The Poser figure market is currently in a vulnerable position. What we have today is the digital equivalent of the potato monoculture that caused the tragic Irish famine of 1845. The Irish farmers, at that time, cultivated almost exclusively one single type of potato. When a the potato blight attacked their fields it became widespread because every farmer cultivated the same type of potato and so the “bug” grew and flourished causing a widespread shortage of food. If the farmers had diversified their crop with other types of potatoes then the desease would have been contained and many people would have avoided starvation.

The Poserverse today is at risk to be in a analogous situation, although not nearly as dramatic, because of Victoria 4. If we look in the big marketplaces, Renderosity, RuntimeDNA and DAZ, we see that V4 has the lion share of all products. Still today the vast majority of new clothing and accessories for human figures is based on V4. There are good reasons for this. V4 is an excellent figure, it’s well known, and it works both in Poser and DAZ Studio (DS). Other figures have been introduced by several vendors but failed to attract so much attention from content developers.

So, why is this a risky situation? Markets need to grow or they stagnate and lose buyers. Many content providers today depend on the Poser market for their income. Anything that destabilizes that market can have serious repercussions. It is vital that the market diversifies or it risks to be seriously compromised by this single point of failure that is V4. Growth is also at risk because diversity is an important factor in expanding a market. While the appeal of V4 is strong it is not universal and it starts showing signs of staleness. Different proportions and ethnicities are also important.

It is therefore necessary to think about a strategy that allows us to avoid having all our eggs in one basket. One of the reasons of the V4 dominance in the Poser market is the investment of money that people have in V4 accessories.

Any new figure that is introduced today will have to satisfy the following requirements, if it wants to gain some market presence:

1. Be fully compatible with both Poser and DS.
2. Be able to use V4′s clothing. People have invested thousands of dollars in products for V4. They are not going to purchase again all those accessories because of a new pretty face or some morph abilities. Interchangeability is key.
3. Be able to use V4′s skins. This is easy to do. Unlike the clothing, fitting a UV map to another one is relatively simple.

Point 2 is the key for gaining freedom from the current locked-in situation.

The fitting room

Poser 10′s fitting room is a new feature that allows to fit any piece of clothing onto any figure. You will be able to fit a V4′s shirt on a teapot, if you want. Yes, Poser’s Fitting Room is that powerful. Other solutions have been tried before, but having something built-inside Poser is a whole different situation. It provides the level of control that was not available before and, because it’s coded in Poser, we can be sure that it takes in account all the rigging data that are necessary to have a great result.

The Fitting room also allows to retain the original morphs, which is a major plus. If you have been a fan of alternative body shapes, like Miki 4 for example, now you can use all the wardrobe from V4 to dress Miki and add variety to your renders. Are you feeling restricted by the lack of choice for Blackhearted’s Anastasia? Don’t be, with a few clicks you can adapt any garment from any figure to the new model.

The Fitting Room has very fine and sophisticated controls to identify areas that need to be kept stiff, like buttons, and others that need different types of fitting, like making some parts tighter and others free to drape and flow.  This is done by painting with the now familiar weight-mapping brushes. This level of control allows us to define the perfect fit, no matter what are the proportions of the target model.

On the other hand the PFR (Poser Fitting Room) also expands the market for content developer. If you are designing a piece of clothing for a figure you can then create all the variations that you want for other figures with just a few clicks. This allows you to publish a garment simultaneously for V4, Anastasia, Miki, Michelle, Antonia or any other figure. The crucial point in doing this successfully is to minimize the time required to create a figure-specific garment. If the time is short enough, then the ROI is much more attractive.

The Poser Fitting Room makes that critical time very short and so it opens a lot of possibilities for new content.

This is possibly one of the most remarkable developments in Poser history. A big thanks goes to the Poser developers for making it possible.

After learning the fundamentals I decided to make a first model, a big letter “J” extruded in 3D, with nuts and bolts holding together, as if it was built out of steel. I also wanted to animate the letter to spin on itself. Very trivial. One of those things that you do when you are learning the basics.

