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I did wonder if that was it. Yes, the DS to ZBrush seems to be made prely with morphs in mind and doesn't support groups or surfaces - that requires going via OBJ or, for surfaces, using the Autogroup by UVs command.
After browsing this thread, I found it quite refreshing how little 'religion' has crept into the discussion - esp considering the title :). Very refreshing and informative. Thanks to all for your balanced/pragmatic insights.
I happen to thrash badly at Poser, DS, Carrara, Bryce, and Iclone - which is probably why I thrash. I'd recommend picking a single app first, getting good at it, then augmenting your tools with the other packages - based on need. Once you know one of them, the conventions get notably easier to figure out in the others. I have to say that DS is where I keep going back (aniblocks/animate2, and ever-improving interface), but carrara is where I'd like to settle, even if it is getting rusty, it's still solid, compatible with most things, and way more than I could ever master, and most everything I could ever want to do. Not enough hours.
Best luck, and thanks to all for the good commentary.
ms
That was it. :-) But when morphing, groups aren't crucial, unless I want to hide some part of the body. No big problem.
Ron, I'm truly sorry if I offended you in some way. I didn't mean to. I know I can seem snippy, but it's not intentional. I say what I think, and it usually seems to translate into "wow, she's mean." I'm not though. I was trying to say that I liked DS very much, too. Somehow, that seems to have gotten lost in translation. :-)
It has been the most civil Poser versus DAZ Studio thread I've ever participated in.
I paid as much as what Poser Pro upgrade cost to add the equivalent functionality to DAZ Studio as Poser has. It is true the DAZ Store has more content then Content Paradise but you definately pay more for that content on average. I couldn't imagine as a hobbyist paying full price but you can bet some hobbyists do and surely some businesses do. Out of the box Poser Pro has lots of content.
So all things being about equal Poser Pro and DAZ Studio wind up costing about the same for roughly equivalent libraries and functionality. Some things I use DAZ for and other things I use Poser for and there are some things I still have to teach myself well enough to make an informed decision between the two.
Whilst the base price for content can be a bit higher at DAZ than at other sites, the discounts on offer here, particularly when they stack, are way better. If you buy a lot of content at base price, what you said is clearly true, but if you jump on them when on sale, you can get some key plug ins for a fraction of the base price. I picked up decimator (a feature of poser pro 14 game version) for around 20 dollars. I doubt I spent 250 on the plug-ins needed to get DS up to the level of Poser Pro, and 250 (or 170 when on sale) is what I need to spend to upgrade Poser Pro.
I think where Poser beats Studio is when it comes to third party plugins.. With Poser when there is an update to the program the plugin still works for it even a major update with only a few exceptions but not that many.. On the other hand with Studio if there is an minor or major update to the program most needed or useful plugins / cameras / lights break and either sort of work or don't work at all..
The annoying part of that is hoping the PA who created it releases an update but in most cases the plugin / cameras / lights have been abandoned, I have a few like this that no longer work properly and have not seen an update in years..
This is true. However, as someone who's been using Poser since Poser 5, I can tell you that the catch is that the vast majority of that content has previously been included in all of the previous versions of Poser... ie: what's included with Poser Pro 11 is about 90% the same as what was in Poser Pro 2012 and 70% the same as Poser 8 (and a lot of those items in the Pros used to be freebies on the CP website.) It's all very well for SM to advertise that Poser 11 Pro comes with 5 GB of content, but 4GB of that is the same content as the previous versions... Alphaman, Creech, Don, Judy, James, Jessi... most of these are contemporaries of Victoria 3 and quite a few predate Victoria 1. Worse, they don't include the last set of well supported SM figures, the G2s, (Kelvin, Koji, Mikkis 2-4 and, if SM's own info is correct, G2 James and Jessie) which HAVE been included with previous versions of Poser. And that removes almost all of the ethnic characters in one fell swoop. Okay, you do get the Diego variants of Ryan and Ryan 2, but otherwise, if you want to render anything besides white males and females, cartoon characters and aliens, you're going to have to buy additional figures or invest in a 2nd party texture conversion system. So while you get a lot of content, the usability of a lot of that content is going to be highly variable, and the majority of it predates the newer technology that one is theoretically buying the newest version of the software for by five to ten years.
