WHY?

I have decided that I will n olonger provide freebies or marketplace items for Poser at this time.

My hobby for the last 40 years has been 3D graphics, and Poser for 20 years, and will continue.

Several years ago, I saw a decline in support for the characters that I primarily use (LF1/LH1), so I began to work on using content that I owned to find ways to convert them to the figures that I use.

I have had texture Transformer packages for V4 and M4 for over 4 years.

I have created fitting room morphs for D3, M3, V3, M4and V4 which gives me access to a large collection for clothes.. I recently started creating Base Items to be used in the same way the MFD was used,

I am no longer dependent on there being a marketplace where I can buy content, and most of my purchases in the last year have been Merchant Resource items .

Why not LF2/LH2?

They seem to be competent figures, but lack of support and more importantly lack of poses.

They are the first POSER NATIVE figures that can not use the legacy pose.

Texture wise, they can use LFH2 textures except for eyes, but without at lease a start at a pose they can be a PITA.

The user base

Mostly disengaged. Most popular thread seems to be about an years old figure

The Vendor base

Much smaller after the last 3 years

The owners

Seem to be doing nothing to promote the POSER figures.

Bill

People that know everything by definition can not learn anything

Sad to hear, but completely understandable. I must confess. most of my reluctance to use LF2/LH2 is exactly what you say. No support from the owner of the program and lackluster support from vendors. Despite the fact that they've been out for years, there is very little variety in available skins, morphs, poses and clothing. And, with removing the Cloth Room and putting in a substitute with no documentation of user-friendly Interface, Poser's owner simply killed those figures as most of the available clothing was, you guessed, Cloth Room dynamic.

(also less face it the male figures were already undersupported)

With that said, you will be missed and I hope you at least will stick around for the hobby.

Sorry to hear, Bill.  Your frustration is understandable. =(

Molly

Well, I did try to support LH2 even if  Indirectly, All of my freebie characters will work with LH2, except for the eyes.  Not the morphs of course.

My marketplace M4 to LH1 with the free LH1 to LH3 should give him some close.  I only did them because LH2 had so little support.

The poses were the killer for me.  Having to set up a new pose for every render instead of using Poser 106 and G2 Poses  makes LH1 easy to work with.

t is not a lack of shoes/Clothes or skins or hair, I have conversions of all of those, but willl not release for LF2.

The Market Place for charactres is all DAZ so I figure Rendo will go the way of content Paradise, RDNA etc.

As a last resort, I still have PP2014  (they killed game dev)

Bill

People that know everything by definition can not learn anything

Thank you for everything you've contributed; I've always appreciated following your work and advice.

All good things... as the saying goes. You've done good over the years; the fact that you kept plugging away at it is far better than I've been doing (because life, that's why.)

The following is not a judgement, but I want to answer your implied questions in a way...

- The figure promotion issue has been a chicken-and-egg problem ever since people stopped using Posette as their primary figure, and first became apparent when statistically nobody - freebie maker or vendor - really bothered with Judy (anyone else remember that figure? It was the default Poser 5 female figurine.) It's been a thing ever since.

- The CG hobbyist market has been shrinking for awhile - AI is only accelerating this as it moves from the 'slop' phase into something that's actually useful.** 

- The pr0n art (read: mostly hentai IMO) sector has definitely moved to AI, as expected; the impatient 'art' crowd there is only looking for spank-bank material - they see AI as a faster route to getting those dopamine hits they crave - after all, can't be wasting time actually setting poses and waiting for renders to finish.

- Poser's up-front costs make it less appealing in the face of Blender (free), DS (free), TiXL* (free), Unity (free for individual use), VRoid (free)... and more popping up almost monthly. Art has never been easier to make, and that's not even counting the rapidly expanding AI (non-porn) art universe.... and most of those tools are free as well. Who wants to pay $$$ up front when you don't have to? 

- Rendo buying Poser was a noble last effort, but sadly, unless something major and disruptive happens, I suspect Poser will continue fading away. 

Maybe someday in the future, someone trolling archive-dot-org for research material will stumble across this little genre, and marvel that people willingly put themselves through so much just to make pretty pictures.

** I will say though there's a few new AI-centric plugins and CG helper apps out there that really rock - like the LaurenDev DAZ Pose Generator.
*** TiXL: https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl

Why not clothes?

Rendo owns the software and the site, so they can establish the rules.

So what are the rules?

For conforming clothes, the clothes MUST include certain FBM's

Result:

no real benefit for the user. No mater how many FBMs are in the clothes, they will still not fit a custom character

The Vendor is required to provide front and back images in the marketplace for each morph, resulting in extended time for creating High Quality images

Not required for dynamics, but those are going to have a new process to use since the cloth room is going to go away.

Cognitive disconnect: If a prop has embedded .obj file it will be denied, but each FBM injects a modified copy of the .obj into the cr2

Material or mat Poses can not be with in the same place as the clothes item, even though they will not work with any ;other item.

Bill

People that know everything by definition can not learn anything