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You can still buy older versions of Poser on Amazon for about $30.00, so the price of the software itself isn't an issue. However, toss in the cost of the base V4 and M4 starter bundles, or Dawn/Dusk, and you've now spent as much as you would to upgrade your choice of Genesis figure with the comparable morph sets for DS. At that point, it comes down to what each software's "killer ap" is, and for the novice user, DS clear strength is autofit whereas, for the longest time, Poser's last big advantage over DS was dynamic cloth and hair. With the introduction of D-Force, however, that difference has been halved and if the buzz we're hearing is correct, will soon go away altogether. This is not to say that Poser isn't still a viable alternative for those who are already invested in it, but it's hard not to look at the tiny amount of development that's been done on the base software since it was acquired by Smith Micro and expect very little additional advancement with the next gen when/if it comes.
Since its been mentioned, I'm just poppinng in to say that while nice hardware is nice, it is absolutely not necessary. This forum is full of great tips and resources for getting the most out of meagre hardware. You just have to be willing to put in a little bit of extra time and effort into optimizing (and once you get into the habit by "time and effort" I mean, like, literally 2 minutes)
If I can render this: (2 figures and a full Stonemason set, and half the lighting is mesh emitters passing through glass ffs)
in 50 minutes at 2000x2600 pixels on a 6+ year old laptop with 8gm of ram and a 2gb Geforce 650m, than I think its fair to say that any claims that you need the leatest and greatest in hardware are a wee bit exaggerated
Awesome render. Way to work with that you've got. I always hate when people recommend that a newbie buy a 8+Gb ram card and an ultra powerful computer. I've seen a few of them just get frustrated and give up on the hobby, thinking that it requires $1500 worth of hardware just to start out with. I produced some perfectly fine renders with my GTX 460 (1 Gb) and some half-way decent renders before I even got into Iray.
I'm not trash-talking anybody's ability here, but if you produced crap results with 1 Gb of VRAM, you'll probably produce crap with 11 Gb, only faster. There are plenty of differences between Poser and Daz, but the hardware requirement is the smallest of those. Both offer the choice of biased rendering (Firefly, 3dl) or unbiased (SuperFly, Iray, and Luxrender) so experienced users please stop telling the newbies they need to buy a ton of hardware.
It's a challenge for PA's to add Poser support as it also adds time to develop. Hardly no one is willing to pay for that extra time or there are not enough buyers to justify it because time = money.
Yep. I think its perfectly reasonable for someone to say "I want to render a lots of scenes with 5 people in 30 minutes or less therefore Iray doesn't really work well for me" but a lot of these threads the prevailing attitude starts to seem to turn into "If you don't have a thousand dollar GPU why even bother" and yeah it seems especially common in threads aimed at people new to DS which has to be disheartening.
The real concern is whether or not its going to be worth the customer's money to upgrade. A program can easily be upgraded and improved BUT will it be able to remain competative. And considering that this is a content driven hobby, the program is only part of the puzzle.
Indeed it does. I have never upgraded past Poser 8. And the last products of mine that supported Poser, the presets were made in P8 but had some issues in PP2012. To say the least, I dropped Poser support in my products shortly after that as I saw no more reason to upgrade either as a customer or as a PA. Another factor is that the number of PAs who were active when Poser was the only option is growing smaller and smaller. New PAs who have never touched poser will more than likely not bother learning it.
...could you run the DForce sim just on the figure as a Scene Preset then merge it in to the final scene?
...yes it is one's choice, I have also used Poser as well (I picked up Poser 6 for 70$ form a reseller just as 7 was about to be released) and just found the Daz figures to be easier to work with and had more features than the native Poser ones. So I was still finding myself buying a lot of Daz character, morph, clothing, and hair content. With Daz 3.0 Advanced came 64 bit support and that is what sold me as Poser 7 (and later, 8) were still 32 bit with the 2 GB file limit (which usually resulted in render crashes once the file load exceeded it).
When Genesis was released, a lot of the clothing fit woes I was dealing with using Poser and Gen3/4 characters vanished as well (except maybe for footwear).
Also for someone who has been in this for just over a decade, I actually have a surprisingly modest library/runtime compared to others here, even some who have been here for fewer years than I have.
