Just sitting here thinking: been following the Poser rumours thread over at Renderosity, and am glad I have Pixel Nook to come to say what I really think. Traci’s generosity and all of that group’s creativity got me thinking about our community… I mean, the greater Poser Community in general, not just us.

I was going to say this on that thread, but I think tempers are a bit volatile there at the moment.

When you think about it, back when Diogenes was putting together the whole figure-WM concept and developing absolute genius figures – some of which blew the originals out of the water – what *really* drove the whole effort was: freedom. Freedom to improve what’s there, freedom from an organisation dictating what or how a figure should behave or be used, freedom of movement.

Freedom. Seems no one got that.

In the Windows world, there is something incredibly sacrosanct about proprietary and intellectual-property. No clue why – I really think it’s those bloody Gates letters to hobbyists. Before then, computing was about sharing and growth. After him, it was about money. But still, sharing lives on. In the Poser community alone, we’ve got:

Bagginsbill: *gave* the community Matmatic.

So, no one got that. No one got what this could do for Firefly, for shaders, for materials.

Then, SnarlyGribbly gave the community Pose2Lux. Now, we can completely circumvent Firefly and do something totally incredible with our Poser creations in a superior renderer.

Oh but wait, it was free.
“Couldn’t be of much value, then could it?”

Then, Diogenes gave us: V4-weight-mapped. Now, this has GOT to be the game-changer, the one that made the difference. All the renders proved it: the mesh deform was vastly superior to what had come out of … um, the original developer’s design.

Once again: free.

Then, EzSkin. The list of incredible gifts to the community goes on and on.

Free (as in: no-cost) is a stigma. Too often, for too many, “no-cost = free” means “no-value”. This is a sad-sad-abysmally-sad thing. The whole Poser concept *originally* was all about Poser artists creating amazingly brilliant add-on stuff for NO-COST, as a give-back to the community. That is Poser’s heritage. But what happens these days? Too many Poser users evaluate those gifts based on what they cost and thus deem them of no value.