This is why I strongly recommend buying an older version of Poser at a super discount rather than splurging on the new package. Especially when you consider the following:
The other thing to remember about Poser's included content is that no matter what the "new" figures are, they're not going to garner any real support in the marketplace until months after the release of the new version, and that's making the big assumption that they ever will. To wit, just try and find clothing made specifically for Roxie, who was the current main female figure until the arrival of Pauline just a few months ago. Because, as it stands, there are less than 20 Roxie items on Content Paradise, and the little that was on Renderosity has long since disappeared due to that site's clearance polices. A quick search there turned up a single dynamic miniskirt and a pair of boots. Need a Roxie texture set? Um, nope, they're just not really out there. There were a few when Poser Pro 2014 launched, but they've all since been clearanced or pulled by the artists. Freebies? There are a bare handful on sites like ShareCG. And Rex is even worse off. The sad truth is that the last SM figure that got any aftermarket support to speak of was Alyson 2 and she's down to 45 items on CP. And yes, granted, there are some artists giving Pauline a shot right now, but it's hard to ignore the likelihood that if you plan to use SmithMicro's included figures, you're ultimately going to end up spending a lot of time converting products made for the DAZ and Hivewire figures. Or, more likely, you'll end up buying Dawn/V4 or whatever, so you have to add that cost onto the top of Poser as well. (Or you could Get DAZ Studio for free and get Genesis and G2F&M at no extra cost.)
Personally, as someone who does still use Poser for some things, I really wish Smith Micro would just give up on the "new figures for each new version of Poser" schtick. Either save the cost and drop the price of the base software, or stick with a figure and actually develop a content market for it.
Has Smith-Micro not been upgrading Python the way they used to? That seemed to me to be the major cause of plugin breakage in the past.
Ah yeah forgot about that, there were some plugins and other third party content made before and during Poser 8 that broke when Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2012 were released due to the version of Python used for Poser 9 / Pro 2012, even so most were updated for the new versions of Poser.. Not sure about Poser 11 / Pro 11 as do not have it yet, either way I am still waiting for updates for plugins, cameras and lights for the current version of Studio and doubt that I will ever see an update for them..
Yes. It'd be nice if some of the older stuff was cleared out, or at least put in a separate download labelled "legacy content" or something.
Plugins needed frequent recompiles up to the latter stgaes of DS2. Then the last few versions of DS2 kept the SDK stable, DS3 had a stable SDK throughout its life, and DS4.5 (the first official release version) has had a stable SDK.
When Daz Studios 4.6 to 4.9 hit a lot of the addons I have do not work that well now.. One is ToonyCamPro it sort of works but is a bit hit and miss now and some of what it should do does not work properly.. Others have said how AoA's lights don't flag SSS correctly not since 4.5.. And Omnifreakers UberPoint Light Shader for DAZ Studio, even though it works Studio keeps asking for a particular sdl file to be recompiled for better performance.. And no idea how to do that..
Just seems that some addons do not work well with Studio 4.6 to 4.9 as in most cases this is due to lack of updating by their creators for whatever reason..
Yes, some shader products have had issues - I was addessing plug-ins as such, which work or don't work, rather than shaders or scripts, which can have issues in some cases but may work to at least some extent.
Don't worry about that one...if you recompile it you may gain a whopping 3-5 seconds speed boost on a long render. That's about how long it takes for the automatic recompile to take place. Where as some of the other shaders that can be recompiled will gain more of a boost, light shaders don't. All that is, is a performance 'suggestion'...there isn't really much, if any, performance hit by not recomiling that one. Much like the 'warning' on displacement bounds. You can 'tune' things a little by paying attention to them, but in the long run you spend much more time tuning than you save by doing so. So while the info message may be annoying, it's not broken.
ToonyCam's problems are due to changes in Shader Mixer...
I'd actually never heard of Fuse until I read this, so having CC I went and downloaded it.
Right now it's not even close to Daz or Poser (nor is it in any way a poser or renderer - I have no idea why you have to go to PS to pose or another website to export to obj) however it is ludicrously easy to use, the options are all very friendly, and the range of options available for easily customising skin and clothing materials is downright scary. If I was Daz, I'd be worried if Adobe decides to start pumping money into Fuse.
