Well, being disabled and not even leaving the house except twice a week to shop for food and collect prescriptions, I had nothing better to do than run a quality control check of my own on Renderotica's quality control with respect to sets of poses.
Principle: Pose presets should only set what is necessary to apply the pose, and ABSOLUTELY should NOT interfere with the user's positioning of the figure in the world space OR with parameters the user may have used to create the character such as size or changed body proportions.
Practice: it has been a principle for over 20 years that users (who want to use pose presets created by someone else) position the figure in Worldspace using the Body trans and rot dials, while pose creators putting out poses for others to use, free or for sale, do NOT use the Body rot and trans but rather the hip for posing the character relative to world 0, 0, 0 to put them up in the air, down on the ground, moved a distance away from but rotated towards another figure etc. A proper quality pose preset should ONLY contain: (i) the x, y and z rotations for all the parts apart from the hip and NOTHING else, no translation settings and DEFINITELY no scale settings as they may be in use altering body proportions; (ii) x, y and z rotations and x, y and z translations for the hip to position the figure as needed bny the pose relative to 0, 0, 0, but NOTHING else; (iii) either NO BODY SETTINGS AT ALL, or just the settings for the Body pose dials like Arms Up, but DEFINITELY NOT Body rot and trans as that screws with the user's settings for position in the worldspace, or scale as that may screw with a setting used for the character's height. Or any of the Body morph dials. the only exceptions would be the expression dials IF the pose set explicitly states and warns it sets a designed expression, or specific extra morphs that are part of the product like a special titjob morph for the breasts going with a titjob pose, or an impact morph in the abs that goes with a being punched there pose.
Method: Pick a sample of four prolific pose preset vendors at Renderotica who include pose sets involving two or more characters interacting so they're not going to be at worldspace 0, 0, 0. Randomly pick one set I have from each, then randomly pick one pose for G8F from that set. Load pose preset into text editor (including de-archiving it in 7zip if compressed) and check contents. Also apply the same pose to a zeroed base G8F in DS and examine the settings for Body and Hip the pose set in DS to make sure I haven't forgotten how to read a DSON pose preset. Rate for quality of pose preset - not the quality of the pose on a base figure at 000, the quality of the PRESET.
Results:
Best: Thunder-3d. Good points - posed using the hip. not body, and no body settings included at all. Bad points, trans and more egregiously scale settings included for all body parts, so might override body part proportion settings used for a character. Pose preset quality score out of 100 = 75
2nd: !Sledghammer. Good points, posed using the hip. Bad points, Body trans and rot dials included in preset overriding any worldspace positioning already done by the user, sending the figure back to 0, 0, 0. Body scale and all bodypart scales included so will mess with any changing of character height or body proportions done by user (or vendor - the DAZ official characters for a generation of figure mostly have different heights and have for a long time now and actually given on the store pages, and load with a Body scale setting to give them that which this pose preset would override). At least a user who knows enough can use the undo button, then select the hip, ctrl-click to try the pose again with options and pick 'selected body part' and recursive, even though users shouldn't have to jump through those hoops. Also contains overriding expression dial settings and other unnecessary ones. Pose quality preset rating ... if I'm feeling generous 50%.
Equal bottom:
Chaosophia. Good points ... er ... (remember, this is the quality of the PRESET as a preset, not the posing). Uses the Body rot and trans to move the figure instead of the hip. The first one I used week before last, I applied it and my G8F figure vanished. Had to use 'frame selected object' with the camera to find her, then realised what you'd done and that your pose preset had sent her back to 0, 0, 0 from where she was in the room for that particular beat of the action as prescribed by my moving her with the body dials as has always been the strongly recommended practice for users, Actually it was the Head Trauma pose set, not restrained, and looking at your pose presets and seeing the egregious way you are saving them I ended up having to undo, save the scene, clear it, load just a base G8F and G8M, then work my way through applying each pair of poses, then run a script on each of them that moves the Body rot and trans to the hip, then save with proper settings, so my folder now has your pose presets in it, each accompanied by a second version with the same name but -fixed appended. Then clear scene, reload my original to get the two characters back to where they should be to then use my -fixed versions of your presets. Thanks so much for that. And it includes overriding whole body and bodypart scales to override any height or body proportion settings used in the characters, and other expression and morph controls the pose shouldn't be touching. In other words, this preset doesn't have a single feature of a good pose preset and every possible feature that makes a pose preset a bad quality one. Pose preset quality score out of 100 = 0
Layla. Preset uses BOTH the Body trans and rot AND the hip, so partially canceling each other out - WTAF? - and messing up any worldspace positioning using the Body already does by the user. And the 'Move Body rot and trans to hip' script won't fix it - I'd need a special 'ADD Body rot and trans to hip then zero' script to sort that mess out. Scales set in the Body and bodyparts to mess up character heights and body part proportions, morph settings a pose a shouldn't mess with and expressions NOT advertised as being part of each pose ... Pose preset quality score pout of a hundred = 0 - or maybe a minus number for a preset that uses BOTH body AND hip rot and trans. Sheesh.
