I can't believe how much more powerful DAZ Studio is over Poser 11.
DAZ Studio 4.10 vs Poser 11
I crashed course DAZ Studio over the past four days and have produced some amazing results. I'd post the results here, but they're too explicit. I'm literally dumb founded how amazing these IRAY renders are. I applied all the principles I learned from Poser over the years and DAZ Studio rewards my knowledge far better than Poser.
DAZ Studio is vastly superior to Poser 11, hands down. There is no competition. The interface is better, the tools are better. I can do everything faster in Daz Studio. EVERYTHING. There's tons of little things DAZ lets me do that are time consuming in Poser 11. It's amazing how much faster I work in DAZ.
Poser 11 is truly an inferior product compared to DAZ.
I suggest to anyone using Poser 11, stop wasting your time and switch to DAZ. Now is the time to change. Don't waste anymore time. If I could crash DAZ and master it in four days, so can you. I've literally cranked out commercial level renders after four days. I'm still in shock, but very pleased.
The two most important things I've learned:
1. Do all these tutorials: https://www.daz3d.com/help-daz-3d-video-tutorials
2. Use these IRAY Ghost Lights, if you don't your render times will be higher than need be: https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit
The IRAY Ghost lights are ESSENTIAL, they need to be a part of DAZ Studio as a core product.
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Comments
One complaint I hear frequently from Poser users is that everything in DAZ Studio is 'hidden'. This is a deliberate policy by DAZ to keep the UI uncluttered. But every command you need is there somewhere. The trick is to right-click everything, and go through all the menus. There are some amazing things under the hood in DS and it takes a while to find them, but believe me, it's worth it. As a content creator, the sheer amount of awesome options in DS makes my life so much easier.
I don't have anything against Poser at all. I started with it many years ago and I still have a soft spot for it. But I never liked the UI, and some of the weird glitches used to make me tear my hair out. I find DS so much easier to use.
I admit to having a soft spot for Poser. It was the programme which introduced me to the world of 3D artistry, and one of the very first figures I ever bought is still one of my favourites today. Poser might not have fully embraced the same technologies as Daz Studio (even though full compatability was on the cards at one point), but it still has a few points of interest which are, in my experience, better than Daz Studio.
The first is the cloth room. It cannot be denied that the new DForce clothing is a massive step forwards for Daz Studio. I love it, and I love being able to finally introduce dynamics into my work properly. The older Optitex dynamic was far too constrained for the user and exclusive to the point of requiring a multi-thousand dollar programme to create dynamic clothing. It meant we didn't see many PA's utilizing it, and those outfits we did get were pretty much only useful for the character they were made for, since the clothes don't morph with the figure. DForce however is still an uncut jewel. It's great as long as your scene is behaving itself nicely, but DForce deals with intersecting polygons rather poorly. Whatever calculations it runs can go completey haywire when this happens, causing the entire outfit to explode in a cascade of micro polygons. Not a pretty sight.
Poser's cloth room is sleek and the result of many years of perfecting their art. You can 'clothify' just about anything and drape it nicely. You can alter all kinds of settings on the fly for every surface of the material and very quickly and easily set rigid sections. DForce can only go from strength to strength from here, but Poser's cloth room is still the leader of the two.
The second is the firefly engine. Every engine has their pros and cons, so at face value there's nothing particularly special about what it can do visually. However, it is fast and gives some very impressive results if you know how to use it properly. The material editor allows you to create some incredibly complex surfaces and effectively build your own shaders from the ground up by combining different effects. Daz Studio's shaders are much simpler for the end-user, but are well designed for a specific task. Both are fantastic, but a bigger toolbox is never a bad thing.
Having worked extensively with both Poser and Daz Studio I still prefer the latter, but both are very powerful in uniquely different ways.
I used Poser before DAZ3D too and switched because of iray. Poser renders just look like crap compared to iray and unless poser is going to improve that they will be gone some day I think.
The DAZ/Poser war (if there ever really was one) was over long ago. For me and my 2008 computer its more about which softwares will continue to be compatible to use going forward. I already had to give up IClone which is fun but newer releases won't run on my rig. DAZ runs but can easily run out of space and I have to crank out Iray renders only in CPU mode. I'm hanging on to my computer as long as I can so I'll run whatever version of software I can. Some day I'll save up for a new computer and probably add in one of those Nvidia graphics cards but I dread the cost and having to re-install everything.
Can we please keep the conversation civil and not reawaken the old program war,
Just accept that some of us use Poser and some use DS, and let it go at that.
Re DForce - Bear in mind that DForce has only just been introduced. I highly doubt DAZ will leave it as it is, and I imagine the technology will be massively improved over time. I'm not saying one is better than the other. Just that Poser Cloth Room is pretty well-established and DForce is only just out the door.
I agree about the Poser Material Room. DS's Shader Mixer is incredibly powerful, probably every bit as good as Poser's, but it's fairly incomprehensible to the majority of users. I've tinkered with Shade Mixer and the potential is frankly awesome, but I confess to not having the kind of mathematical brain that can make me a wizard in it.
I started with Poser and then switched to DS when DS just came out, I went back and forth between the 2 programs until I finally stayed with DS. Poser I loved, but I find DS easier to work with.