Despite Studio's Popularity, People Still See 'Poser Art'
Nyghtfall3D
Posts: 813
If there's one thing SM and previous developers have done right from a marketing perspective, it's engrained the term 'Poser art' in the minds of the average Joe who may not have ever used the program, but has seen enough images created with it to automatically assume it was used.
I started out in 3D with Studio in 2006. It's been tool of choice since 4.8 was officially released ,last June. I'm in the middle of a new project, posting renders as I finish them. I always make a point of referencing my workflow with every render I post: DAZ Stduio, Iray, Photoshop. Someone on another board I frequent complimented me on a, "Fine piece of Poser art'". I just smiled and shook my head.
I'm not going to bother correcting them, but I do think it's comical that, despite Studio's popularity, and my specifically listing the app in my post, peope like him still think of Poser when viewing 3D art, no matter the app the artist actually used.
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I think it has just become one of those expressions, just like photomanipulating is now labelled 'photoshopping' regrdless what software you used, just like searching the internet is called 'googling' regardless of which search engine you used. 'Poser art' now simply refers to posing and rendering pre-made assets, regardless which software is used.
It is interesting how a product or brand name can become associated with all products of a particular type. Band-Aid is probably the best-known example, but there are plenty of others. I've heard that in some parts of the US, all soft drinks are referred to as Coke. That could get confusing.
I suppose some might get anmoyed that their product name gets associated with a competitor's product, but I would think that most would see it as a victory.
From a number of artist sites that I go to "Poser Art" is a derrogatory term, usually used for CG art with poorly posed and lit scenes with bad composition. I think it is a major benefit to DAZ that art made with studio instead simply falls into the catagory of CG art and does not have that poser stigma.
'Hoovering' springs to mind too, said when people are vacuuming.
Yes Comment made by someone who was A Contract CLeaning Manager for 14 years, and never did persuade my staff that they were vacuuming, not cleaning, and if they wanted to be precise they were either Numaticing or Henrying (other brands an modles are available)
And on one site, when they were reorganisng their galleries I was told that my images from the Contest gallery were going to be placed in the Poser Gallery. Hmmph, excuse me I use Bryce. I render in Bryce, any other programs are only used for prework.
Sometimes it goes the other way. PC once just meant Personal Computer and was used for any computer designed for one person at a time to use. It didn't mean one compatible with IBM personal computers.
I think that DAZ as a brand isn't still very widely known. Poser has more name brand recognition.
Companies hate it when they lose their trademark that way. Talk to anyone at Bell Labs and you can practically hear the (TM) or (SM) whenever they say "The Unix Operating System", and they never say just Unix.
The real problem is that "poser" is a derogatory term all on it's own, one that unfortunately implies that art created with it is somehow not as good as something else since one of it's synonyms is "fake". That's an unfortunate branding issue that the creators of Poser obviously never anticipated... though, to be fair, when it was created, Poser wasn't intended to be an actual art medium. Ideally the name could have been changed when Poser 3 was introduced... maybe MetaCreation Studio, after the company that owned Poser at the time, but they didn't, so here we are...
I have observed that viewers from other user communities only use "poser art " in a derogatory fashion when it depicts scantily clad or naked northern european white women.
The online poser/Daz community has to accept some of the blame for this Negative stereotype.
I have Shown the attached image to many people in non poser communities:
Stonemasons "DarkStar"for POSER
Sanctumart's "solo" for POSER
Titled "The Journey Home" and rendered nearly nine years ago.
I have never had anyone dismiss/Disparage this render as that "poser art crap " even though the focus of the image is a female and it is 100% poser content no original models made by me.
Narrative counts even with stills , more so with animation.
Well at some point in time poser art had a specific easily identifiable look. Early Daz work looked about the same, but at some point Daz artists who started pushing the limits of photo-realism began to give a much different look to DS renders. Even though Poser artwork doesn't typically look the way it did back in 2001, that look is still the one most people readily think of, especially if the artwork is not going for hyper-realism, and has a slight uncanny valley effect.