Subjectively, ignoring the difference in feature amount, etc. I like using Studio a lot more.
I trialled Poser and hated it; thought it was unfriendly, awkward, and miles behind Studio. I see people blame Daz for Genesis 3 not natively working in Poser instead of asking SM why it doesn't, blame Daz for buying RDNA which will make the future of Poser's forums questionable instead of asking why SM don't host their own official support forums, and then still want to give the company hundreds of dollars to start using a program that only runs older content (which you still need to buy anyway... from the people who offer you a program for free.) I'm sure people have their reasons, and I would never tell anyone what they should use, but I really don't understand Poser users at all.
Have been around 3D many moons, and have to say that, despite my history with Poser going way back to Metacreations, it looks moribund. From what looked like a pretty unpromising start -- early versions of DS simply never ran right on my Mac-- Daz have consistently delivered new and useful technology. They're iterating, delivering new technologies, like iRay, and making them work reliably.
In this horse race, there's simply no way to bet on Smith . . . they seem hobbled by poor software architecture choices from years past. Its a pity, DS needs a competitor, but I don't see Poser as it. They've got interesting features that DS doesn't have-- bullet physics, face room, strand hair-- none of which are used by many people, but they consistently missed the boat on the stuff that you have to use, every day, with the software. Like a decent content library, for example.
Daz was smart on a range of issues, notably the idea "platform is free, make money on the content" . . . note just how hard its been for other 3D vendors to get a store that usefully integrates into their software, getting it done and done so that it works reliably under heavy loads ("march madness"), that's not trivial. My impression is that Daz is focussed, responsive and "they've got a plan". I don't have the same feeling about Poser.
What is Blender?
Blender is updated more often with a much wider range of features, has no real sales to employ people, but has extensive and almost always up to date documentation in several different formats. Daz have stated that they employ someone whose sole job is to look for pirated content and send takedown notices, so surely they would have employed someone to write and update the manual before worrying about that.
Last week I stumbled across an official Daz video on youtube about using ActivePose. I was vaguely aware you could manually drag figures to pose them, but until I saw the video I had no idea that the locking features etc. existed which make active posing actually work. Nor did I have any idea that the video existed until I found it accidentally.
I wonder how many of these quick turnover customers left because things weren't properly documented beyond the first beginner stages (the in program interactive starter tutorial is very good) or because they were unaware of how many great features Studio offers. I still see regular users posting that they had no idea they had to manually tell Iray to use their gfx card instead of CPU, a feature I found awhile ago, but only by accident.
Proper documentation for this would have been much more valuable than adding a store in the program or the confusing mess that is Connect.
I largely agree with you, with regards to never being able to get on with it; but I see the quality of the renders folks produce, and it has the tools, if the artist using it has the skills. I don't, and that is frequently what it boils down to: what suits a person.
And yet, that rather defines the difference between the Poser and DAZ mentalities. To a great extent, Poser is a monolithic entity that revolves entirely around Smith Micro, and while there are poser plugins, there are a lot fewer of them than there are for DS. DAZ, on the other hand, seems to thrive on chaos and fortuitous coincidences. Although DAZ Studio is clearly their preferred pony, they also keep Carrara and Bryce running in the race. Where they don't have features, they rely on PAs to create them with apparently little coordination. Thus after years with no hair systems, we suddenly got two, there are two different LUX plug ins and multiple 2nd party methods of transfering textures and adjusting shaders, etc. And yes, it is VERY frustrating when an individual PA decides not to update a plugin, but on the flip side, we have seen huge leaps in the development of DS and it's capabilities over the last five years, whereas Poser's evolution has all but stalled over the same period. I used to upgrade Poser with each new release, but I've been sitting on Poser Pro 2012 for several years now as there really hasn't been anything added that I really need that I can't already do in Studio. I was disappointed with PP 2014 and decided to wait for the next version roplled around, but now that I see how little new seems to have been added to Poser Pro 11, I have to wonder if I'll still be waiting by the time Poser Pro 12 rolls around...
