Just to say, I don't find a real need for fewer poles or tris. I find Dawn sculpts and subdivides beautifully as it is. I would love to see her topology become even more flexible and sculptable, but I don't see losing important edge loops and structures as adding to that the way many others claim happens in the abstract. I'm still dumbfounded by so many claiming that anatomy based edgeloops make a figure less flexible when Dawn's have made her _hands down_ the easiest figure I've worked with (and I've sculpted Posette, all the Vickies up to V4, Dina, Maya Doll, A3, Antonia, PE, and many others). And when you've shown her morph into a horse, a dragon, and panther. I'm looking forward to your improvements in topology and bending, but I want to be _very_ clear that I haven't been at all displeased with Dawn 1.0 in those respects.
I think that you guys sound like you're incorporating important advances into Dawn 2.0. Just don't get too caught up in what people say. I hope you focus more on what most vendors actually make and customers actually buy. Not just the mouthy few of us who post too much in forums.
At the end of the day, the general populace holds back for one major reason: They're not seeing an aesthetic they want to make their own, _and_ can imagine doing so. I always go back to the dynamic dresses by corvas that spent _months_ on Rendo's best seller list. They had no UV maps. They had no special dynamic groups. They used Poser's default stretchy, slippy, unrealistic cloth settings. They had no thickness, and no detail. They had flood fill material options. And not only are they _still_ unsurpassed in terms of the heights _and_ longevity of their popularity, but every time I brought these qualities up, I would get told how great they were by users as if I was saying they weren't. And this happened last not long before I stopped posting at Rendo, long after my own clothes were out, so it's not as if this was some early time when people didn't expect anything of dynamic clothes.
My point was never that they were flawed. My point was (and is) that everything people say they want in dynamic clothes, all the reasons they give for not buying them, were proven largely irrelevant by that product. corvas showed how they could make characters look glamorous and sexy in the types of scenes and poses that were common in the galleries, how they could take pretty much any color and fit a variety of scenes. And that was that. I never even saw a complaint that he thickened the meshes in Max post sim (probably because he openly stated this in his promos). They had a very simple but flexible appeal, and it served them very well.
My only major request for 2.0 is to put Dawn's official morphs _outside of the library_ in Poser. When you put her morphs inside the library, the absolute links to the PMD files in break as soon as anyone, myself included, decides to customize their library. Which so many people do, it's in how people say to install (Unzip to an empty runtime, move files to exactly where you want them, etc.). One _huge_ drawback to Dawn 1.0 as a vendor is that you pretty much can't use any official morphs (or pretty much anyone else's morphs) in your character, unless you want to risk your character not working because the morphs aren't where you expected them to be. Morphs are external resources just like textures and meshes, and should be kept at the same directory level for the same reason. Libraries should be customizable, and links should be absolute from Runtime down. Putting linked content inside the library makes uninstallation, a _very_ rare occurance easier, but it makes actually using the content harder.
And just to say, worst of all, if you don't know this is the reason, it can look like Dawn just doesn't work. When I did my usual and set up my HiveWire runtime the way I wanted, then loaded morphs, and saw nothing happen, I knew why. I then went into PFE and fixed all the references by hand. But most people wouldn't even know what was wrong, let alone how to fix it. They'd just do what they normally do on installation (customize their folders) and have Dawn's morphs not work. And frankly, with a 2.0, that's even more important. I'm betting that some people will want a unique runtime for her, some people will want a unique folder for 2.0 in every level, etc. And some will probably go back and rename their Dawn 1.0 folders, or wrap stuff in a 1.0 folder. I'd bet that many, if not most, people are all going to handle this uniquely, and in a way that makes the most sense to them.
I think my only minor (as in unimportant) request after that is to include photos of dancers and gymnasts for rigging and muscle morph references. I don't think others will care if she can't point her toes like a ballerina or show off lean muscle like a gymnast or runner, but it would make me incredibly happy.