Yeah, I tend to think of it as 'skinny white chicks with black doll expressions in clumsy poses with plasticy skin and terrible lighting with a few strips of clothing flopped on top.'
Yeah that was the look, although later I discovered that Poser didn't have to look like that, it's that the majority of people using it, simply "posed" figures and did a render, they didn't spend much time on anything else.
A lot of what I used to think of as the Poser Look was probably down the the old renderer it had before they got Firefly. It was OK for it's time, tended to look a bit plasticky but most renderers did back then. I don't know how many people remember that far back but Poser these days is much better.
Concerning the subject matter, it used to be a standing joke that a Poser user's first render was Naked Vicky In A Temple With A Sword, and some people never got beyond that.
I found it a lot more difficult to setup scenes and pose figures back then. When I had a PC with memory meaured in megabytes and CPU speed in megahertz I would click on a arm or leg, drag the mouse a bit and the computer would freeze for nearly a minute before it jumped to the new position. And loading a conforming item of clothing involved several minutes of watiing to see if the clothes would appear or Poser would crash (frequent saving was essential but that took a long time as well). Compared to that it's amazing how smooth and stable Poser and Studio are now.
I always thought the "poser artist" label had a lot to do with how this process, ie using Poser to pose, dress, and render, was not considered true art in the art community.
That debate is still going on. A lot of people it seems don't consider something art, unless the creator actually creates every aspect of it from the ground up. It's rather funny that these limitations aren't necessarily put on other artforms, that require teams and the like, though I suppose you might have some hardcore painters that don't consider someone a "true" artist if they don't mix their paints themselves and buy them from an art supply center.
It's not just "poser art" though; a lot of it is aimed toward digital art in general, rather than just one specific tool.
I think one big issue is that a novice painter produces something that looks vaguely person-like, but clumsy. A novice CGI artists produces something that looks almost real, except it looks bizarre and clumsy and plastic.
So I think this makes for a lot of permeated terrible CGI art where a clumsy sketch would more immediately elicit 'that's just not good.'
ANOTHER big issue is the usual traditionalist rejection of anything new. Like Nelson says. And that's a very very very old conflict.
My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
-Mark Twain
All too true, in more than just art; my other main hobby has its share of traditionalists that have tried to slow progress at various times.
IMHO At this point in the technology, alot of the "traditionalist" opposition is purely economic&fear of no longer being relevant.
Not just in "Art" but in other areas as well.
Look at how analog photographers& filmmakers used to dismiss Digital Images as something that will never have "film Quality".
There use to be a guy over at the CGsociety forums that was adamant that no autogenerated walk cycle will ever look as good as one lovingly key framed by hand like in "the old days"and thus will never be useful for anything
LOL tell that to the gaming market that made $104 billion in 2015, crushing movies & music sales combined.
Ah, yer all nuts... I'm pretty sure these autocompumatrons are just a passing fad... As well that intranet thing... You are all wasting your time... Stop, or you'll feel silly eventually.
You want stability and tradition?... One word... Cave painting... Okay, that's two words, but good cave art never goes out of style.
Not only that, but you can communicate gritty tales of everyday life across the millenniums, unlike flimsy pixelatized images that last like at most one week or so before they unpixelatize into nothingness.
You'll see... Give it time... I'll be right...
The "poser look" is very easy to fall into for DS. It is normally denoted by having fairly detailed humaniod(s) with poorly utilized composition, lighting, or vision. Normally, if someone is manually creating a model with the detail of a DAZ or Poser human in it, the "whole" of the composition will have detail and quality to match since the effort put into the creation of the human would be wasted with a surrounding that doesn't match. However, the ease with which DS and Poser allow one to use incredibly detailed humans leads to users NOT putting the requisite effort into the rest of the composition, leading to a fairly recognizable genre.
I can almost always spot a DS or Poser render no matter how well rendered or posed because the work on the surroundings and composition RARELY matches that of the "focus" area. With work done in Maya or C4D, one will rarely see the uber detailed human so prevalent in "poser art" because of the amount of effort that it takes to make it happen. There is a "Maya look" that one can easily spot if one knows what to look for, as well as a C4D look. It is not the render engines since the "look" prevails regardless of the use of Vray, mental ray, Pixar RM, 3DL, Houdini, or Octane.
