Recommendations

yebdox

Hello all, I work in healthcare and have dabbled with Poser in the past, with some frustration. Currently, I want to create a male and female model with modest athletic clothing and appearance to function as a base for posing for exercise illustration and instruction, and possibly for animation to demonstrate exercises. 

I'm not familiar with Daz3D, and am a bit confused by the modeling choices, content, and compatibility. I'm beginning to understand that models created in Daz would require some import process to function in Poser, and vice versa. I'm most interested in realistic appearance. The clothing bundles, hair, facial expressions, etc that seem to be most commonly demonstrated in 3rd party Poser software/ characters look pretty cheap, vapid and weird. OTOH, the demos I see on Renderosity look much more real for the most part, with skin mapping, better eyes and expressions, but look like they have been developed for digital porn. 

I really just need a male and female figure with athletic, not cartoon or porn detail, with gym shorts, shirts/tanks, shoes and realistic expressions and body morphology. I don't mind the learning curve, as I've forgotten what I learned in Poser 5 (the last time I spent any time with this stuff.)

Thanks in advance for any simple recommendations for models, clothing, expressions, posing and tutorials, as well as views on the advantages and disadvantages of Poser vs. Daz.  I know that's a lot to ask, and if you can point me to more concise reading, I will gladly pursue it.

KA1

This is seriously going to depend on how much you want to invest I guess, with Daz you get the Genesis, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 starter essentials which give you basic models and materials to work with, if those seem okay it's just a case of finding the outfits you want of which there is a wide choice in most price brackets both here at the Daz store and elsewhere - Genesis 3 would require working in Daz (although I believe some people may have had a little success trying to get them to work in Poser) but you could certainly look at the included Daz content to start you off and then decide from there?

yebdox

Thanks, KA1, I have the free download  for Daz and will upgrade to Poser 11 and poke around. I was just hoping maybe someone already had a setup that they liked for similar medical and exercise illustration. Do you have an opinion on Daz vs Poser for clothing flexibility? The older versions of Poser always seemed to have issues with body parts poking through the clothing maps. Maybe that's not such an issue any more. 

Ken OBanion

The only DAZ figures that are not compatible with Poser are the Genesis 3 figures, and the characters derived from them.  The Genesis and Genesis 2 figures can be imported into Poser using the DSON Importer for Poser (and I've read in these forums that the DSON Importer will work with Poser 11 -- I personally cannot vouch for that, as I am still (impatiently) awaiting delivery of my copy of Poser 11 Pro).

Earlier figures -- Generation 4 (Victoria 4, Michael 4, etc.), Generation 3, and earlier -- are directly compatible with Poser; they should be, since Poser was the target market for them.  It really wasn't until DS 4 was released that it was potent enough to give Poser a run for its money.  (DS 3 was pretty good, but I still stuck with Poser.  Then version 4 came out, and it was a quantum leap over DS 3.  I now prefer it over Poser, and I basically haven't looked back.)

yebdox

Thanks for the enlightenment, Ken!  Will give them both a go. 

After having poked around, I'm getting the idea that both Poser and Daz can render to some pretty realistic figures. I was seeing some Poser figures used for accessory and clothing demos that looked pretty mannakin like, but some artists seem to be able to do lots more with expressions and poses than others, with the same base figures (Victoria and versions of her, for example.) So it looks like the potential is there, but requires some expertise.

 

Khory

Seams like Studio comes with some athletic type wear for the figures. So you might want to poke through all the included stuff and see what is there. Even if it is for a different figure you may be able to auto fit it to the one you want to use. I'll also mention that the genesis 3 figures seem to have the most realistic bends but genesis 2 figures are a very close second. If you needed added realism you can also use the new Iray render engine in Studio 4 but it will be slow going unless you have a good nvidia graphics card.