That is an excellent observation/summation.
I totally agree.
That's silly. Poser isn't moribund and their included content and the content at Content Paradise has much less a focus on moribund themes then the DAZ Stores does.
In fact just reading this thread I've learned new things that make Poser much more appealing to me from the perspective of Poser software features that help me then it was before I read this thread; because as a modeler from the ground up in Maya LT or Blender I'm not or ever will be really good or fast at modeling.
I can understand long time Poser users sticking by their app, as they have invested so much time getting to know how to use it. It would take them a while to get up to speed with DS, and they are likely to prefer the Poser UI, simply because they are familar with it. I do wonder though why a new user would choose Poser over DS, and if SM can not attract new users to their app, then the program will slowly die off, it may take a while, but you can not rely on loyal customers indefinitely.
I started out looking for some sort of poseable figure for drawing in Photoshop. After several searches I heard about Poser, tested that, heard that most people used Daz figures (ie Victoria) and from there found Daz Studio and found it much nicer than Poser.
The point of the story I want to highlight though is that I was looking for a 'doll' for Photoshop. Everyone knows PS; I'd never heard of Poser, let alone Daz Studio. If I'd known about Fuse at the time (or if Fuse had become a tiny tiny bit more integrated into PS) I'd never have discovered these two 3D apps, or how much fun and what results you can get from 3D, which would have been a huge shame.
One major difference at this point is that DAZ is only sold... er, given away... only online, while Poser is still available in physical packaging and sold in a number of Brick & Mortar stores. SM also still shows up as a vendor at a number of the bigger SF and Comic cons, which is how I originally encountered them, many moons ago, whereas I don't think DAZ has worked the con circuit in years. That's an increasingly slight advantage in a day and age where people are doing more and more of their shopping online, but I imagine that there are still people coming into this hobby via a first run-in with Poser in an art, electronics or office supply shop. In addition, older versions of Poser (as well as SM's Anime Studio and Manga Studio) have a regular habit of showing up in super-discount shops like half-price books at prices in the sub-$30.00 range. That probably doesn't put much cash in SM's pocket, but it probably serves to bring in a few new customers, as does the bundling of their lower tier products into packages with things like WACOM tablets.
Another issue Poser has with any new users, is it needs to hook them in quickly. It is only a matter of time before a new user discovers the bulk of the figure assets available both as freebies and commercially are not compatible with the figures in Poser, and before long will discover DAZ, and shortly after DS.
Oh, I don't think it's come anywhere close to that, yet. There are still tons and tons of Poser-ready products out there, including a huge number here at DAZ. However, the vast majority of those items were designed for V4/M4, not any of the SM native figures, while most of the remainder are created for either the Hivewire figures or DAZ's Genesis/Genesis 2 figures. Even if SM pulled the plug on Poser tommorrow, people would be able to continue using Poser for years, but with few PAs seeming to be interested in developing content for Pauline/Paul and the other major addition to Poser 11 - the superfly renderer, the question becomes whether people will be willing to continue to upgrade to new versions for increasingly smaller benefits.
When I was a new user, the fact that there just isn't much out there for Poser figures made me think of them as a dead end, whereas the Genesis line was immensely appealing because you could mix and match all of the different characters, making every character, clothing, and hair purchase more worthwhile. (Also, initially I bought into Genesis 2 with the thinking that it was more advanced than 1 but had a lot more out and was more likely to get sales than 3.)
V4 also actually takes quite a lot to set up properly. You essentially need to buy the base, 4.2++ and probably elite skins or at least some other characters. For a Genesis generation you get the base and software for free, and really only need to buy the head and body morphs. The way everything interacts is also a lot simpler for a new user to 3D to understand (no talk of morph targets or injections or specific characters or whatever, just Genesis 1, 2, or 3.)
Obviously as we become more experienced we learn that this isn't always the case and that there are ideal ways to buy from various stores to get a lot more for your money, but those were my impressions at the time.
I agree with you on this. The point I was trying to make (and clearly failed) was that even if a new user discovers Poser first, assuming they have internet access, they are likely to find out about DAZ and DS pretty soon, so may switch over to DS if they have not had the time to become a fan of Poser's interface.