MM DAZ-Poser The divide widens
Consumer573
Posts: 282
Easter Sunday - I finally had some time to go through all the MM items looking for Poser. I feel Poser items at this point should be broken out and flagged because it is such a minority that a buyer has to go through too much disappointment (DS 4.10 only) to find one and it puts the poser artists who are still supporting the group at a disadvantage. For example, unless I am wrong, in this whole sale I found only one Poser compatible item under Trendy City Bar, which at this late hour I have put on my wishlist. I spent a long time going through the items, virtually none of which I could buy, and it really wasn't worth my time. [Note: Under search I later found 4 items {1,2,4}3,, but sort doesn't tell you whether they are in an MM sale category, just that they exist in the marketplace. Thank you Dreamlight, David Brinnen, Forbidden Whispers, Do/Petitpet]
Please, Daz, make it easier to support Poser Artists.
At the moment I am a Platinum member but it is getting to be increasingly difficult to continue much longer.
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Comments
In the Software dropdown tab, you can filter by compatibility.
yeah I reluctantly quit the PC+ club or rather let it lapse January and saved a lot since
I am a Carrara user but most stuff requires just too much work to use these days to bother
DAZ still gets my money but it's mostly in Fastgrab on older items
the few artists who do make Poser versions which also work well in Carrara I do indeed often buy from but one can wait and take out a quarterly membership once a year to grab their stuff as I intend to and any others things I must convert for use.
I may rejoin for 3 months when the big PC+ sale comes up in September followed by the PA sale
MM just looked underwhelming
Same here. I didn't quit the club for any particular reason, other than I needed to spend less money. I think I'm going to join back up during the Christmas sale. Then I can catch on all the Petipet goodies I've missed. I also miss the PC+ monthly freebies, but money's tight.
I bought the new Poser and use it occasionally, so it's good to know there's some content still being made.
There's lots of Poser content being made and sold over on Renderosity.
David Brinnen almost always does a Poser version of his products if that matters :) There are also others that do as well. DzFire does too IIRC.
Laurie
valid question. I know there was a small upgrade released 4 months ago, but haven't heard anything on a new version.
From a personal standpoint as a poser user also, if I wanted to take full advantage of the latest genesis figures, I would focus on daz studio and move on. It is just to much of a hassle and very limiting to my workflow.
There was an announcement from Smith Micro, simultaneous with the 11.1 upgrade, that Poser 12 was being worked on, with no specifics on the new features, but the release date should be not too far off..
Both Genesis and current state nVidia graphics cards are way out of my budget, I'm working on a ten year old workstation, so I'm sticking to Poser and my weightmapped Victoria 4.
The new Project Evolution female from CGBytes looks promising and seems to have some support, and may be an alternative to Genesis. No; not a big fan of the Poser native figures either, but I like the program itself. Never really got into DAZ Studio, from its first Beta versions onward; Poser is more intuitive for me.
I'm still on Poser and if I use DAZ Studio at all, than in 3Delight-mode. For people like me, only the older DAZ content is still interesting to me - along with some occasional new stuff like the afore mentioned David Brinnen or Jack Tomalin sets. So yes; I have to say, DAZ3D hardly has any interesting new content for me; shiny as it all may be; I'm just here for the old stuff I've missed.
Funny how that happens. Was totally unintended for me, but it happened anyway ;). One day I just realized I wasn't using the other at all anymore. Hmmm.
Laurie
...it's not just Poser and Carrara users feeling left behind, but also those of us who still use 3DL. I don't mind doing a bit of adjustment to materials but even with conversion scripts, I find that reworked Iray shaders do not always look as good as good as native 3DL ones. Yeah in the old days we had to make adjustments to Poser materials but the results were still better than I have seen with converting Iray to 3DL.
Hence, my purchasing has also dropped off quite a bit.
I used poser over daz 4 over a decade and there are many feature i prefer that poser has, but it was the quality of product and not the quality of studio that one me over to daz in the end, cost ? well in the end it is mute becayse while daz studio is free those content purchases really ad up
...true. As I mentioned in another thread I'm probably in for about at least as much as the amount of what Modo costs today just in content, merchant resources, and plugins.
Yes, Poser is being developed and improved. It's like asking is wheat being raised because you don't use wheat.
