Let's not forget that support for a figure is also customer dependent. It doesn't matter how many vendors support a figure if no one is buying their products. Eventually, they give up and go back to proven sellers.
Very, very, _very_ true, but it works both ways.
So far, I like Dawn best of all Poser figures because she's easiest to morph. She's easiest to morph because she only lacks a few anatomical edge loops (I'd love her ribs to be better designed for detail) and has only one edge loop that goes a bit wonky (the edge loop starting in middle of the elbow's back should go to the middle of the wrist, but goes to one side). This is also why she can be morphed into different creatures easily.
Like other failed figures, La Femme yet again _requires_ HD morphs to have any definition at all on her completely grid-like, anatomically incorrect topology. Blackhearted's character promo text _brags_ about needing about half a million additional polys to add really basic definition. That's just not good. It tells even vendors like me who work really hard for very little that this figure will have a steep learning curve just to make a half-way decent character.
Like other failed figures, La Femme yet again doesn't even have a properly shaped nose. I've never made a figure, and I've noticed that nostrils have a part underneath that comes up from the face. Set the nostrils right on the face, and the figure looks unrealistic and toony. And since it's a very fine edge, if you haven't accounted for it, it's hard to add. Like V4, La Femme's eyelids are too thin and rather weird looking. The promos show great shading and textures around the eyes, but the eyelids are still a problem. I've read that her irises are the wrong shape, which means they won't render properly from the side given realistic materials. I know because I find you often need to make the iris convex to give it the shading it has in real life, but when I did that to Dawn, renders from the side didn't work _at all_. It's better to just burn shadows into the texture. So despite the hype about expertise, La Femme's nose and eyes aren't very finely crafted or realistic. The main thing I learned when doing traditional art back in the day (I actually sold works to my school in high school) was that you could get a lot wrong if you get the eyes and nose right. Getting those right is absolutely key.
Like other failed figures, La Femme has a little cadre of blessed vendors who were in on the release. The rest of us have to buy something to have the base. Unlike Dawn and Dusk, who are free to vendors who want to make products for them. And Dawn came with a texture that served as a merchant resource. Out of the gate, La Femme is more unfriendly to your average beginner vendor who wants to make a character than Dawn. More people support and promote Dawn already, and she has a DS option that allows me to transfer my work to DS without having to entirely switch figures. Most of all, Dawn's Poser content only sells so well.
As far as I can tell, La Femme's main strengths out of the box are her rigging and what you can do with her expression system. If the Poser content customers put a top priority bending and expressions, then no Poser user would ever use V4 rather than Dawn. I wouldn't have had to wait _years_ for fixes to her shoulders, which people assured me the community would fix right away when I pointed them out on her release. If people were willing to master 30 controls just to apply an expression rather than dial it in, then everyone would know about Miki's Face Room morphs. Poser customers keep using V4 or switching to Genesis and DS, because they're easy to make lots of different pretty but simply posed illustrations with, most of which are pinups with almost no expression.
I remember when people chafed at the upload restrictions at Rendo. When people wanted to upload multiple images a day. Most of which depicted a different character in each render. In a week, a person could easily need at least 7 unique characters, clothes, and hair, while using poses that are almost identical and expressions that actually were.
Content users mostly want a figure they can make into completely different characters. While no new figure is going to have V4's library out of the gate, you can at least try to make building characters as easy and quick and painless as possible. But figures like PE and La Femme are really obviously built around the singular vision of a particular creator, with a maybe one other creator giving character feedback, instead of being built as a morphable blank slate and involving every single character creator you can find.
As a vendor, I can either make something that only works in Poser for a figure that will require more skill and effort to make things for _or_ I can just stick with Dawn. Or, as many vendors have, I can just switch to DS and Genesis and make many times more money. But the products I make would be basically the same in every case. My art wouldn't change, but the effort to make it and the rewards it garnered would.