I am a bit surprised to see a thread here in 2018 complaining about
the "Divide" between the Daz studio and Poser content market.
They now exist in completely separate ecosystems.
The Daz PA's have largely moved on.
There are a few surviving poser only stores
and even two new poser females (Project E and Bella)
Anyone still dedicated to the poser platform
is truly wasting their time complaining over here
and should be financially supporting the poser vendors who are making content for the much heralded"Project E "or the legacy Mill 4 figures.
I know the feeling. That's why I no longer subscribe to the Platinum Club because it's mostly old items I already have or don't want. The pickings are very slim and not worth the price of a subscription. If it wasn't for the Mil 4 figures I'd uninstall Poser altogether. Fortunately there are still some vendors on DAZ that cater to Poser customers, but who knows how long that will last.
In Poser I have rendered 6-8 figures in a scene full of props on a 4 GB laptop with no crashing or other issues. It might take about five minutes to render, but it can be done. I have to admit that DAZ Studio could do it faster since it always was a fast program, but I prefer Poser. I recommend more than 4 GB's, but many laptops have minimum memory and not too many options to upgrade it.
This!
It's funny, when I was using poser, V4 was still the figure to use so it was never an issue of not having quality content to use in poser. I am glad I never had to jump thru the hoops to get genesis figures to work since I switched to DS after genesis 1 came out and haven't looked back. I can't even imagine being a poser only user now and not being able to use the latest genesis figures and content because I was stuck with an app that didn't support them. This PC was built a year ago and the one before it had poser 6, 7. and 2014 on it and after getting this one up and running, I couldn't think of a single reason to reinstall any version of poser. I do miss the dynamic options, the morph brush and even superfly a bit, but there are workaround for most of those and so much more in DS that makes it a no brainer for me.
I'm sad to see that we're even still discussing this. Use whatever makes you happy.
Laurie
I think this is a very good point. Until relatively recently I had a mediocre PC and a graphics card which was no use at all in respect to rendering; 3Delight was a dark art to me as it seemed to require shader add-ons and counter-intuitive methods in order to make a render that was even remotely realistic (and let us not forget that renders using more sofisticated shaders took a long time in themselves). Fortunately for me, Reality/Luxrender came along pretty soon after I started and that was it. Renders would take several hours at least, but is the realization of your art not worth a number of hours of processing time? I'm sorry, but if you demand an instant "make art" button then you are not an artist. My PC is now 5 years old, and OK, my graphics card is decent (a GTX 980 TI) but I recently rendered a scene that fell out of the memory capacity (I hadn't even noticed!); it nevertheless took less than an hour. Honestly, if you think that is too long I think you are in the wrong hobby.
What do you guys call a long time to render? When I first started with Daz and the Pentium 2 computer and windows 98 it would take anywhere from 45 min to 20 min to render an image and I thought that was fast. Now I render an image and it takes less then 5 min, though have to admit I don't use iray and my computer can't handle dforce. I had no problem using shaders and later Opitex on a dual core using Vista and a render took about 5 min. In the last 10 years, no matter what computer I had I never went beyound 5 min for an image, except on the rare ocassion I went overboard on shadows and even then never went beyound 10 min. So what do you call a long render?
As for the Poser Daz divide, I have been listening to this arguement since 2002 when I first discovered Daz. I've had my frustrations over time mainly due to shaders and dynamics between these 2 programs, but thats all. Every time one of these programs makes progress, a thread like this appears. Both programs have their ups and downs, give and take, share and not share. Next year the arguement will probably be in the reverse over on the Poser side...that's change for you. You either change with it or keep what you like and stay with that. Argueing is not going to change the differences between these two programs, they will both keep doing what they always have...whatever the h3ll they like and we have to suck it up and do what we can in the face of these changes.
Hmm think I just started rambling and repeating again and need to stop...lol
...being in that first camp (5, 8 even 10 characters along with tonnes of props transparencies and other effects to make a gritty street scene look gritty instead of looking like the streets are clean enough to eat off of) yes it is important to have reasonably manageable render times for both testing and the final process. When I use the term "reasonably manageable' it means be 2 to 3 to maybe 4 hours, not 8, 10, 12 or upwards of a day as I have been experiencing with Iray in CPU mode. . Single character proof tests using a simple backdrop and no props shouldn't take more 15 - 20 min, not an hour or two. This is where the discouragement factor comes into play as if it feels like you are not making much if any headway it becomes frustrating rather than fun (and this should be an enjoyable pastime or why pursue it).
