A New Day

Well, my first post. Yesterday was an extremely long day. I was up until midnight finishing setting this blog up and catching up on some of the odds and ends needed to launch.
I wasn't ready to start posting quite yet as the product is not quite ready for prime time, but unfortunately I came across the Newtek forums and did some reading. As with almost any forum you need to weed through quite a bit of B.S. and personal agendas to get to the meat of the discussion. And it's a good one. You can say whatever you want about the Poser product, but it invokes passion and heated discussion almost always. It seems there are several questions at hand:

1. Does Poser add any value to Lightwave?
2. Is Poser Art actually Art?
3. Why is Lightwave seemingly on the backburner with no official announcement, and other application support such as Max and Maya at the forefront? I.e. was Lightwave an afterthought?

I'll start with addressing number 3 and keep in mind that these are my opinions here, yadda yadda....
What it comes down to is that the code we are working with on the LW plug-in is not in the same state as the other plug-ins. For a number of reasons that I can’t go into. We made the decision to hold off on announcing LW support with the Poser Pro release because we felt that it was too risky to assume we would make the deadline and offer a good solid product that would live up to expectations of features and quality. So we figured we would release is as an update to the Data exchange portion of Poser Pro ASAP after the initial release. It will just be rolled into the build with and updater. SO we didn't announce but word got out and the forums exploded with opinions and discussion. Love it or hate it, Poser has that effect on people.

Okay on question number 2, how can I possibly answer that? Is a Soup Can art? I went to a museum of "Modern Art" in Europe once and saw an installation that was a pile of TV's. Looping on each screen was video of the artist urinating on a photograph of Marylyn Monroe. Someone thought that was art. I didn't. Aldous Huxley was quoted as saying "If not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners". The Sistine Chapel was a commissioned job and Huxley arguably one of the great thinkers of our time. The question of what is art is in my mind therefore much greater than Poser or 3D so this will be the last time I address it on my blog.

And now for the big one. Does Poser add value to LW? I think so. First of all it supports the product. LW is a great product but lets face it, it's up against some goliath competition. Bottom line is the good people at Newtek need to sell product to stay in business so they can continue to improve the product. Any good plug-in that offers some decent functionality should be welcomed. Poser's ability to eat a tremendously vast library of content and the ability to quickly animate adds to the LW product. The argument should then be is LW art really art.