The Zygote Chat will be held on the DalNET IRC Network: http://www.dal.net Server: irc.dal.net Channel: #ZygoteChat WINDOWS USERS: Use Pirch downloadable for http://www.pirchat.com MAC Users: Use IRCLE downloadable from http://www.ircle.com For loading and entering the IRC with PIRCH, check the "Full Story" link below. ---------------------------------------- QA RESPONSES: Q MILLENIUM MAN: What are Zygotes plans concerning the release of a male counter part to Millenium Women? When is this model likely to be availabe for the Poser community? And will it build on the strengths of the Millenium Women model and the recommendations of Poser enthusiasts? A Yes, we plan to create a male counter-part to the Victoria model. It will be very comparable to and compatible with Vicki. It will include, at release, the same features, morphs, etc. that the latest Victoria update now includes. The model will be of similar resolution and cut, and, like Victoria, will have different grouping/joint parms and will therefore also not be compatible with existing clothing. In creating this figure, we will definitely be concerned with and try to anticipate and cater to the general desires of the Poser community. We were surprised with some of the feedback on Victoria, and will bear this in mind as we create the male version. We plan on monitoring the forums and Poserlist at its release, as we did during the release of Victoria, however, we also appreciate direct feedback which you can send to sales@zygote.com. (Just for the record, we don't always check the forums as regularly as we have for the last month, and emailing or calling Zygote directly is always effective and appreciated.) Q What kind of timeline do you have on the Millenium man? A At this point I do not want to give any dates; experience shows that self-imposed deadlines are chronically pushed back, and I'd hate to have you all impatient because he is overdue. We have already started modeling the head from a digitized plaster casting, and are still debating on how we want to reference the body. (We may start from a 3D scan of one person, or we may use photo shoots of multiple models as we did for Victoria.) In any case, releasing some clothing for Victoria and creating this "Millennium Man" are currently Zygote's top Poser priorities. Q If and when there is a Poser 5, has the possibility of all the figures being "Millennium" figures been considered? If so will they be different to the current "Millennium" figure (Victoria)? If they are NOT different from the current Victoria will the current users of Victoria have to toss her aside having shelled out money for her only to have to repurchase her again in Poser 5? Or will she be different from the figure included in Poser 5 so that she will always be a stand alone? A Zygote has no intention of including Victoria (or the Millennium Man) in Poser5. We feel that this would be unfair to those who had purchased the model from Zygote, and we certainly don't want to punish our loyal customers. (We did this with the long curly hair style and a couple of other items now included in Poser4, and regretted it in retrospect.) As far as what content will be included with Poser5, I'm not the guy to ask. Although we had just begun talking with Metacreations about Poser5 when they decided to divest themselves of Poser, now that Steve and Larry are back at the helm with Curious Labs (say halleluiah!) we have yet to get into any specific discussions concerning content. (Not to mention that even if we had, we would not be at liberty to discuss it.) Q Assuming that Zygote will indeed be working with Curious Labs in supporting Poser 5, when it is released. Is this something that we can count on, or does Zygote plan to release Poser-compatible models independently, such as Victoria, and rely on the Poser community purchasing them separately? A As in the past (with figures such as the faerie and dragon, and clothing paks such as the Costume Shop CD and the Tunic Pak), Zygote plans to continue to release Poser-compatible models independently. Victoria fits into this category. Also, as with Poser3 and Poser4, Zygote plans to seperately contract with the owners of Poser for providing content for Poser5. Q Will you be releasing the updated clothing and hair in bundled collections of several items to make it less costly for people to 'upgrade' or as single units? A Hairstyles will be released seperately (two are already selling individually). This is because of all of the hairstyles already out there that can be made to fit Victoria with a with little scaling; we figure that many people may only want to pay for one specific hairstyle from Zygote to complete their collection. Clothing, however, will be released in bundled "paks", in order to lower cost for those who would like to buy multiple items. We are still not decided on how many or which specific clothing items to create and bundle together, and would appreciate suggestions. We will probably have a few paks rather than one big Victoria wardrobe CD, however. Q There's been several fixes going around for problems in the joint parameters. Such as the point-at problem with the eyes and the shoulders lifting up fix. Will you be releasing an updated figure with some of these fixes and similar fixes at some point? And will Millenium Man