It appears to be the “what do you want to see in Poser 12?” season. So here are my ideas on what I might personally want for Poser 12…
1. Multi-pass rendering that can cope with multiple render types (e.g.: Firefly with multiple switches, such as Shadows Only | Sketch with custom preset selection | Preview with Comic Book to a dialed-in preset | SuperFly) and output sizes and file types. The ability to schedule all this.
2. The ability to load and save Presets for the Comic Book dials and the panel’s check-boxes. A colour-picker for varying the colour of the black ink lines.
3. A Python Panel that (at long last) remembers your custom buttons between sessions. The ability to save your own buttons as a preset for this Panel. The ability to add micro-icons to aid in quickly picking a script from the Python Panel.
4. A macro recording and playback feature, like Photoshop’s Actions, with the ability to save and share playback files.
5. The ability to save and share UI interface configurations. This would work in tandem with the macro recording (see above), providing easy sharing of quick “watch what I do” tutorials without needing to get into all the hassle of making and uploading video. These easily-made and shared ‘Tutorial-lets’ could greatly aid new users — download, load the UI preset and macro, press “Play”.
6. Ability to quickly add an “eyes controller plate” to any character, including a G2 DSON import, which would easily move both eyes at once by grabbing and moving a non-rendering cube or eye-plate in the scene.
7. Particles, duplicate and scatter objects, shatter objects (perhaps an expansion of PhilC’s $10 ‘Exploder’ script).
8. A simple way to paint a texture or colour directly onto the model surface with a brush, in 3D space. Nothing complicated, just a quick way to snip bits off a base bitmap.
For instance: my base prop has crude painted-on rivets or eyebrows which are not tooning up well, because they’re not geometry. I load a simple brush and directly erase these while in the 3D scene. Of course this can be done in other ways, but having such a brush could also lead to other possibilities.
9. Bigger fatter versions of the bits which a user regularly needs to grab onto: scroll bars, rotation tools, etc. Other than that, and perhaps a Lights controls makeover, don’t go changing the interface other than in very minor ways.
10. Something like the core of Scene Toy, but built-in as a Window. Smith Micro should also buy the rights to a number of key ‘in danger of extinction’ PoserPython scripts, polish them, and include them as standard as they already do with a number of partners.
Overall, stability is fine with Poser 11 SR6, so that doesn’t need to be fixed. Same for the Content Library (provided you turn off indexing, after your initial big indexing pass of your runtime) with SR6. I don’t much care about new base figures (we have enough generic people, by now, don’t we…?) or about new/better physics (breast jiggle, which is probably all it’ll be used for, has been able to be done by scripts for decades now) or the tools needed for making clothing and outfits for sale (though of course it’s nice to buy the results now and again).