That's the core issue with the customer base not being there. People say, "Why not just convert and get more sales?" when it comes to platforms and figures with lower sales, but you're talking about additional production time for conversion, whole new testing time, and whole new promo building time. That's at least 3/4ths the production process. So even assuming you're just as quick with a second or third or fourth figure or platform as you are with your main one, you're talking about 3/4 of a product that won't sell as well as another. That means to break even, not make more but just break even, the conversion has to sell only about 1/4 less than a new product for the most profitable platform and figure. After that, it's essentially charity for a few customers. And remember, the content creator's main platform is probably whatever they build in, not what they publish to. If they're making clothes, those clothes can work on any figure. If they're making a texture, texture painting is the same on pretty much any decent mesh. Only morphing is really figure specific. Also, while the DS community is mainly externally critical, the Poser community is mainly internally critical. I can't tell you how many people I've read go on about how vendors need to work even harder than they do, despite average sales per manhour per project being _well_ below minimum wage for more than a decade now. The only time I've seen DS users complain about effort was talking about Poser vendors making DS versions.
There's a reason Fabiana went from Poser only to DS only, without much of an interval where she supported both.
If the customer base emerges and people love La Femme more than Dawn for other reasons I haven't covered (Blackhearted's rep, for instance), then sure, I'll hop on that bandwagon. And I'll be _very_ pleased to see new life in the Poser community. I'm not at all against La Fenme or PE finding their niche and thriving. I can tell that a great deal of work went into both figures, and I really appreciate the efforts of all those artists. I am not saying any of this simply to discourage those artists, or anyone else considering making their own Poser figure. But it would nice if the shiny new Poser figures people keep coming out with would focus on what customers and vendors need, not making a brilliant new 3D figure that impresses a handful of wonks who only use their own content anyway.
Content community customers are about 99% illustrators, not 3D artists and certainly not animators. They don't care about 3D industry standards, and they don't look at postwork as a bad word unless it's in promos. They just want to be able to make cool illustrations in an hour or less. Don't make supporting your JCM more difficult if all it does is prevent 30 seconds work with the liquify tool in Photoshop. You need to make a realistic figure that the same people who churn out V4 characters and skimpwear can support, that the same people who used to make tons of NVIATWAS pics can enjoy. If you feel the need to add extra helper bones, just add them to the breasts. Maybe you just have to give away the base figure, the main morphs, a MR texture base and a versatile hair style all for free. Or maybe you just have to make them free to vendors. Most V4 characters are dial spins with repainted merchant resources that took 1 week to go from zero to in the Rendo store. That's the workflow that you need to support if your figure is going to challenge Dawn, let alone reinvigorate the Poser content community.
Frankly, to make a new figure popular, you'll have to accept that everything that gets people seeing and using the figure is a loss leader. People don't make lots of renders of stuff everyone has already seen, and most people don't render the same exact character twice.
LOL, no offense taken. She is actually based on a 3d scan of a real lady, so no alien/supermodel legs, like we're all used to seeing in the Poserverse. She would probably be around 5'2, like me. That being said, the figure is set up with properly weightmapped transforms, so the proportions can be adjusted as desired pretty easily. The hands and feet are default, and I do intend to work with them later to make them less...bony. I also intend to make HD morphs for her so that she will have more defined details, not toned muscle definition details, because that's not my intention for this character (Blackhearted has done a set of HD body morphs for her that lean in that direction). More...an example of a woman of average build with some imperfections like rolls, cellulite, less than pert breasts, and a little bit of a double chin. Maybe not the most popular choice, but I always like to see some diversity out there on a figure. Not just tall, thin, toned, white chicks. For my next trick...maybe a male character, or an overweight character...once I see how this character goes. I've seldom done "regular people" type of content, I've always done monsters and weird stuff. I'm interested to try my hand, and this seemed like an easier, shorter-term project than the animal/creature figure I'm working on, to fill in the gap.
I have been a bit back and forth to the hospital (family emergency) but the work helps keep my mind off things. So, hopefully this project (and the others I am working on) will continue at a reasonable pace. Just putting it out there that I might not be as responsive to messages and such as I would like to be, and I haven't even caught up with messages from my last hiatus. :-S
I really like your ideas! Could you describe how to make HD morphs for Poser? As much as I find adding resolution only does so much if the edge loops aren't there (I discovered that with clothing, so I find it pretty universal), I really am interested in being able to add detailed morphs.
I hope things go well with your family emergency. Health problems are so deeply upsetting, and make all of life so much more difficult. Even if you're not the one going through them. I wish you and yours all the best.
. No, only kidding, that is a very detailed description much of which is written in a way a below average Poser user can understand. I like everyone's viewpoint but it is fairly rare to see it from the vendors point of view and it is also useful from a content buyers point of view. With my simplistic view of the market I often cannot understand why a similar dress for different figures is quite different in price, now I can see that part of it can be the complexity of figure in question. 