include these fixes? A The point-at problem with the eyes has been fixed in the latest update. Nothing, however, has been changed with the shoulders as of now. As far as that goes, I'm not aware of the specific problem addressed with the "lifting up" fix you mention. I would be interested in seeing a joint parm fix in the shoulders, and certainly if Zygote thinks it is a better solution then we would be happy to incorporate it into an update. (Though we hope to be done with updates soon.) In general, anything that we "fix" (as opposed to "add to") about Victoria will be released as a free update. And yes, the Millennium Man will be created with Victoria's fixes in mind, so that we hopefully won't have to update him after release. :) Q Are there plans to include the use of and E-check to purchase your products. Not having a credit card and not wishing to wait several days for the payment to arrive by mail, wait for clearance etc,etc,etc. Would make your products much more available to all. A Not as of now. Yours is the first request that we've gotten for this service. The approval time would still be an issue (especially on weekends), but it does sound like it could be a viable addition to Zygote's payment methods. Thanks for the suggestion; I will pass it on to our marketing/web guys. Q How can you justify the large price tag for the model since more experienced users can duplicate the same look? A We believe that it would be extremely difficult and time consuming even for the more experienced users to create a figure like Victoria, even if they were to start from Zygote's Posette model, which is included in Poser yet which can't be sold by others in any form. I may be misunderstanding your question, however. If you mean duplicating the look of the figure as a specific character (ie: morphing Posette to look as Victoria looks "out of the box") then you're right, it could easily be done by others and is not worth the money. However, we feel that the value of Victoria is not in her "look", but rather in her versatility. And, having created numerous morph targets for the standard Poser figures, we realized that regardless of one's experience these models were very limited by resolution and direction of the geometry. In order to expand Poser's potential, we felt that an entirely new model should be introduced. Sales have since confirmed that decision. Perhaps it would be helpful for me to touch on Zygote's Poser marketing strategy in more general terms: Most of Zygote's income comes from custom work for major production houses. We build, morph, map, optimize for animation, and animate models for movies, TV commercials, videogames, etc. Most of this work is proprietary; a one-time sell. To cover overhead and salaries, we need to make a specific amount of money per hour of work. Despite our high quality product, our rates consistently prove to be considerably cheaper than those of our competition. When we create content to be included with Poser, we bid it out in this way. When we create Poser content to be sold independently, however, we know that we can (and should) lower our prices. Believe it or not, we do have experience in economics and business, and we do realize that there's a big difference in marketing to individual big-budget companies and primarily hobbyist masses. We still need to make our money back, however, or else it would be bad business for Zygote to create for Poser. (We are a business, after all.) Knowing that Poser users are generally very price conscious we've experimented with the pricing on our models. (Those of you who've been around for a while have probably noticed.) If enough additional people would buy our Poser products so that Zygote would make the same revenue we currently expect to make, then we would be more than happy to sell all of our figures for $5 or less. In the past we've sold some models too high and others too low. We have had some Poser models that made back their money in their first week (though very few). We've also had some Poser models that never even made enough money to pay for the time of the employees who did the work (also very few). And about the introductory special pricing that we do with most of our Poser products: the aim of this is to help out the avid Poser users that are on Zygote's Poser mailing list, while not selling the model for extremely substandard prices to the professionals that can afford to call Zygote only when they have a need for a specific product. The Poser community should also realize that some of Zygote's regular non-Poser clientelle has become accustomed to buying our Poser products so that they can strip out the .obj (losing all the other data included) and pay a fraction of the price that they're used to. I personally feel that it's in the Poser community's best interest to have these introductory offers, and occasionally when we feel that the product is particularly expensive or that people need more time to save we will extend these specials. Q Do you intend on doing any dedicated Anime Style Models? We have discussed this more than once, and are currently keeping track of the number of votes for anime figures that we receive from our customers. I think that we eventually will, though our plate seems to be rather full at the moment. One obstacle that we've forseen is