This post was first published on February 10, 2020 on DeviantArt.com. It’s a bit of a time capsule of the journey towards Daz into Blender—Darryl

2019 was a big year as far as the software I use on a daily basis. Somehow, most of my daily drivers received massive changes, updates, or shifts at pretty much the same time. I want to quickly go over some of these changes and what they mean to me (and maybe you as well).

POSER 11

In June of 2019 Bondware, the developers of the Renderosity website, bought (saved?) Poser from the Smith Micro Corporation (S/M). This news was met with some combination of fear, joy, relief, and resignation from the Poserverse. S/M totally dropped the ball over the last half-decade or so. They won’t be missed. So long S/M, don’t let the doorknob hit you in the arse on the way out.

At the end of the day Rendo managing Poser makes perfect sense. Contrary to their public statements it’s clear that they want a soup to nuts platform similar to Daz. They bought Poser for the same reason Daz developed Studio in the first place. They didn’t want their business held hostage by outside entities. S/M was doing its best to kill the program completely and I’m positive that Daz views any Genesis sales outside the Daz store as a form of theft. They give away the figures and the software relying on content sales for profit. “If you want to sell content get your own damn platform” is certainly on their minds. That’s what Bondware did. I don’t blame them.

Unfortunately they started their relationship with loyal customers in the worst possible way. S/M left a huge turd in the living room on the way out called “Activation Servers.” This required a forced update to owners of recent versions so Bondware could “rebrand” the app. But they didn’t just rebrand, they eliminated Wardrobe Wizard, 32-bit support, and began pushing out notifications of Rendo content through the app. The update caused a number of issues to my copy that have yet to be worked out. What was perfectly functional became disfunctional in some ways. Also, on first opening the app, rather than seeing Andy, the friendly Poser mascot, I’m now greeted by a full frontal of a naked LaFemme.  I get it. There’s no telling when the next version of Poser might show up (or if anyone will buy it) so let’s get our virtual vixen front and center while we still can.

You couldn’t put a bikini on her though?

One thing I can say for sure, Poser 11 will go down in infamy in the annals of Poserdom. The launch was totally botched with a broken and homely Pauline figure. Paul, the missing link, was not available at launch (nor been seen since). There were bugs to the point of unusability. Superfly, a physically-based renderer and the key new feature of PP11 had no pro-level images to show it off, leaving the community to post WiP images to the internet as they tried to learn it. They added the aforementioned activation servers that ended up doing exactly what we feared they would do. They fired their dev team and off-shored American jobs to low wage workers in Europe. They ended up firing these guys too when they sold the company, spreading the joy of unemployment to the global community. The software hasn’t been upgraded in over 4 years. The handover to Bondware forced LEGAL owners of the software into a forced upgrade that caused various problems without any useful new features. I’m using Blender more and more these days, it’s fun and exciting. Poser 12 better be killer before it turns into a seldom used utility on my harddrive.