Reality/Lux was another matter entirely as I found it's render times to be extremely slow (almost on a glacial level) compared to even Iray CPU mode, 3DL with UE or Vue. I uninstalled R4 and Lux 1.4 after running into bugs that seemed to get worse with every patch so never bothered downloading the Ver 4.3 update with the "speed boost " (which I later discovered came at the cost of render quality). By then Iray was here, and at the time, seemed like a marked improvement (I never could get a clean Reality/Lux render even after letting it go for the better part of a day and night).
The different situation with Iray however is that it is integrated into the Daz programme, so the scene and programme had to remain open during rendering which took up both CPU and memory resources as well (one of the very few nice features of Reality Lux, was once the scene was submitted to the render engine it and even the Daz programme could be shut down thus freeing up more memory and CPU resources for rendering) . Hence as I began to work on larger and larger scenes, I noticed render times slowed almost exponentially, (not even taking into account interior and night scenes). What I discovered was the load of both the open scene in Daz and the render process was exceeding system memory and dumping to much slower swap mode (my 5+ year old old system had 12 GB with about 11 GB available after Windows and system utilities). Now for 3DL that was more than enough, however Iray is more hardware intensive. So for rendering one scene that was about 8.9 GB in size this meant I had about 2 GB of physical memory for rendering with before the process dropped to HDD virtual memory.
Interestingly, I never found 3DL (or for that fact Firefly) to be all that "dark and mysterious". Carrara and Bryce also seemed pretty straightforward to me (the latter being rather slow if you used GI). I discovered that with high quality shaders (like those in Howie's sets) I could get very very close to photo real results in Carrara and it didn't take as long to achieve as it did with Iray (I still consider Carrara's render engine to be one of the best of the CPU based ones for the high level of quality it is able to produce).
An hour for a fairly complex scene like I create (not just a simple portrait or vignette) would be super in my book but most likely not possible. 3 to 4 hours for such a scene with high quality results, no noise, no grain, would more than acceptable for the final run. However, when I start a render process before going to bed and wake up 8 hours later to find it maybe 60% complete and still exceedingly grainy, with Task Manager showing CPU load, memory load, and HDD R/W performance all pegged, that is where it becomes frustrating.and discouraging.
With 3DL even using some Uber elements (like area lights and shaders) I can get that "under 1 hour" performance.
I stumbled across a forum on Smith Micro where they were listing Poser commands in Python for Poser 12, but as usual, they are being cagey about possible release dates.
No one is demanding an 'instant art' button, and I don't think calling down people for speed needs is productive. If you are making animations, for example, your need for speed is probably significantly higher than someone doing one-offs, and a hobbyist can afford to tinker and nurse a render more than someone who has a deadline.
I only render in 3DL. I rarely optimize anything (I'm starting to learn, though), and my computer is 3 yrs old, because I burned through 2 laptops before it (one literally started smoking). I am probably a terrible example, because I don't know what my bits are, or what my chips are named - as a former Mac-baby, the box is supposed to remain inviolate, and you don't ask about the population of fairy-monkeys inside. ;-P
A short render is anything under half an hour. An average render is in the two-five hour range, and some few I've had to wander off for a couple of days. My infamous Christmas contest entry ran for three days to get to 12%, before I came home from a holiday and pulled the plug. That's when I started to learn the definition of 'optimize'. Yes, I'm late to the party :-) Speed is an issue, sometimes, but not inherently a priority. I would like to not burn out another computer, because I really can't justify a replacement after the last time... :-( therefore I am trying to learn to be kinder to the hardware, and trying to remember that things in the background really don't have to have the same level of detail as things in the foreground. It's hard to remember, though. I am sure my computer has some sort of online therapy group where it complains about what a cruel taskmistress I am...
...indeed. It is the time and care involved in setting up a scene, composing it, optimising materials, lighting, morphing, posing, draping, kitbashing, modelling, etc. Whether a scene takes 15 min in 3DL, 4 - 6 hours in Iray (in CPU mode), or several days in Reality/Lux.has nothing to do with "artistry".