The thing with DAZ Studio, the way I see it, is, that to get the most out of it, you first have to fork out a lot of cash for the hardware - nVidia-cards with a lot of VRAM and cuda-cores aren't exactly cheap - and then have to invest like crazy in the Genesis line of characters, that aren't exactly cheap either. Pre-Genesis, often characters from the same generation could use each other's textures right out of the box; now every new base character seems to have it's own UV-mapping. Every new pro-pack for every new base charakter will set you back a hundred bucks or so and they get released by one per month and often more - not to mention all of the extra morph expansion packs an cross-generation plug-ins. Every two years or so, after releasing two dozen of base charakters or so, they release a new Genesis-generation and support for the previous Genesis generation mostly stops. (Victoria 4 lasted over six years, is still frequently used in Poser, and is still supported at other stores) Apart from Wilmap's clothing sets, there's not too much free stuff for the Genesis charakters. Also sets seem to be getting more and more expensive, with all of the extra detail and added shaders. To get the most out of Studio, it seems that you have to have at least a hundred dollars to spend every month, which I can't. Even with the free distribution of the base software, DAZ seems to be aimed at the relatively rich. That may be a good business model for DAZ, but it's not good for users with a lesser budget. In the old days, using Poser 4, I used free content only for almost two years (and there was a lot of it) before making my first purchases; that's sort of hard to imagine for people starting out fresh with DS 4.10....
There really is a lot of free DS content if you look on ShareCG and other places. I've made a few things myself like props and shaders and Wilmap makes all kinds of free clothing for Genesis thru Genesis 8. If you have DS, you don't even NEED to buy any characters - you can use the base figures only if you want to and they do come with some free content like some clothes and hair.
As for buying stuff, I buy my share, but I am not rich by any stretch of the imagination...lol. And for a lot of years I couldn't really buy anything (and didn't). It's all in how you manage the money you can set aside for a hobby and leverage the freebies that you can find for it. And when I first started using DS and Iray came out for it, I had a one gig Nvidia gpu and I made do with that until I could get a newer card. And even now I sure don't have top of the line anything. My renders take hours, but I'm patient when it comes to that....lol.
Oh, and as far as different UVs go...the Genesis 3 figures did have different uvs for every figure (which a lot of us didn't appreciate). The Genesis 8 figures all use the Genesis 3 base uv for their gender.
Laurie
Sempie, no one forces you to use Iray and the latest Genesis Line with Studio.
3DL doesn't need a card, and you can render the V4 characters or older Genesis Generations with it. Like, I am still mostly using G2 in my workflow.
But it is true that newer content is mostly for G8 and Iray here in the store. And while I have no problem with smaller Iray scenes, I have saved a lot of money thanks to G8.
Sorry you are not able to enjoy this hobby on the level you would like to. I am sure there are many that are in the same boat or worse, it's the nature of life. DAZ is a business and they have to make money to stay open, just like any other business. DAZ has gone above and beyond to make it easier for everyone with the crazy sale prices they have. You just need to be patient and keep an eye out for the deals.
.The beauty of 3D is that you don't have to spend money to participate in it. DS is free and there are many modeling apps and image editing software on the web for free, so it's totally up to you what you get out of this 3D deal.
Oh but I am enjoying it.
I'm just using Mike and Vicky 4 and Poser 11 instead....
...for older adopters such as myself it was relatively inexpensive until Iray hit.
I have been on a tight budget (low paying job) ever since I got into this, and now it is even tighter as I live off a meagre fixed pension.
What I do is focus more on morph, skin, materials, and other merchant resources which make it rather easy to get quite a bit out of less. Yes it involves a bot more effort than just plopping in and posing the latest pre-built character. I never buy pro bundles anymore as most of the clothing included doesn't fit the style or genre of the work I do (not into fantasy, horror, or skimp), and with all the merchant resource content I have, I can come close to creating just about any character I want just by pushing morph sliders around and using DFormers. So I usually only purchase a base figure and maybe one or two related items which I like and know I will use. The last Pro bundle I ever purchased was the Young Teens5 (almost four and a half years ago) as it included two characters, a nice collection of appropriate contemporary clothing, nice hair, morphs, and poses. I only ended up with the Mike and Vicky 5 pro bundles because I upgraded to Carrara 8,5 pro and they were part of the package.
I still make use of older clothing and hair content as well as morphs brought in through Generation X (which is part of why I stopped at G3 as the PA who created the plug in passed on). So I have a fairly extensive "gene pool" to draw from for character development.
Back when I first got involved in this, being resourceful was almost the norm (again particularly if you were on a budget). I remember spending months involved in what several of us called the "Lil' Vicky project" where we pushed morphing limits to new extremes and created our own custom morphs to make teen and child characters when there were none available for Gen4 (K4 came out fairly late and didn't get much support). We even made use of data like growth proportion charts so a 12 year old looked like a 12 year old and not simply a miniature version of an adult. Yeah I'll admit it's a heck of a lot easier today with utilities Genesis and Zevo's Growing Up morphs.Below is just one of the results of my experimentation from the "Lil' Vicky" days.
