carrara. I like working in Daz Studio.
Given sufficient motive (not producing stuff I want, not updating the app enough, competitors that offer more appealing UI/features/content), I'll shift to a different company/product.
At a more personal level I 'like' Daz because they have an appealing, friendly business model (the whole core free/then content), they are very responsive and open with their refunds, and so on. A company that 'plays nice' earns good will and plays into the larger rational decision of which product to work with.
When I came back to CGI, I really intended to go with Poser. But the whole old school 'pay and pay for upgrade and pay for upgrade and pay for upgrade' was a massive turnoff. The dated content was another turnoff.
I know the history behind it, but if you think about it, coming to DAZ and asking why they are not supporting a competing program is kind of like going to Content Paradise and asking why there is a lack of general DAZ support (not that SM offers a whole lot of support for Poser content there either, (I was reading through their FAQ about how they don't do any QA for items in the store).
Yes, at one point the mission statement for the Digital Art Zone was that it provided figures for Poser. And of course the longer running Published Artists here were a part of that. But at this point, with the divergence between the two programs growing greater and greater, and DAZ more than holding its own on features and usibilty vs. Poser, asking artists here why they aren't supporting Poser here is sort of a self-defining question. This place is less and less connected to Poser all the time regardless of how great or not the next release of Poser is going to be.
Of course this isn't the Digital Art Zone any more, it is now simply "DAZ".
Poser support in general seems to be dropping off, and I don't mean here. I do suspect the market dynamics are causing that, it's causing a lot of discussion at other locations dealing in content for the two programs.
Sad part is, Poser has been the go-to choice in Japan for a lot longer than it has in other parts of the world. In the time between the release of Genesis 3 Female and today, that trend has been in full reverse.
As well, I'm going to have to add a bit to what Fisty said upthread: I'm taking my chances on G3F, after switching programs because Poser choked on Genesis 2. I not supporting Poser gives me more time to improve on the product rather than using the time to fiddle with Firefly shaders and a library structure that's never been particularly intuitive. Don't get me wrong-- it's a nice program for what it does, but technology marches on, and unless the other side is willing to work with it, then it's going to go the way of the dinosaur.
If the next version of Poser introduces an unbaised renderer and a clear technological edge that translates to a market advantage, then it'll start getting more attention. Until then, you can expect the current trend to continue. Sorry, friend. It's just not worth it right now.