My scene of the two girls at the bus stop took a long time to build, I had to create the characters, kitbash several items, re-texture the bus, create skins for the characters, create a mask for the city backdrop photo so I could use an HDRI sky, place objects behind the camera to be caught in reflections and run test renders after making adjustments to the composition. The whole building"and testing process took a several days while the final rendering process in 3DL (with IBL Master) took only 12 minutes. Does the fact it didn't take hours or days to render (which is machine controlled) make what I did any less of an artistic process?
If you are a content creator or animator, you don't want each image or frame to take very long to render.
I finally thought I had it licked
I could render 360 sphereical iray scenes and use those as dome textures
do lots of compositing
set path length to 10 and whoohoo iray you beauty!!!!!!
then the scenes with 8K textures and 300+ maps started appearing
I am glad there is some new stuff that still renders on my rig but I need to factor in running scene optimiser to even use some or just not buy them if there is too many ginormous textures listed.
I have actually used Poser quite a bit lately too as unlike DAZ studio it has an awesome FBX importer
all softwares have a place in my tool box and Poser versions of stuff though rare are greatly appreciated by me
even if to use in Carrara
...I don't remember, does Poser import .3ds and .lwo formats and can they be converted to .pp2/.pz3?
Totally agreed. I built a new pc for rendering featuring a 1060 and just the needed hardware to fully support it. While of course I am satisfied with my new rig and the speed it brings out, I also have to say that with my old laptop I was using Iray anyway, slower and with more memory limitations of course, but it did work.
As for Poser support in the DAZ store, I see about 10K items for Poser/DS3 vs 20K items for DS4. So it seems to me that Poser support is far from gone. Anyway since G3-G8 are not Poser compatible anymore I guess this is going to drop unless something changes.
That's also a bit odd to tell the truth. I mean, if DAZ assets can be successfully imported into Maya and Blender, then why not Poser ?
Yes, with various degrees of success. Some conversions are perfect, but there are those with back faces or deformations. Poser 7 sometimes does a better job than Poser 11 in that respect.
I used Poser from version 3 to 9. I really loved it.
But I never managed to get Genesis to work in Poser, still can't. Just error messages and confusion.
Genesis 3 & 8 changed to Dual-Quaternion skinning. It is a more industry standard skinning system than the two slightly different versions of Tri-Ax that Poser and Daz Studio used in earlier generations. This change was made to make it easier to use Daz figures in a wider variety of platforms. So far the currently released versions of Poser unfortunately have not been upgraded to support Dual-Quaternion skinning, but since it isn't a Daz proprietary skinning format they can implement it without anything from us.
Pity DAZ cannot do it for Carrara which they own
I hear people complain their art sucks! Why does my renders look dull! My Photos don't dazzle, my painting or drawing does not evoke!! Well People, instead of buying hardware and content or using poser or daz!!!!!!! Go to the library and get some books on art composition and photography! It will teach you how lighting and composition work and some general art classes will improve your skills! You will definatly, see a huge improvement in your renders! Most artists want to express a thought or a feeling or tell a story when they show you a piece of work! Before throwing things into a scene try doing this! Oh, I like poser too by the way! I love the way superfly works great on my second hand 10-core 20-thread xeon processor! All 3D software can create great works of art! It is not the content or the software!
>>> it is the artist<<<
~Just my 2 cents
...I have Poser Pro 2012 and Poser 9
...
Actually, while learning composition is definitely important, one of the biggest keys to getting exactly what you want it to NOT try to get everything to look exactly the way you want it in the original render. Professional photographers have always relied on postwork to get their final images, originally during the enlargement process and now via photoshop, and now all movies are color-graded in the same way as well. So why should 3D art be any different? If you don't have Photoshop then The Gimp is free and nearly as good, and it's a lot faster to go through, tweak things out and try new ideas in post. There are a number of YouTube channels with a lot of great tutorials, like PIXimperfect https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMrvLMUITAImCHMOhX88PYQ to get you started, and even learning just a few simple things like how to adjust color balance and skin tones can take your art from okay to Wow!