True, this doesn't soften the blow of hardware expense to get the most from Iray. However, the Daz programme today has so many more tools available than we had at our disposal a decade ago. In my book, Pro bundles, you don't really need them unless you want the "naughty bits" (then just get one for each gender). I feel there still are ways you can enjoy this even on a tight budget (I've been doing it for over ten years, five of which were working on a 4 GB 32 bit notebook). It may take a little more effort a little more time to work things out but it is still possible.
I think the least you would need for every Genesis Generation would be the basic morph sets - I only have these for Genesis 1, that was rather functional to start with, with a lot of morphs already built in. For Genesis 2 I have no morph packs, and, through some giveaways from the recent past, Victoria, Stephanie and Lee 6 - in fact, Genesis 2, for me, is still a very new and untried generation, for which I own next to nothing. For Genesis 3 I only have Mike and Vicky 7 during last november's give-away action - (missed out on the infamous big Glitch, though.) For Genesis 8 I have the base characters only, never even installed them yet. I think I only have the first Genesis generation to a point that I could be creative with it; Mike, Vicky, Stephanie 5 and the young teens, and a lot of morph extensions, even a couple of commercial characters, hairdos and clothing sets, and Wilmap really made a lot of clothes for them. (I'm not into fetish, steampunk or fantasy either. and some of the more recent historical clothes seem to be cosplay-oriented rather than accurate; I'm mostly into contemporary, period and historical stuff.) I recently finaly did get AoA's lighting sets and the recent Reflective Radiance set for 3Delight during sales - I was still on Überenvironment, which I found very unintuitive, never managed to wrap my mind around that one. My ancient Quadro 1700 died on me a couple of months ago so I got a new 4GB GTX 1050 ti, which would sort of support small iRay renders - I did manage to do a clothed V5 iRay render with a basic light setup in around 30 mins; the only iRay render I ever finished up till now. Maybe the new Render Throttle for iRay would help; the old one really boosted 3Delight, as I remember it. My DELL workstation my be 10 years old, but it still carries two quadcore Xeon CPUs and 36 GB RAM. So in a way, I could get started with DAZ Studio.
It's just that I'm more comfortable with Poser. I always liked Firefly more than I like 3Delight. EZSkin, a free python script, can marvelously add SSS to ancient skin texture sets, there's a very flexible and very free weightmapped Vicky 4, I've got most of her morph expansion packs, the more recent textures for V4 by Maddelirium, Sabby, Danae, Godin, Sav and others are excellent, Syltermermaid is releasing her old V4 characters for free, at about 10 per month; Mankahoo and others are still doing new hairdos for V4 for very reasonable prices. There's a lot of clothing sets for V4 and M4 that I still have wishlisted, and they usually have very good discounts during sales. There's some excellent free shaders for Firefly, like Bagginsbills' Car Shaders, and Colm's Render Studio lighting sets for Poser produce very nice results. I have Terradome 2 and some of the Dreamland Models suburban sets that are all Poser only. I'm comfortable with Poser, it does what I want it to do, and I never got around even to playing around with my new Studio content.
...I did both characters below just with the Genesis 2 base, head/body morphs, and Zev0's Growing Up morphs as a test (rendered in August, 2013). No other figures/characters were involved in the mix..
Every iteration of Genesis is free. The head and body morphs are not that expensive and often go on sale (If you are a PC member you can get a bigger discount and even use your monthly coupons to save more).
If you want good global illumination for 3DL without the long render times of UE, I would suggest getting Parris' IBL Master which is much simpler to use (it is also compatible with AoA's advanced lights). I have been using it ever since I bought it and being able to render fairly complex scenes in 8 - 15 min is wonderful.
The one feature of the Genesis line that I like is the ability to fit clothing from different generations, different figures, and even cross gender without the need for third party conversion utilities and associated figure licences which can add up quickly in cost and not always produce the results you want.
In that regard alone, I much prefer Daz Studio for making your own content. There are so many tools included which make it an absolute breeze to import and create new items and fit them to your characters. Whether it's a prop, or a new outfit, it's very intuitive and, with very little practice, even beginners can start to make their own items to use in their work. I'm not saying Poser's workflow is terrible (because it really isn't), but Daz Studio seems to go above and beyond in terms of supporting custom content, and it's just that much more easy to do. It takes a lot of the hard work out of your hands, so you can focus on the fun stuff.
There are a few areas where Poser still reigns as King, notably in the cloth room department. DForce is a long-awaited addition to Daz Studio but there are a few limiting factors in its use. I've found that larger scenes (those with more polygons) simply won't allow me to use DForce. I had such a scene recently, and it would only simulate the cloth after I had removed a large portion of the background, leaving only the character and dress. Poser's cloth room seems to work regardless of how big your scene is, only spending more CPU time when the cloth comes into contact with those extra polygons/vertices. This could be more of a limitation in how much I understand DForce, but at my current level, the cloth room is just easier to work with.
