Yes, DAZ Studio is lacking in a few features Poser has still, such as the ability to create dynamic clothing, and a few tools necessary for tweaking new created figures, but when you compare it to the position, say, a year ago – Studio is catching up fast.

DAZ Studio now has dynamic clothing, although you can’t create your own yet.  Studio also has about 90% of the tools to create new figures from scratch, with the remaining 10% you can work around in 3D modelling software or may not even need at all in some cases.

DAZ Studio is actively supported by a company interested in pushing it out free to as many people as possible in order to sell content.  Poser is … uh.. well, I heard rumours about a version eight coming out soon (after a couple of years of languishing at a nearly-compatible with Windows XP level), but Smith Micro don’t exactly scream about the product from the rooftops.

DAZ Studio has a nifty, fast-ish UI built on Qt.  Poser has a clunky heap of crap that uses so much of your PC’s horsepower drawing unnecessarily graphic UI controls that theres barely anything left to do the actual 3D work with.

DAZ Studio comes as a free base package with additional tools available to purchase as plugins as and when you need them.  Poser comes as an expensive, but complete, package.  The majority of users just looking to throw scenes together and render probably will never touch half the menu options in Poser.

Studio has a lot of support on the DAZ site, including product info pages, tutorials in the wiki, and active forums.  As far as I can find, Poser has a couple of pages on the Smith Micro online store.

DAZ  Studio lets me throw a quick scene together in minutes and render it quickly.  In that time with Poser, I’ll probably still be waiting for the screen to update after I clicked to open a panel in the UI after the third crash in a row.

And if anyone really wants to get into a rendering argument with me: Poser uses a custom rendering engine.  DAZ Studio uses an industry-standard Pixar Renderman-compliant engine used in Hollywood – 3Delight.

I tend to frown at Poser the same way I used to frown at WordPerfect – a piece of software people have gotten used to because there wasn’t any real alternative at the time, and are scared of letting go now there is.

On a side-note, I’m considering doing a weekly review of DAZ model releases.  Something to think about…

Twilight Dawne and Vanguard have been taking up most of my time for the past couple of weeks, while I got to grips with the artwork side of things.  Other than that things have been mostly quiet.  Okay, mostly I kept them quiet to stop myself going mad.

Meds are keeping me pretty docile.  Its hard to work up any enthusiasm for anything.  Still, the alternative is … not good.