Nevertrumper posted at 6:04 AM Thu, 27 November 2025 - #4501704

cadman posted at 10:59 PM Wed, 26 November 2025 - #4501696

With the majority of products at the marketplace of the owners of Poser being for Daz Studio [...]
 Most everything, even here on the Poser owned site, seems to be going Daz.  

Poser is not popular enough anymore to make money only with Poser content.
This is what happens, if a company is either too lazy or too stingy to invest in the improvement of their product.
All here is about milking the Poser cult cash cow.

I've used Poser on and off for over 20 years. I believed I knew the direction it would go based on what I assumed people were using it for. I recall the struggle with set-up/rigging tools, morph transfers, re-fitting clothing and the glacial pace at which they became useful and reliable. I watched the posing and animation tools linger as each owner viewed the program to some extent as merely a platform for vendor content. 
The first few version of iClone were barely comparable to Poser in terms of visual quality, nothing to steal away the pin-up crowd, anyway. But there was something philosophically different about it. Instead of seeing a mannequin frozen in a static default pose there were idle animations which made the figures feel more like virtual actors. The clothing was simplified but easy to fit across different character proportions.
Over time iClone matured. The characters got significantly better, the animation tools more modern, the native output was improved and a plug-in "quality" renderer added.
The same company then released Character Creator, and it has also seen significant improvement over several releases. Not only could users now create figures from their own meshes for use in iClone, those same rigged figures could be used with game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity.
During this time Epic debuted MetaHumans for use in Unreal Engine, and many DCC tools began to integrate support for those.
I bought Poser initially because I wanted to place figures into my scene for scale and realism. But I also always wanted to be able to use those figures in an interactive context, as both player and non-player characters. But it became clear over time that the included figures were too mesh-dense for real-time use. They had non-standard rigging, non-standard "blend shapes" etc. For a time it seemed like these were problems the devs wanted to tackle, we got the decimation tools and the figure merge tools as part of a GameDev version (IIRC) and those tools were later added to the vanilla program.
But for the last 15 years it has seemed as if whoever owned Poser could only see one competitor, Daz Studio. Sure, it was inspired by Poser (or more the uncertainty around its future) and both targeted the same community. And as it worked with the same vendors' content, it ultimately lured many into its ecosystem.
I just wonder, in a time of generative AI, game modding, photo modes, virtual pop-stars etc. who the target audience for Poser is in 2025. People here may lament that Poser doesn't work as well with Genesis as Daz Studio, but the rest of the world wants MetaHumans. Poser added Cycles, but Eevee looks just as good for 95% of uses (I'm aware that Cycles' license allows this while Eevee's doesn't). Poser should have went PBR years ago. MetaHumans and similar were the real competition, but the choice was made over and over to continue chasing another niche software making (IMHO) the very same mistakes.