- This topic has 58 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 7 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
> Lots of members have now moved to ad-blockers or ad-free browsers to block them.
There are people out there who still don't use adblockers? Seriously? Damn. There really are a lot of dummies out there still. No wonder sites like OnlyFans still exists.
DAZ vs. AI... Others have addressed most of the sticking points I have, which keeps me in DAZ-land. Character (and scene) persistence is a biggie - as well as story continuity between images. Now if I could toss a crude render from DAZ and AI finishes it up using a previous image as a comparator? I'd be all-in on AI, using DAZ (or whatever) as a pose and camera angle reference feeder. Until then, it's cool for one-offs I guess, but it still needs work.
Also, a question - if I put in custom character images for it to work from, what's to keep those personalities from turning up exactly the same in other peoples' images? I never use an out-of-the-box character, for any reason (except as background extras slapped together - those are usually old Poser 4 chars, though for polycount reasons. Anyhoo -)
DAZ going under? All said, I'm optimistic that even if DAZ were to be kidnapped by aliens tomorrow morning, I have oceans of content and plenty of versions around to keep going for a long time. If my ability to load an ancient copy of Unreal Tournament or Counterstrike (c. 2000-2001) on my computer and play them on Windows 11 is any indication, I can probably continue using Studio for at least 20-25 years more with a today-dated fresh download from DAZ. If not, a Virtual Machine will ensure it, and maybe let me tack on 10 years lifespan more.
(I wonder if I can install and run an ancient copy of Poser 4 from the original CDs, speaking of?)
As for NFTs, they're dead. Too many people got burned (thinking it was the new BTC) for that to come back. Maybe as part of a useful software antitheft package or asset (at least the blockchain part, embedded steganography-style), but otherwise nah. The whole 'let's build a shedload of gaming assets!' part of DAZ master plan appears to also be dead.
They should've focused on building and fostering the hobbyist market. Maybe DS 5 can incorporate the speed of AI, but with the features that overcome AI's current set of limitations (persistence, story continuity, etc)? Not gonna hold my breath.
@frank22 other things you can try to make it work: try to get just 1 character of your image to look right, then mask around it to do further work on the other characters. It has to be done in stages to work most of the time. Just focus on 1 piece at a time, and mask/inpaint, run in a batch of 8 (or whatever your rig can handle), and keep spinning until you get that one character right. Then work on another piece. Also keep in mind, you can use more than one controlnet at once. So you can try to use a cammy, depth, and openpose or reference etc all at the same time, and also adjust each ones attributes individually (strengths, etc)
on DAZ disappearing: as I said in the past, if they go away I suspect the userbase to still continue on long after that. Just like the old Commodore 64 lived on for YEARS after the company did. The c64 scene just would not die due to the rabid user base who refused to give it up. People still wrote and traded programs for it, and I think DAZ will be similar, users will still create, sell, and trade new assets.
@pooper,
Studio 5?! You're soooo funny!
That's like hoping that Poser 14 will have a normal interface, be completely stable AND load Daz formatted items natively.@Pooper - "Character (and scene) persistence is a biggie - as well as story continuity between images."
Yep, that pretty much sums up the situation for SD, though I don't think either DS or SD users do much other than single-shot renders. For those who do make VNs, or just a short series of related images, DS is obviously the best choice.IMO there's a difference between "Dead" as in "noone uses that software anymore", and "Dead" as in "not commercially viable anymore"
I'm still using Poser, but I use it for the same reasons I drive a 1965 vintage car:
It can do anything I need and after spending 24 years with it, I know every nut and bolt of it.
I recently installed Studio (again), but nothing can beat the feeling of full control I have over my Poser assets when opening a cr2 in a text editor and doing weird stuff inside it.
😉My point is: Studio is still commercially viable. But given the progress AI makes, will probably soon be as "Dead" as Poser already is.
Maybe it can "survive" in a sort of Zombie-ish way as a figure pose "prompt" as Grouchy-Old-Fart suggested, but I think the AI-programmers will come up with easier, more intuitive solutions.
I mean, it's already possible to directly animate a single picture of a person!
*
Personally, I've given up with the latest, greatest, and I'm currently building a "nostalgia" runtime for my Poser 11.
It includes most major DAZ figures from Vicky 1 to G3F (Last DAZ figure to "sorta" work in Poser), and native Poser figures from Posette up to Dawn.
Also some 3rd party figures like Rikishi and Project Evolution, for good measure.I do this because I have SO MUCH stuff, that I tend to spend more time deciding what to actually use than to set up a scene and render!
I also noticed how much of Poser's (and DAZ') history is already forgotten and unavailable in the web, so I want to still keep using those obsolete figures and see how far I can push them with better shaders and rigging.
So many cool freebies are gone forever, so many early DAZ installers unavailable, too!
(Anyone remember the DAZ MerBaby and the old DAZ Centaur based on the Poser 3 "Dork"?)But, yeah, whatever happens with Poser or Studio in the future, this will keep me busy and (hopefully) give me years of entertainment to come, whatever direction AI will go.
Just like my '65 Opel will (hopefully) still get me from A to B, even when the streets are
all filled with Teslas and whatever other cars are out there in the future!(I'm turning 59 soon. Where are all the flying cars they promised me when I was young?!)
😉
Lots of excellent points there. What pushed me into Studio was the fact that Poser was always horribly unstable on whatever computer I had. It crashed and locked up constantly and I went to Studio out of frustration. The early version ran for weeks with no problems, not so much anymore.
Ans yes, the older content with Vicky Fourpointtwoplusplus and her massive wardrobe is still the best."Studio 5?! You're soooo funny!