Just as a brief kind of control, I went through the same process - random folder with interacting character poses, random pose picked, examined in text editor and applied in DS - with two DAZ store vendiors with sets bought from the DAZ store. I chose Sickleyield as a well regarded, technically knowledgeable vendor, and Zeddicus as a very prolific producer of pose sets there about whom I know nothing. Dearie me - the glorious difference. With both of them the randomly selected pose preset ONLY had, for every body part but the hip, ONLY the rotations, absolutely nothing else; the hip had the rotations and translations and nothing else; hip used not body to position; one had no Body settings at all, the other quite reasonably had the settings to zero the Body 'arms up', knee bend' etc dials but NOTHING else from the body. Randomly chosen, and both perfect textbook examples of what presets should and shouldn't contain.
Both DAZ store vendor's Pose preset quality scores out of 100 = 100 DAZ QA clearly still on the job.
Conclusion: The quality control for sets of pose presets at Renderotica is either:
(a) actually non-existent despite what store staff may say,
or (b) non-existent because whoever is supposed to be doing it is a lazy SOB not doing their job and just waving any old product through,
or (c) effectively non-existent because whoever is doing it is actually very ignorant of what a good pose preset is, probably just trying the pose on base figures at 0, 0, 0 and passing it if the pose looks good without any checking of (or probably knowledge of) the many ways a bad pose preset can look good on default figures at 0, 0, 0 but completely screw up a user's figure when used in a scene set up by the user.
Jeez, people, it's just a particular set of options set when saving the pose to then be distributed, and you can set up so those options are always applied when saving pose presets. It's not rocket science. You just have to learn once (and should have learned early on) the features a good pose preset needs, and just set up once so they're saved like that. Very little and one-off effort.
If someone were to ask me 'Are pose sets from Renderotica any good?' I'd advise them that the quality control is non-existent, the DAZ store would throw them out for abysmal quality even if they accepted the subject matter, and the person who asked me better be very hot on saving scenes before applying pose presets from here, on use of the undo button, and if they have the knowledge to understand what the parameters set by a preset from here are telling them, some utility scripts like 'move body trans and rot to hip' because nobody here (well, of those four, plus two of the other vendors here whose pose presets I also glanced at) actually appears to have a clue how to save a preset that won't screw with the figure's positioning in the world space (apart from Thunder-3d) or unnecessarily mess with various settings often used creating characters who aren't just base figures (including Thunder-3d).
As for anyone here criticising the quality control of pose presets at ANY other site, all I can think of are groups of words like 'pot kettle and black' or 'glass houses and stones'. There's really only one way a set from -hub could be worse - if the actual positioning of base figures at 000 is poor, and I can see that from the promos. (Well, unless someone's figured out how to make a DSON preset hand control of my computer to North Korea.)
Damn it, you people just need one 10 minute lesson on how to save a quality pose preset. Are you all so anti-establishment you all just refused to read anything on the DAZ website or spend a little time in their forums to learn the really basic stuff early on, and have just been blundering on for years? You may be skilled posers but your presets are complete ignorant cack. And before you instinctively bristle and howl, actually READ what I've said. I've given reasons and explanations. If you want to argue you need to have actual counterarguments to the points, and the only actual counterargument is being too lazy to learn and implement something clearly new to you when it's minimal time and effort.
Right, that's me done. Finished setting up a new Windows 11 laptop with fairly high-end graphics capabilities to replace my wheezing, seven year old Windows 10 one. Time to do some rendering and stop typing in forums. Learn something or not. I'm outta here and turning off the notifications for replies. You'll either consider, learn and improve, or bluster vacuously and indignantly, and this ia all real physical pain for me. And I'm fed up with the spellchecker from this website trying to correct my BRITISH English. I have my own spellchecker, thankyou.