Fun with poses

We’ve been doing poses for a long, long time.

A poses set was in fact the second product we ever released, in December 2001: Dynamic Poses for Victoria 3.

Poses give characters attitude and purpose, they make them alive, they make them act. They are fundamental and can easily make or break an image. This is true for many other elements, but a bad pose can be unforgiving in an otherwise excellent setup.

We abandoned poses making for a few years as it seemed the market was getting saturated; the truth? There’s never enough poses and every creator brings a different vision to fruition. So we stepped back into poses making and have been going full steam ahead for quite a while now.

A RANGE OF POSSIBILITIES

As interesting, fun and varied poses creation is, we always try to go a step further to see if we can accomplish something even more inspiring and useful.

And we have been experimenting with poses quite a bit!

Our first ever experiment/addition was creating partial poses, this happened very early on, after just a few poses packages.

Creating partial poses for Poser was a painful process, it meant manually editing files to separate tops and bottoms and whatever else one wanted to include.

It was time-consuming and yet it was still worth it, because it turned a poses package in a construction kit: so much more flexibility and customizability! Both concepts are very dear to us and the way we create things, so partial poses have been the way every since.

Only a few of our packages do not have them. When the included poses are so unique (and convoluted) they are hard to use in partial form and may cause more frustration then usefulness.

To this day, it’s surprising it’s not a standard feature of every poses package released. Of course there’s various tools that help accomplish the same effect without “cluttering” the library, but having them ready and only a descriptive thumbnail away is a boon for us personally.

This is something that spawned as we were brainstorming for interesting features to add to our poses packages.

It’s a step further in the direction of partial poses: fine-tuned, optimized full-body poses derived from the partial poses mixes.

While partial poses are amazing, of course they are not perfect, so we decided to create a package whose partial poses combinations were all fine-tuned and optimized as if they were an original full body pose.

This meant a whopping 240 complete poses derived from the original 16 ones!

We were thrilled with the result and we’re using the variants all the time. The small differences in the fine-tuned mixes make a huge difference in actuality and are really handy. It feels you can find that perfect pose/variant that was just out of reach when using the main package only.

This is a very time-consuming feature though and it did not seem to make an impact on the market. For the kind of product and revenue it produces it’s not economically wise and we stopped after a few packages. Still, it was a great experience/experiment and we are very happy with those poses packages that include this feature:

One of our main interests as artists, it’s to create lively scenes.

We enjoy images that tell a story, we started creating Poser content because we wanted to create a comic book.

Our conversation poses packages spawned from the desire of quickly creating realistic groups of characters chatting and the concept was perfected when we included pre-made groups.

This feels like such an obvious feature and makes crowding a scene a real breeze.

When we create promo images, they are usually on the simpler side, and yet we often have small groups in the background that use our conversation poses and the group-poses features. Such a no-brainer to quickly fill scenes and make them alive.

Poses and cameras is another obvious pairing and yet it’s better than one expects.

It’s no secret that creating a complete scene in Daz Studio can be a long process and by the time one is ready to render that can be some fatigue.

Premade, stylish cameras offer an inspiring tool to explore a scene from different angles and perspectives, to highlight all that work that went into creating it.

Personally even though our cameras are fine-tuned around the matching pose, we use them all the time in any scene we create, it only takes one click to load a set of cameras and explore different viewpoints, it really opens the creative eye of the mind!

We started with Everyday 2 and just a handful of matching poses and it was a huge success. Apparently we weren’t the only ones to want something like this and in the following packages we managed to include many more morphs to offer more range and fun.

Is there more experimenting on the horizon? Well, actually there are a couple of things we have planned, but we prefer not to tease something that’s still only on a to-do list and who knows if it’s going to actually get picked.

What matters, it’s to always stay creative!