There are compelling arguments to both programs, but ultimately Genesis wins for me. It's a no-brainer to have a universal character with universal clothing. Smith Micro's own characters are, for lack of a more diplomatic word, ugly. They've certainly improved in a few areas, but they still very mannequin like in their expressions and faces and many lack natural bends, which can lead to some odd results. There are some great 3rd party models for Poser, and Genesis can be used with the help of companion files, but Genesis flat out stomps the competition and is free with its native Daz Studio, which itself is free.
Poser does have a nice render engine though, and genuinely excellent materials which can be fairly complex. Things like volumetrics are way easier to do in Poser than in Daz studio, and the results speak for themselves. That, I think, is one of the fundamental reasons why Poser still continues to be as popular as it is.
Ah, but the "being more comfortable" is a totally different thing compared to "You need to invest a lot of cash into DAZ to even start rendering".
Also, you pay for your Poser 11 platform. That money, if invested into the "basics" like a G2 morphs during sale when they are off at 80%, wouldn't end you up any more expensive. As for the free shaders, there's quite a few of them, like OSO3Ds, for example, plus the base ones that come with Studio. And the freebies section here in the forum has tons of stuff, too.
In any case, it's not worth to argue about preferences; I had the same experience with Poser than you had with Studio. It just won't work for me, despite some of the neat things Poser can do. As they say, to each their own.
While that was true of the Name 5, Name 6, and Name 7 characters for Genesis, Genesis 2, and Genesis 3 it hasn't been true for Name 8 characters for Genesis 8, and was largely untrue for other add-on characters for earlier generations of Genesis which tended to use the base UVs (certainly for Genesis 3).
I only paid 50 bucks for my Poser 11 upgrade from Poser 7 during a promotion sale. Saves me from investing in LAMH and other plugins for things that aren't native to Studio.
It's a combination of all of these factors.
You make it all sound like Poser is obsolete and good at nothing, which I believe to be a little bit biased.
I'm attaching some test renders made with Firefly and Superfly; an EZSkin test using Superfly and ancient Stephanie 3 (!) with an International Morphs and Textures setting, a Dreamland Models set combined with a weather set for Poser by 2nd World using FireFly, a test render of the Canal Streets set using an IDL based sunlight set; a test with an ageing V4 using morphs and textures by RDNA/Sydd Raven, a test render of M4 using a texture and dynamic beard by Mortem Vetus, and a test of Colm's Render Studio 2014 using V4 and a freebie dress by Awful Soul, and a test of Bagginsbill's car shader on an ancient freebie-car, with some really ancient characters to crowd the street; the most distant one is actually a Posette. Renders can still be made without using Genesis or iRay, guys...
Uhm, no. Please do not generalize. Neither did "all of us" say/imply what you claim was said, nor did I anywhere in this thread read anything even remotely indicating that Poser is obsoletete. There was a question about it still being developed, but that is not the same.
You have, due to the nature of this site being the DAZ3D size, which offers DAZ Studio for free, a whole more DS user than Poser users. So yes, most here prefer DS over Poser, everyone for their own reasons. Just like you prefer Poser. That DS and Poser continue to drift apart... yes, no doubt about it. Who will survive? Who knows. Perhaps Blender will be the only program left standing in a few years from now, perhaps a totally new program will rule market and content.
It annoys me to no end that whenever something like this comes up, it ultimately ends in "mine is bigger than yours" and generalizations.
Just. No.
Fair enough. :) Do what makes ya happy :)
Laurie
The problem is that while this works for someone who's been in this hobby for a while, if you're just getting into it you're stuck with the problem that Poser hasn't made a decent built-in figure since Allison 2 and hasn't given decent support to any of them since the days of Jessie 2. Which means that someone just starting out will have to spend just as much or more to make Poser usable, as it requires buying your choice of a.) of V4 M4 etc. and all their morphs and accessories, b) Dawn & Dusk and all their accessories, or c.) G2F&M and so on, just to do what you can do with DS out of the box. This is why Poser's been in a death spiral for years. In the long run, the market is driven by new users coming in, since many of the older users do exactly as you say you're doing and buy less new content, and if you're looking at the two options side by side as a newb, DS costs much less to get up and running.
Oh, that is great. I guess I misunderstood as your post sounded like you were not able to enjoy 3D because you couldn't afford the latest and greatest to get the most out of Daz Studio (or poser for that matter)
When I was still using poser I was enjoying all these exact things also, many years back, so I can relate. I am not knocking poser as it is what I learned on and I still have the latest version installed and it can do some great things, but I prefer DS hands down now
The way I see it myself, is 3d rendering is just like gaming, you get the most out of it when you have the best hardware and addons. You can still enjoy the game on a lesser system with the default gameplay, but it can really shine when running all out with all the great DLC or commercial addon content added.