Why the “J”? The symbol that I just described was the logo of the product I was working at that time: Borland JBuilder. JBuilder was the number one development platform for the Java language, at that time very popular. I wanted to have a spinning logo to display during a possibly lengthy operation that the program would perform.

It did work and the result was good enough that we decided to include the small animation in the finished product.

Years have passed and I had forgotten about the spinning J until last week, when I started cleaning up an old backup of a PC that is long gone. There I found the original Blender file created for that silly little animation.

The project had been created on a PC running Linux, my desktop of choice at that time, and now I have it on my Mac. I double-clicked on it and sure enough the current version of Blender was launched. Lo and behold my old file loaded and I was able to cycle through my little animation.

Think about it: from 1999 to today, fourteen years later, a lot of things changed for Blender. Still it retains compatibility with files that old.

Recently Adobe has announced that they will discontinue the publishing of the Creative Suite as a “permanent license” and switch to a subscription-only model. The CS is a bundle of software that includes Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and other applications. As you can imaging CS costs several thousands dollars. If you use the programs in the Suite the bundle is a good deal, it costs less than buying the apps separately.

I have used the aforementioned applications for years and bought a couple of licenses of the Creative Suite as well. As a small developer it was a pretty large investment, but it was worth it.

Now Adobe is saying to all the people who invested in the Creative Suite to take a hike. I don’t like being held hostage with my software. It makes me feel very uncomfortable. With rented software my access to my own files ends the moment I stop paying the subscription. I could have paid for years of that subscription, if I stop tomorrow then I end up with a bunch of useless files that I cannot edit or view anymore. Quite a far cry from my Blender experience.

I can’t imagine how anybody at Adobe has considered this a viable model, something that people would appreciate. Is their greed so high, so incredibly out of proportion that they have lost all connections with the real world, with the people who use their software?

The backlash on Facebook has been monumental, with practically unanimous condemnation of this absurd move. Adobe’s stock price fell as well.

Particularly distasteful is Adobe’s take on labeling this move as the “modern” way of selling software, as if all the millions of people who buy standard, permanent licenses are dinosaurs stuck in the past. I wonder if all those rich Adobe executives who took this decision would feel “modern” if they were forced to rent the house that they bought. C’mon be modern, trade your real estate property for a “trendy” rent.

It’s not too late for Adobe to retract and possibly apologize to the community of users that supported them in the past years.

What this tale is teaching us is the value of owning a license of your software and the dangers of Cloud computing. As mentioned in a previous article in this blog, the Cloud is a great opportunity for greedy corporations to implement business models that are bound to trap the consumers and subjugate them to pay absurd fees forever.

If Adobe refuses to listen to its customers and provide the license that they want then it will be time to find alternatives. Fortunately there is no rush because our license of their software is not going to expire.

Data in the Cloud is a good thing.

Cloud computing has its place in our life and plenty of innocent applications. Inevitably, when a new paradigm, if not a new technology, is discovered there are people and companies that try to apply that paradigm to situations that should be left alone. In the case of Cloud computing we can’t even say that this is a new paradigm at all, although some might think so. Cloud computing is remarkably similar to Mainframe computing, a model in which a single large computer holds all the programs and data and people access such programs and data via terminals. That model is something that we fought to disrupt, with very good reasons, with the invention of the Personal Computer.

The fact that we use phones and tablets today is not changing anything when programs are executed “in the Cloud” and their display shown on mobile devices. It’s the same ball-and-chain of mainframe computing.

What sense does it make to have a fully featured computer on your desk, or a smartphone in your pocket, and then delegate everything to some centralized entity that has full control on what you see or don’t see, what you use or don’t use?

Let me be totally clear: it makes no sense at all for the user, but it brings a lot of benefit for greedy corporations.

Of course companies pushing that model want us to believe otherwise, but we know better.

Using programs “in the Cloud” is one of the most dangerous trends that I have seen in decades. The sales pitch is that, by using a program that runs on a distant server and then displays the output in our browser, we don’t have to install the program or update it in the future. Our data are also safe on someone else’ computer so we don’t have to worry about backups and the such. Gee, I wonder if we should we give that company the keys of our house as well?

