scottl opened this issue on Jun 01, 2022 ยท 58 posts
unrealblue posted Wed, 15 June 2022 at 4:40 AM
Sasha-16 is nice if V4 is your thing. If I do anything with V4, it's really Sasha.
La Femme is nice but devilishly difficult to make conforming clothing for. Not as easy to sculpt in Blender (for me).
There is also Dawn and an upcoming Dawn 2 (a very experienced dev group on this). From Hivewire, which is now store-fronted here. More info on their forums. A lot more :p
I went the same as you. Poser for years. Enjoyed LuxRender and Reality. Daz stopped supporting Poser. I tried DS. Gave up. It just never clicked with me. Some time later, I happened to attend a SIGGRAPH and noticed Blender everywhere. I started learning Blender 2.8 (new GUI) and when I got to character work I really missed a lot of what Poser offered. Now I shift back and forth between them (depending on what I'm doing). I wrote a Blender plugin to make moving back and forth easier for what I was doing (sculpting). If you haven't tried it, Blender is currently very slick. Poser is better at what Poser does, though :)
Figure-wise, this is Dawn with some V4 clothing ported using a combination of Poser auto-rigging and Blender sculpting for fitting. Dawn is relatively easy to fit with conforming clothing. No extra morphing or JCMs needed for the clothing to work with Dawn. The (youthful-stylized) character is also sculpted in Blender and applied in Poser 12 (one button Load Full Body Morph). If you haven't used Poser in while, there has actually a lot of little things done to fix and/or fill in some of the features. In any case, Dawn has a nice mesh and Dawn 2 is even better.
Nothing special here. Superfly (on an iMac Pro, CPU rendering, about 15 minutes), simple mats, simple lighting. No JCMs, no fix morphs. Auto-rigged V4 clothing sculpted to fit in Blender.
I think Poser is viable. I'm liking where the rendo dev team is going with it. I'm also liking what the Hivewire team is doing with Dawn 2 (fully cross DS and Poser figure, state of the art, super-experienced figure devs. Like nothing that's come before). Poser plays nicely (for my purposes) with Blender. And I'm thinking this will only improve (things like CyclesX in Poser being actively worked on).