February 1, 2014
THERE! (Finally.)
The Seventh Seal has been broken! The last DAZ Studio compatibility issue has been resolved. After the most extensive beta testing in our company history, I’m happy to report that now we have the Universal Sizing Apparatus compatible with DAZ studio. Special thanks to Tom Latham for all of his diligent work. We could not have done this without you, Tom.
What we’ve learned during the course of this project about cross-platform compatibility between Poser and DAZ Studio could fill a book (and just might). While, to us end-users, Poser and Daz Studio appear to be very similar programs, they are not. It is true that they both read the same data files, and do very similar things, but they are about as alike as CorelDraw and Adobe illustrator, or Microsoft Access and dBase.
While you could import two Adobe illustrator files into CorelDraw and merge them, you would not get the same results as you would if you merged those files in Adobe illustrator. Nor would you expect to. They are different programs, and as they import or export each other’s data they make minor changes to it. The same is true for Poser and DAZ studio. But because those programs represent a three dimensional “real” space, we expect things to be real in there. To be consistent. But they are just two different programs with two different ways of juggling bits and digits and the results are similar, but not identical.
A given morph target will work in both programs, but, from our experiments we’ve learned that minor, nuanced adjustments to morph targets do not produce the exact same results in both programs. And most likely, no one has ever noticed, or cared. But for the Sizing Apparatus to work, we needed precise, identical behavior in both programs.
We solved the final puzzle by adding large amounts of data that forces DAZ Studio to interpret the parameters in precisely the same way as Poser does. This extra data is unnecessary for Poser, but does not negatively affect it.
So now with this knowledge we are ready to finally wrap up this project. The Universal Sizing Apparatus/Man has been ready for weeks but he wanted to fix this before we release it. Now all that is left is rewriting the Manual to include all this new information we’ve discovered and then packaging these products at for distribution. It’s been a good week.
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