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224 S 200 W, Suite #250
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That's a good point. The old Poser community is dwindling in numbers. Unless new members pop up to replace those who retire -- or go into semi-retirment -- or switch to other apps, Poser won't develop a contemporary user base. That doesn't mean it won't continue to be developed and sold though, I guess. And I forget, sometimes, that Poser is evidently used for things other than rendering works of art. The addition of an accurate distance measurement tool indicates that Poser might be used in forensics, somewhere. :-)
More seem to support Daz I'll grant you, but that is the crux, it's only perceptions and opinions we can offer; Poser seems to be well supported. Victoria 4 products still appear, and that isn't because Daz Studio users (generally) require them; and after ten years or so, new innovative and simply different products must be getting incresingly difficult to think of - at least that haven't already been done for Poser's main go-to figure: Victoria 4.
The original topic was which tool to buy, not "Whither Poser?" (nor "Wither, Poser!"). We managed a nice long run without any app-warring, let's try to keep to that please.
We have also not heard from the OP at all, so we have no idea if he/she decided to use some of the money they had on Poser after all
Depends on the user, I started with Poser first and got used to the UI rather quickly. After a few years I decided to try DS and hated the UI, tried it several more times and couldn't find a way to make it work. It was only with the release of Reality that I "had" to make it work in order to use luxrender. Now that I am used to DS after several years of use, I still find ways to do things in it and new features daily. If anything DS has to many redundant ways to do the same things. After several years of not using Poser on a regular basis I went back to it to try reality for poser and found the UI cumbersome and unintuitive, go figure. The ONLY reason I still have versions of it installed is for the cloth room and working with poser file formats. After reading all the horror stories about using DSON and trying to get genesis figures to work in poser I have a ton of respect for users to are able to consistantly use this route in their workflow
If there's more material for Poser I sure would like to know where. There's more material for DAZ Studio than Poser. I am a Poser-only user since I've been using it for a long time. I never could get the hang of setting up scenes in DAZ Studio.
If you're into buying a lot of content I would go with DAZ Studio. If you want to convert Gen 1-2 figures to be native in Poser, it's a nightmare and usually there are problems with the DSON converter. Some items just cannot be converted at all. DAZ Studio is very fast even on the slowest computer.
You might be better off going with DAZ Studio. Try it out. It's free. Poser doesn't have a trial version. You have to use a credit card to try it out then cancel before they start charging your card.
Actually, the original poster stated that he was already currently using DS, so it wan't a which tool to buy question (not that anyone can currently "buy" DS at the moment anyway, unless you just feel like sending evelopes of random amounts of money to DAZ.) Rather, the question was whether or not it would be worth investing his money to also get Poser, which he did not currently have. That basically leaves four main options - 1. - Buy latest, top of the line version, Poser Pro 11, 2. - Save a bunch of money and buy Poser 11 standard, 3. - buy Poser, but save even more money and buy an older version and 4. - No, don't buy Poser at the current time. Of course, there's another option that no one's mentioned yet - downloading a trial version of Poser - but in this case I think it's fair to make the assumption that 30 days may not be sufficient time to learn the Poser interface well enough to make a truly unbiased comparison.
Unless it's specifically labled DAZ Studio only, almost everything at Renderosity is either Poser compatible or Poser-centric. The same is true for Hivewire, Poserworld, Content Paradise, what's left of RuntimeDNA, and everything for V4/M4 and earlier in the DAZ store, excepting Optitex dynamic cloth. That's thousands of items. It's only when you get to DAZ product made in the last four years or so that the scales tip in the direction of DS only.
Hmm. I hadn't caught the fact that they weren't offering free trials of Poser 11 without a CC... There seem to be some Poser Free Trial offers out there, but the ones I followed up on all seem to lead to Poser 8 Debut rather than anything current.
I am a fairly new user to both Poser and Daz. I like both. There are different benefits and drawbacks to each one. I'm working on book covers, and so far, my custom Michael 4 characters look WAY better in Poser than DAZ. I have no idea why. Still learning.
I haven't had time to figure out getting Gen 3 in Poser 11 yet, or the new materials room, which is three times more complicated than the old one.
I did as Cybersox13 mentioned- I got a brand new (legitimate) copy of Poser 10 for about $30 on eBay and tried that for a while. I liked it enough to upgrade to Poser 11 when Rendo had it on sale recently (I think it was $79). I wish I had gotten the Pro, as there are a few more features. I still have plenty to learn in both programs. I'm impressed with some of the renders that Superfly does. That said, some textures look great in it, others don't. I don't have Iray capability yet for DS. I have Reality plugins for both programs, still haven't gotten real good with that either. Lots of learning curves!
My advice is to start off cheap and get used to the program. Those sales seemed to come and go. I'm sure you'll be able to grab it for that price again in the near future.
Personally, I like more Daz than Poser, maybe it's my machine, but every time I open Poser, I feel like it's about to break, it's slow, and not so friendly as Daz.
Poser has never crashed on me and is quite fast however like I don't use the iRay in the Preview Window similarly I don't use such setting in the Poser Preview Window. As an iRay Render is an invitation to DAZ to crash likewise similarly in Poser besides the fact that doing so slows trememdously down DAZ or Poser. You should change your default Poser settings.