Can one "hide" the look of the tool? Sure, but it isn't easy nor is it quick. Even with the detail that the PAs put into environments, they still don't normally meet the detail that the human figures exude in a DS render. There are exceptions, but most fit the mold. Unfortunately, so much effort is put into the "focus" area by DS artists that there is little energy/motivation left to make the rest of the image match. Then there is the concern (especially lately) about the render being "fast". Fast and good are normally mutually exclusive. There is such a rush lately to "create and publish" renders that the quality output, on the whole, for the whole community has taken a step backwards even as the technology pushes forward.
So long as the workflow and expectations of the community continue to pursue the "quick out" methods, the "Poser look" will continue to be a problem. Ask the PA's how long their promo renders take and you will NOT hear "a few minutes". You will also not hear that scene setup happens "In just a couple of hours." However, one constantly reads users complaining: "If the render takes more than 15-30 minutes I cancel it. I'm just not going to wait!" In my book, if the render takes so little time then one needs to evaluate what is missing.
Kendall
While I appreciate what you're saying here, when one is working on sequential art (like a webcomic) "Fast" is actually a requirement. Spending 8-12 hours per render is all well and good in theory- until you actually need to come up with anywhere from 4-20 within a week, around work and family. (4 is probably doable. 20 - which assumes a 3 day a week posting schedule - pretty much isn't happening unless you actually can do nothing but the comic.) When I was doing my comic, I'd aim for 1- 1 1/2 hours for setting up the initial scene, about 20 minutes for modifying the scene per panel, 2-3 hours per render (If it took more than 4, I removed/changed things to make it go quicker) and another 15-20 minutes for postwork (once I had the routine down) and another hour for layout/lettering (though that was all panels together) And I still had trouble maintiaing an average of 6 panels per page, 2 pages per week update schedule. And I wasn't trying to emulate a photo-comic, either. I was aiming for Painterly Realisim.
Of course, you may think that CG renders aren't the correct medium for Webcomics, but that doesn't change that people do use them for such, so there are people for whom "speed" is not just a matter of "instant" gratification.
Webcomics are an area where absolute "quality" is not required, nor is it desired. In most cases much of the excessive detail will be tossed either to color quantification or to image shrinkage. So in your case, the "poser look" is not going to be in the equation. My response/post was not for niche situations like yours, but for those looking to do "high quality" static images -- usually striving for photorealism. In a case like yours, I would actually say that secondary and/or tertiary rendering environments would be the preferred solution.
Kendall
Kleenex
It's more traditionally stated that there are three desirable options in almost any endeavor - you can have it good, you can have it fast and you can have it cheap, but you can only have two of them at any given time. Granted, given the average budgets that most Poser/DAZ users are working at, "cheap" is more or less automatically going to be one of the two options for most folks, but with the leapfroging CG tech has been making and how fast those improvements have been filtering down, the definition of "fast" has been getting shorter and shorter while the definition of "good" has become increasingly subjective. When I bought my first copy of Poser, there was a blow in advert for a program called VUE, which I promptly ordered. Cut to just a few years later and VUE was being used by ILM and other major effects companies as it was better, faster AND cheaper for a lot of purposes than what they had been using.... and while the people whe were actually using it for comapnies like ILM were obviously being paid good salaries as opposed to the enthusiasts who were doing it at home just for fun, there's some pretty amazing "works out of the box" solutions out there now on the one hand, and some very expensive, high dollar work that looks like #@##.
And of course animation like I do.
Ooops that bit I just deleted was meant to be posted in a different thread
There is Poser since 1997 I guess. I'm on Poser since Poser4 in 2001. That's why it is so established in my head. I am using DAZStudio almost exclusivley for a year now. Still I am talking about Poser-art.
Anyway Poser or DS or VUE or Maya or... are 3D art and it is all that matters.