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Commercially, DAZ (and Poser) are dead as a doornail.
This is the level of realism currently possible with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/@ChloeVSHistory
(EVERYTHING is AI here, including Chloe herself. So much about "AI can't create consistent characters")
A single episode would take months to create using professional 3D tools.
Trying to achieve this quality using DAZ Studio or Poser would be completely ridiculous.*
The problem is, DAZ got high on sniffing their own farts, and thought they could use Genesis to play with the "Big Boys".
Turns out, even the "Big Boys" can't keep up with the "Big Boys" anymore. Lol.*
So, where leaves us that?
Personally, I treat Poser just like a distinct art form.
I do optimize my figures a lot by resculpting and re-rigging, I optimize my shaders, lights, etc. to the max.BUT I DO NOT TRY TO PRETEND THEY ARE ANYTHING OTHER THAN A POSER RENDER.
I still want my figures to be recognizeable as DAZ/Poser figures.
I'd like people to say:
"Well, yes, this is Vicky 3, all right. But it's the very best Vicky 3 I've ever seen!"That's why I don't use any postwork, either. I want my work to be pure, unadulterated POSER.
Nothing more, nothing less.That's how I can still keep Poser relvant for me. I very likely could do "better" artwork spending my time with any of the AI engines.
Maybe I'll do someday.But currently I have still too much fun just using Poser.
BUT OF COURSE...
AI is simply wonderful and amazing.
Sure, it can (and will) be used for mindless slop, but so has any technological innovation so far.
But the possibilities are limitless.Maybe I could turn all my favorite books into full fledged TV shows?
Maybe I'll even live long enough to experience an actual TNG style Holodeck?
Maybe everyone having the "perfect" AI Girl- or Boyfriend will make us a lot less aggressive as a species?
Again, I still love to work with Poser.
I used it to build my own little "MATRIX" to keep me sane in an insane world.I already built my own "Tilly" long ago.
But for all the others who can't:
Body variations of Olympic and Professional athletes captured by photographer Howard Schatz.
byu/monis6344 inDamnthatsinterestingLast time I checked humans came in all shapes and sizes.
Just sayin'*
Not to mention that I can't remember ever being visited by the "Anatomical-Elements-Fairy" on my 18th birthday.
On the contrary. I'm pretty sure I was "complete and fully functional" (HeHe) right from the get go.*
Well, these hysterical antics will soon be history, anyway. as local, uncensored AI picture generation is already available and constantly improved.
Isn't technology wonderful?
*
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S.Lewis
Thanks gor the reply, but I gave that one a try already, but about 90% of the pages, less alone theactual downloads, have not neen properly archived. There is no way to search of course, too.
BTW, of course it need to read Heinkel He 162, not 126. 😉
Thank you, moffet!
A nice little standalone app that gives me the .obj files seems to be just the ticket.I#m 100% happy with Poser 11, couldn't think of a reason to switch. (Maybe Blender. But then I would basically have to re-learn everything from scratch).
But I am quite juelous for all the content support you Studio guys get! 🙂
Poser support has completely dried up, thanks to all the "clever" buisiness decisions its owners made in the past decade.
Poser is now the "Kurtzman - Trek" of the 3D world. 😉I did have Studio installed on my previous machine so I could export duf items as object files to use them in Poser.
I know I also COULD install Poser 13 on my new machine and use those duf exporter scripts written in Python 3 to load DAZ files directly.
But now I wonder if there is an easier way to extract geometry from a duf file?
(All I need is the UV-mapped object itself. I can build Poser shaders from scratch and also Poser-rig the prop if necessary by myself)I only come across DAZ items I REALLY need once in a while, so if there is an easy, straightforward way to extract them, I'd love to know!
THANKS.
(As for the duf figure files, I guess even if in plain text, there is so much functionality crammed into them, I'd be completely lost trying to find my way around them. LOL.)
To be honest, I haven't opened a cr2 file in quite some time, mainly because Poser 11 has all the modding functionality I need nowadays already built in. 🙂
Many, MANY Thanks, Hades, for the excellent instructions! That was exactly what I was looking for! Seems you DO can have your cake, and render it, too. 😉
*
Yeah, I'm addicted to Poser for over a quarter century, now. Still have my Poser 4 box with the installation discs and that big instruction book.
What I like about Poser is that I have full control over my figures. I can mess about with their cr2 files any way I want, thanks to the lack of encryption. And the morphbrush allows me to actually "touch" and modify them in real time, just like a real world sculptor can do with his work.
And everything is still simple enough for me to understand. 🙂
Too bad the owners of Poser got bogged down by their own hubris. Poser was always a laymans tool. Instead of trying to keep up with the Joneses, they should have made it even more easier and versatil to use. Given it options that the average user could actually use.
I'd rather have a better Poser, than a half-baked poor man's Blender.
Anyway, not my circus, not my monkeys anymore. I'll stay with Poser 11 and simple, easy to use (and modify) figures like Mike and Vicky 2, 3 and 4.
It's amazing what you can even do with Posette and Dork, if you put a little work into them!Thanks again to Hades and for ZoneGFX for giving us a place to ask for help!