creating a "lowest common denominator" anime male and female. Since styles vary, we'd probably want to take some kind of poll before undertaking this type of project. Q Fantasy Creatures and More Dinosaurs? A Zygote's dragon has done well; however, the triceratops sales disappointed us. Zygote does have an acrocanthosaurus in our library that we could poserify, or even tweak into a t-rex relatively easily. On the other hand, with dino models available from various other sites it becomes even less profitable for Zygote to create our own for Poser. I suppose that the answer to this question is that we would create more of these figures if we thought they would sell well, but right now it's not in Zygote's Top 5 list. I've personally always been a dino and creature fanatic, though, and would love to get enough requests to justify pursuing this genre. Q Will there be a genital set made for Victoria or any of your female characters when you have done genitals for the P4 Male? Was there a reason that one was not made or why was it decided not to include it? A When we built Victoria we added the resolution we felt would be necessary to add genetalia later as a morph target. We created morphs for pregnancy and birthing with Posette for a custom client, and wanted the option on this new figure should it be needed. However, I must admit that Zygote was pretty surprised by how shocking people seemed to think it was that Victoria didn't come with genetalia. We figured that we were following the regular pattern: we've never released a Poser woman with genetalia before, and up until now had never gotten this kind of feedback. (BTW, we had release some male figures without genetalia, too, and after the negative feedback on those had figured that we would include it on any subsequent men.) Q: Victoria and the lack of genitalia, do you plan to install it? What about the man? A: That is a good question. We have never included genitalia on any of our woman models including the ones that came in Poser. The reason being is that the pure demand for such detail, especially on a woman is so very remote that the cost to model and the amount of revenue that we get in return is not worth it. Not that we are prude or anything, Our male models have got included for obvious reasons, but the woman is a much less noticeable characteristic than a Penis is on a man. Texture maps do a great job and are MUCH cheaper than the actual modeling of the woman genitalia. There was much more demand for the male to be "endowed" for certain uses that are much more justified than a woman. Literally a map can do wonders for a woman and would do nothing for a man when it comes to genitalia. Again, this is not due to prudeness...We provided the geometry for such morphs to be made by those that are concerned with that detail. can only truly be seen within like a foot of the woman's crotch, as opposed to a man where you could see a missing Penis a Mile away. If you really think about it...it really makes sense. Q What are Zygote's plans for the future? A Good question. If you'd asked us that just over three years ago they'd have had nothing to do with Poser! In this industry you always have to play everything by ear, though. We're happy that Poser has turned into a stable portion of our income, and as the Poser product advances (which it should be able to do a little more effectively now that its Meta-shackles have been cast aside) we expect our Poser clientelle to continue to grow. At this rate it may even become the majority of Zygote's business someday. In any case, as Zygote's Poser customer-base grows our Poser library will also expand and our prices will drop. I also expect to see great things from the members of the Poser community, especially should you ever team up on a unified project of some sort. Depending on how things evolve in this arena, Zygote would be interested in participating. Q Will you be working with Curious Labs and supplying product for their new releases? A We expect to, although we have only talked generally with Steve and Larry about this thus far. Q Will Zygote be working closer with the Communities (Big-i, Poserforum.org, Renderosity), in helping to reconize the potential desires and products from these Communities? A As many of you may have noticed, Zygote personnel have monitored PFO, Renderosity and the Poserlist much more intensely this last month than we ever have before. We feel that this was an invaluable resource for marketing and improving the Victoria product specifically, as it could continue to be with subsequent products. We do have to consider it valuable enough at any given time to pay someone to read and/or post comments, and so it makes sense that our participation will be heaviest when we are actively marketing a product. However, I plan from now on to regularly do word searches (Zygote, Victoria, etc) so as to be in touch with all of the valuable feedback that you offer. Thanks to all those of you who provided such timely and constructive criticism on Victoria in particular. (And while I'm on the subject I thought I'd mention that we at Zygote do appreciate the helpful positive and negative criticism much more than the chronic complaining that doesn't present any solution.) Keep the constuctive feedback coming! Thanks, Chad Smith Zygote Media Group