That's like hoping that Poser 14 will have a normal interface, be completely stable AND load Daz formatted items natively"
@Ethiopia - fair point, and I understand (and empathize!) but I think market realities will probably force them into it. DAZ is too small for its owners to settle for cannibalization of assets or divisions - best they can hope for is to sell it off whole to somebody, or bootstrap themselves back to where they should've been going in the first place. Since nobody is going to be buying companies in this economy, that leaves the bootstrap option, and doing that means focusing on Studio, whether they like it or not.There is a life cycle for almost everything. Recently I started to notice how many websites I used to visit are gone, these belonged to fairly good vendors. I trawled the Wayback machine and it seemed to me there were specific times when traffic seemed to stop on some. The first was when V4 was introduced, next was around 2015. Then they went down fast. Some were no big shock and I saw the reasons. But the big problem now is that Daz is the main vendor and developer of 3D human figures. Maybe things have all been done, nothing new to see. Even years back someone wrote 'do we need another Vicky in a temple or another sword?' Exactly like people think 'do we need another Genesis?' What could Daz see as the next potential big seller for 3D artists? Is there one?
Well, the good news is, Renderhub has popped up, and as long as there is money to be made, others will as well.
The REALLY old commercial sites (Thralldom, 3DCommune, PoserPros, etc) were almost like laboratories where really cool stuff would pop up constantly. Some sites, like Renderotica and (yes) Renderhub have that spirit still. They have diamonds and they have crap, but the innovation that gets fostered is worth the churn.
(Renderosity used to be that way, but they're mostly dead now, with a lot of good products, but not as much of a community spirit - at least not like what it had. They did it to themselves, though.)
Now, once the money well runs dry, then I'd worry.
@zaba, @pooper,
You folks make great points.
I found that the long reign of Vicky 4.2++ inspired a pile of gorgeous and original outfits and accessories that has yet to be matched by all the Genesis bimbos together (a popular saying with me).
Once the Borg had assimilated everybody, they began directing the content to what they thought would bring the most money, hence a never ending series of me-too products.I don't see RenderHub as much of a player since they sell so much stolen crap and I don't see any kind of community there.
Perverted'Otica has to die soon since people are now lamenting over the sameoldthing being churned out and not much of it. I'm surprised that the thread hasn''t been deleted but it's still going after a couple of weeks.3D Shards is a great new site but it needs more vendors or it'll go under like the other independent sites. I buy stuff from them even if I don't really want or need it, just to support them. Of course, we don't share their items.
One chance for this hobby to survive and even grow is for Rendo to make Poser what it should be, stable, a common sense and modern GUI and (for fuck's sake!!) native support for Daz's products.
I think of this as a major topic.Are they shooting themselves in the foot? Or is there something we've missed.Why would anyone make human figures that would NOT work in Poser? They must have had tremendous sales with M4 and V4 that worked well in both programs. Looking around, a high percentage of artists have at some stage used Poser. I looked at the traffic count on Renderosity, it's still fairly high,and a lot of the galleries are still using Poser. Poser still has a big potential market and popularity despite many obvious fails. Some vendors still make Poser friendly cloth and also in Daz format too.So I'm only guessing that Daz has it's own team for human figures seperate from the cloth vendors, so it's a direct policy of the company that they should only work in Daz Studio. I saw something else I can't explain. I have a version of Poser 6, I pressed the 'About' / 'HELP' button, I was looking to see who the original Poser developers were. Right at the bottom it refers to Daz 3D. What is, or was, the link to Poser and Daz back then? I had always thought that developers had left Poser to form Daz as a new company. The main question I'm asking is why would the makers of a free program narrow their own sales market of human figures by making files in a format that any other programs can't read or use?
Have you guys tried real illusion/character creator or something yet? I see a lots of their contents popping up on the blog lately.
First, some history....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daz_3D
The reason that Poser has been sold so many times is that it's crap. Not just small crap either....it's huge and massively horrifically galactic league crap. The interface, which was all the rage 30 years ago and was confusing, ridiculous, and didn't follow established conventions of usability, hasn't updated at all and is still laughably bad. It was, and remains to this day, biblically unstable. It crashes and locks up constantly. My personal experience echoes this. Even on two high end graphics computers at work it was horrible and never ran more than a half hour before going bye-bye.
It's biggest problem is that the developers and fans who treat it as a religion, not a piece of software. They are all hysterically loyal.
The big split occurred when Daz (you did read those wiki's right?) decided to improve/change the rigging of it's models and the Poser gang didn't want to adapt Poser to use this new rigging and format. This is when Daz wrote Studio, gave it away for free and became a massive success while Poser slid into the weeds. Those early versions of Studio where completely stable and would run for days without needing a restart. The interface made perfect sense and was quite intuitive.
Poser has languished with it's user base slowly rotting away. The Poserverse is being supported by two people who are (again) hysterically loyal but completely delusional. For decades I heard the battle cry of the figure that would 'save' Poser. We got La Femme 1 (now version 2) which was and still is a joke that no one uses. There's almost no items for the figures and only a scant few artists making anything for Poser anymore. Two of their artists are still making stuff that would have been fine in Poser 3 but has looked dated and simplistic for a couple of decades now. I drop in on the Poser usenet group now and again and am told that most people still use good old Vicky Fourpointtwoplusplus (V4.2++) because La Femme is complete crap.
A couple of artists at Rendo and Perverted'Otica where realistic when they stopped making stuff for Poser and supported Studio only. They both said that they sold dozens of the Studio versions to every one Poser version so why waste time converting the models for Poser.
If Poser is ever to become mainstream again it needs three things--
1) fix that ridiculous 'Kai's Power Goo' interface.
2) make it fucking stable!
3) make it natively support the Daz format (.duf)
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
