Rhia474 posted at 4:00 PM Thu, 1 February 2024 - #4481081

That is what worries me. Why is Poser not attracting content makers any more? Is it something much more difficult to create for than the other program? If you look even on this marketplace,  the difference is staggering. I would like to understand why, because without content the future is grim.

Long story short:  Unimesh support. Poser needs it, and adding unimesh support in Poser will alleviate many of the content creation snags that are associated with needing actor groups, and which make content creation for Poser take longer than it does in DAZ Studio.

And by "Unimesh", I don't mean "DAZ Genesis Unimesh" support, I mean in Poser's core, all posing figures are dependent on individual actor groups. DAZ Studio works differently. 

Here's a big example. When you save a rigged figure (CR2) to the Poser library, Poser creates an OBJ file in the same location as the CR2 file. If you open this OBJ up in a modeler, you'll find that it is split apart at the body part groups. This later presents a challenge if you want to morph an OBJ file that is split apart at the seams, because they aren't welded. THe other problem is, some third party apps, such as zbrush, weld the OBJ together which will make a morph useless because the vertex count is different. Because DAZ uses "unified meshes" (AKA unimeshes) that don't rely on individual body part groups, you don't have this issue when you save a character to the library.

So, to work around that, what I usually do is the first time I save the CR2, at least for clothihng, is that I open the split apart OBJ in a modeler, and weld all of the seams together. Then duplicate vertices have to be deleted as well. After I clean the OBJ up, I change the two references in the CR2 to point to the cleaned up object, which I usually put in the Geometries folder for safekeeping. Then I reload that "good" CR2 into the scene, conform to the figure, and copy the morphs and joint parameters from the figure to the clothing.

It's a bunch of little things like this that eventually add up over time and make it take longer to create clothing for Poser vs DAZ Studio.