Running programs in the Cloud is a very bad idea and here’s why:

• We have a lot of computing power in our PCs. Overloading a central machine with multiple instances of the same program will never be as fast and as efficient as running the program on a dedicated machine. Gamers who tried SimCity recently had a clear demonstration of this failure.
• If there is a failure in the communication, the Internet is not reachable, we are left unable to access the program and our data. If we have the program and data in our computer we have access to them all the time.
• If the company that makes the program decides to hike up the price of using the program, then we have no alternatives but to pay or lose access to valuable data. This position of vulnerability will certainly be exploited. When we own the program that is installed on our computer we are independent.
• When running programs in the Cloud confidentiality is at risk. Regardless of how reputable the company is, we cannot trust them with our data. When the data are in our computer we have control, we can encrypt the data and we can delete it at any time we want with full confidence that nobody else will have a copy somewhere. When we run programs on our devices we can control what we keep in the cloud and what we hold safe in our hands. When we run programs in the cloud we don’t have that choice.

There are plans of creating programs video editors in the cloud. Or having video games computed by some distant server with the output only displayed on the client machine. Things like Photoshop-in-the-Cloud and other nonsense like that.

We need to ask ourselves one simple question: what good would such application bring to us? How is running “Tomb Raider” or “Bioshock”, for example,  in the cloud any better than running them on a PC, a gaming console or a tablet? What kind of benefit would bring running Photoshop in the cloud instead of using the full power of my Mac or PC?

The are no benefits and there are a lot of downsides.

Speed is never enough for a videogame. Still today I see plenty of games that have very blocky, low-resolution 3D models because they cost too much to be animated and shaded in real-time, even on a high-power, multiple cores, GPU-powered machine. How can a virtual machine, running multiple instances of the same game do a better job, especially when you add the Internet latency, than a dedicated computer? It cannot.

So, the solution is simple: we need to be aware of the risks of cloud computing and avoid it when it makes no sense. Owning a license of a software and having the freedom to install it on our computers, and use it whenever we want without anybody monitoring us is very valuable. We should never give up that possibility, no matter how charming the song of the mermaids is. It is all a deception.

Remember that anything in the Cloud can be used and taken from you, so be careful and back up your data. Backup? That sounds like a good topic for another article.

For a while I wanted to add a blog section to this site. The News section worked a little bit like that, but it is really a part of the site devoted to news about the products that we release and related tidbits.

This blog is going to be a lot more personal and a way of sharing ideas and information about 3D art, photography and computer culture.

You can subscribe to this blog with your email address, look in the right sidebar of this page. I don’t spam and I don’t share  the mailing list.

Thank you for reading.

On the wake of that success Renderosity has nominated Prêt-à-3D Vendor Of the Month.

This is an honor and an unexpected surprise. We want to thank the staff at Renderosity for their support of Reality and for this award.

With such a large and vibrant community Renderosity is the place where Poser artists can find great software and content to extend Poser to make it the ideal artistic tool for 3D art.

Renderosity has graciously interviewed Paolo Ciccone, founder of Prêt-à-3D and developer of Reality 3 for Poser. You can read the full interview here.

Thanks again!

Thank you CGChannel!

Reality 3 has been presented today at the world-wide PoserExpo online seminar. Receptions has been phenomenal with many questions asked from the attendees. We’d like to thank Paul Bussey and the staff at 3D Art Direct for inviting us to talk and demonstrate Reality 3 at this event.

At the event the details about pricing and availability have been released as follows:

• Reality 3 for Poser will be released to the public on April 8th
• Retail price will be $59.95, on sale at $39.95 for the month of April
• Crossgrade available from Reality 2 for $14.95
• Full version will be available at Renderosity, RuntimeDNA and Pret-a-3D
• Crossgrade available at preta3d.com
• Reality 3 for Poser runs on Mac OS and Windows, 32 and 64 bits

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?76320-Looking-for-beta-testers-Reality-3-for-Poser&p=732147#post732147

The weekly development update for Reality 3 for Poser is ready. You don’t want to miss this.

Go to the RuntimeDNA forum and read all about it here.

See you next week.

Join the forum discussion on this post