"Jim Charter" <jrc### [at] msncom> schreef in bericht 
news:493724b3@news.povray.org...
>
> Thomas would you be able to sketch briefly how Poser 6 would relate to 
> Daz?

OK let me try. I may forget something but others will correct me.

Daz, as you know, comes free. That is its major asset I believe, in the 
world of figure building and animating. It comes too with a set of free, 
basic, figures, some with morph possibilites, some very basic conforming 
clothes, and a set of 3D environments. Most everything else, if you want to 
expand, and you want very soon to expand (making/adding hair, clothes, etc) 
comes at a price. These are not very expensive, but in the end I believe you 
will spend more money in perfecting Daz than by investing initially in Poser 
and go on from there.

Poser comes standard with a set of figures, most with morph capabilities, a 
set of basic conforming clothes and conforming hair. Up to now, very similar 
to Daz. The great potential of Poser however, are the different *Rooms* 
where you can work on and with the figures.

Material Room: where you can work on the textures. Something similar exist 
in Daz too, but Poser is more comprehensive. The drawback is that many 
features cannot be translated easily to pov via Poseray, mostly because some 
of the features have no equivalent in pov. However, you can add your own 
textures in pov of course, so the limitation is only relative.

Face Room: Here you can change completely the character of your figures' 
faces, creating new personalities.

Hair Room: Potentially (for us, pov users) a very powerful tool for creating 
dynamic hair that can be animated (by wind or gravity). Unfortunately, this 
cannot be well exported to pov yet. I remember that FlyerX said he was 
working on it however. There is already a way to translate the dynamic hair 
to pov in Poseray, but the results are not too convincing.

Cloth Room: Aah! My favourite! Taking the figures in their zero-pose, you 
can model simple or complex clothes in any modeller you happen to use 
(Wings3D, Blender, Silo2, etc) import them into the Cloth Room, dress your 
figures with them, set a whole range of dynamic cloth parameters, and 
animate the figure towards an end pose you have chosen. The clothes will 
dynamically follow the whole action and, if all goes right, end up with a 
very believable dressed figure. You can play with gravity and wind too. You 
have seen my images. The results can be very good. I am still learning and 
improving my skills in this room.

Setup Room: I have not yet been there seriously. Basically, you can change 
here the bone structure of your figures, or add bones to boneless ones. 
Useful too for making conforming clothes.

On the Content Paradise site, you will find a whole range of figures (human 
and animal), props, hairs, that have been offered for free in the past. 
Miki/Miki2 is one of them. Free conforming hair can be found for instance 
here http://www.digitalbabes2.com/

Very important (and very complex) is the free Apollo Maximus figure by Anton 
Kisiel 
http://www.antonkisieldesigns.com/~akfiles/htmlpages/ApolloMaximusFree3dhumanfigure.htm.

It works as well for Poser as for Daz. It is one of my favourites because 
you can change totally the whole morphology of the figure, so you have 
endless possibilities to people your scenes. Currently the 2007 version is 
up but Anton is working on the 2008 (and probably final) version.

Now, if you want specific things, many things are for sale, mainly 
conforming clothes and endless variations on bikinis, generally for modic 
prices. However, my opinion is that they are very restricted in use or 
useless. Just visit the appropriate pages on the Daz and Content Paradise 
sites to see what I mean.

The only two things in which I have invested because I saw their utility, 
are http://www.physicalc-software.com/poserphysics/, and 
http://www.philc.net/BasicClothing_page1.htm.


In the end, I may not have been entirely fair to Daz, but that is because I 
very rapidly switched from the use of Daz to Poser, mainly because I ended 
up pretty soon (immediately to tell the truth) against the usefulness limits 
of Daz. I still have not met those in Poser...

Thomas

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