BTW, what problems did you encounter wit Posr 11 11.1.1.35540 ?
I'm running it on an Acer Nitro 5 laptop with an i9 and a Geforce RTX, Windows 11 Pro.
And except for that dreaded saving bug, it runs quite well.
Hi Kusalkin, many thanks for the reply.
When the Smith Micro version of Poser 11 saves a figure to the library, it creates a new object file and also recreates all morphs from scratch!
It does so by projecting the morphed shape, just like when you transfer a morph from one figure to another.But projecting is not as precise as actually transfering the original morph data.
(Like the good old "MorphManager" app does, for example.)Especially expression morphs are geting messed up this way, as teeth and lips usually overlap, something that mere morph "projecting" can't compensate for.
So, if you modify a figure and re-safe that new copy to the library, NEW morphs and object files get created, resulting in a defective copy of that figure.
Bondware solved that bug by giving you a new option when saving a figure. Either keep the original object file (and the original morphs), or creating a new object file and morphs.
This "fuzzy" "morph projection" is great when you want to easily transfer morphs between different figures with different meshes, but it creates a mess when you morph or re-rig a figure, and want to save a copy of the modified figure to the library!
*
I COULD work my way around this by installing a cracked copy of Poser 13 (Just for the record, I also own a legal copy of Poser 13), save the modified figure as a .pz3 in Poser 11 (Strangely, when you do that the figure gets saved AS IS, without any forced "morph projection), open that .pz3 file in Poser 13, save the figure to the library with morph projection switched off, and then go back working in Poser 11.
Still, this would be a bit of a hastle. I very much would prefer to have a version of the latest Poser Pro 11 build, that does NOT need to phone home.
@trader2h: MANY THANKS, again!
I'm still a diehard Poser 11 user, and they look great there, even out of the box.
They also respond very well to subdivision smoothing. I'm going to adjust the shader a bit to work better with Firefly, maybe dim down the painted highlights on the skin in Photoshop, too.
Still, they could be easily used "as is".The rigging is quite amazing. I might do a bit of weightmapping to improve the shoulders, but again, "out of the box" bending is fantastic, considering their age and that these are all spherical falloff zones.
Cubed did a great job improving the original mesh.
Too bad they didn't do the other P4 meshes, too, back then.
This is such a great figure, you should really install them yourself and try them out in Studio.Thanks!
Sorry eelgoo, but I only got a notification starting with:
"This is a Multi-Recipient message! MESSAGE THE FILLER DIRECTLY IF YOU WANT TO THANK THEM!
Your request for Cubed Babys has been Filled, and your offered points will be transferred to the Filler soon.
Your link(s):"
There is a forum members name at the very beginning of said message, but it says nowhere if that's the actual filler of the request?
Maybe I'm a litle obtuse?
"(I discarded some executables as they had triggered my antivirus)."
Please don't!
Many are probably false alarms.20yrs ago, there actually was a worm distributed with Daz3D exe files on eMule. (I got actually hit by it. Lol)
But other than that, those AV warnings always turned out to be false alarms. (And that worm shouldn't be harmful anymore to modern Windows systems, anyway)Perhaps put the "suspicious" installers into a separate download, so that people could download at their own risk?
And maybe convert those installers into ordinary .zip files instead?Hi, I still use the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Gen DAZ figures A LOT. So I'd welcome all the stuff you can find for them. (Including freebies. Sadly, a lot of great stuff has been lost over the years)
Here's a few examples of V2/V2P4's that currently live in my runtime:
(WARNING: No real nudity, but some "Sexiness")
https://i.postimg.cc/GhS2mdzQ/V2-Samples.jpg
THANKS A LOT for the kind offer!
Hmm, my cracked Poser installs always ran fine.
I eventually bought all of them including 12 & 13, but still use a cracked copy of Poser 11, because that machine isn't allowed to go online at all.
But, yeah, better save than sorry.
If I come across anything suspicious, I use Sandboxie Plus to have a closer look.
So far I've only been hit once by a Poser related virus, way back in the early naughts.
That bastard infected all my .exe files, making all DAZ installers I had downloaded unusuable.Best defense IMO, rather than an intrusive Anti-Virus programm which by itself can be a liability, is to make good backups, and/or mirror your system.
And do your really important stuff on a machine that isn't connected to the internet at all.
(Which is also the best defense against nosy operating sytems like Windows 11)🙂
"Modern" figures are optimized for easy content creation.
And "modern" modelling apps are also optimized for speed and easyness.Back in the day, every detail had to be actually "built" right into the mesh. Any other method would have overtaxed the type of computers normal people used.
Now you simply subdivide a mesh a couple of times untill you have millions of polygons and then sculpt any detail in ZBrush like you would sculpt a lump of clay.
This is faster, easier, but also draws focus away from details.
It's mass production instead of bespoke craftmanship.Add a new generation of 3D-Artists that are used to create game assets as fast and cheaply as possible, and you have the situation we have now.
A lot of "Ooh, shiny" but nothing of it makes a lasting impression.
Same with the figures, of course. G9 is great for portraits, because the face sells new assets.
But if you want an anatomically correct figure, something that looks and bends like an actual human being, it is still lacking.