I used Poser recently to import in a 3DS format model, then save this as a CR2 to import into DS. I am not aware of how to import a 3DS file directly into DS, unless there is a plug-in I have missed.
No, no way to directly import 3ds into Studio...but most ways are no more convoluted/difficult than using Poser to do so.
Neither Studio nor Poser can make the models that they assemble, rig, pose, and render. Neither can make the environments in which the models are placed. In the past, Studio-based figures had a dependable bridge to Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrara.
BUT
Genesis 3 reveals a troubling trend. Because Bryce has not been updated, the bridge does not work for everyone because of evolving operating systems. If not addressed eventually, new users will not have equipment that can rely on the Bryce bridge to place the posed figures in environments. Because Carrara has not been updated, Genesis 3 figures and content are useless in Carrara, and that channel to environments will also close.
So, if you want to pose a character under an HDRI dome, Studio might be fine in the long run. But if you want your models to interact in an environment, Studio has some questions.
If you really want to get into Poser cheap, you can currently buy Poser Debut
Not to mention that there's a disturbing new trend of DAZ products that only work with the Iray renderer, ignoring the fact that many customers either cannot or prefer to not use Iray only products. Ironcially, it brings to mind the huge rift that occured in the Poser world way back when Poser 5 changed the default material settings.
Is it really that disturbing? Most products predating a year ago don't come with Iray mats. Sure it's not ideal, but I don't think all that many Iray users will refuse to buy a product because it doesn't come with Iray settings, since you can convert the two between each other to greater or lesser success. If PAs are saying they have tried to provide both and found the results lacking and/or not worth their time, then there are at least not that hard workarounds.
Do materials have to be changed in some manner to render them in Reality / Luxrender / Octane etc. ? I've never used any of them.
DS has plenty of enviroments to pose in, just look through this and other stores, certainly a lot more enviroments than just using a HDRI dome (which looks pretty bad for indoor enviroments in particular). You only need Cararra, Bryce etc if you want to build the enviroments from scratch, which the majority of users have no wish to do.
For me, the breakdown of pros and cons is thus:
Poser: Comic Book Preview, .max conversion, dynamic hair, Cloth Room (accessible dynamic fabric) [somewhat mitigated as a plus by DynCreator]
Daz: state-of-the-art figures, tons of new content support, Raiya, Stonemason, Jack Tomalin, Polish, Aeon Soul, SHIFTING IMAGES, MEC4D
I myself buy and use Daz environments. It is the ability to supplement that is being compromised. These are big fuctions to have removed. Imagine if Blender lost a law suit and had to remove all of the modeling and environment functionality. That is serious degradation. I would guess (just a guess) that the majority of potential users do care about that.
Daz is losing some important functionality, even as it adds some wonderful things like Iray. Just including the bad with the good.
The ability to use premade content is a different functionality. I said that Poser and Studio both assemble, rig, pose, and render premade models.
To my knowledge most users kit bash their existing content (and a fair few do not even do this, they just just load and render). Some may apply new shaders to surfaces, but I suspect the number that have both the knowledge and inclination to do their own modelling is pretty small. Anyway, that is just an opinion, and either way this is not relevant to this thread.
I would add:
Poser: Morph brush.
DS: Autofit of clothing, and iRay integration. I know Poser can refit clothing using the fitting room (though you need the pro version for this), but Autofit is a lot faster and easier to use.
No, it's the other way around. I'm talking about items that ONLY come with Iray, so they don't work with 3DL. Because while 3DL usually adapts to Iray, going the other way isn't as likely.. See this thread for a good example: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/77556/converting-lecture-hall-with-props-to-3delight-doable#latest ;
Thanks. How could I forget Morph Brush?
I personally wasn't attracted to the look of poser renders when I was first getting into this. There was always a look to poser art that gave it away, and I was more interested in realism. That or the renders I saw were from users that weren't at a high skill level. That being said, it almost breaks my heart when I go to the renderosity site and see some of the figures there for poser that will not work with Da3d. There are some amazing artists working in poser, but I'm in too deep now with Daz to add another bit of software to my plate.
The key thing missing here is the new DAZ figures are state of the art figures only in DAZ Studio. So essentially you can render to the capability of DAZ Studio and your computer HW and not much else if you use the latest generation of DAZ 3D characters. By going back a generation or more you can increase that a little bit, but not much, by adding Carrara, Bryce, and Hexagon to that list of programs that can handle DAZ characters natively.
To use these elsewhere is to export them in a format that a 3rd party program can use whether that be Poser, Unity, Max, Maya, Blender, and on & on. If a game engine were ever support DAZ Studio figures or Poser figures natively then that is a coup for that product, but until then the thing that keeps coming up as the reason to use DAZ Studio is to buy more content, rather than use and or improve existing content, so although I like DAZ Studio and am trying to learn it better, much of the specifics of what I'm learning in DAZ Studio is only helpful in a general technical understanding of 3D technology and I'll have to do it another way in another UI outside DAZ, but it's still the same technology.
A strong reason that the world needs to break away from the old Daz/Poser architecture. V4, the flagship of the Poserverse was built on massive geometries, with massive texture maps. That's how you got good looking things, back in 2006.
But that's a million miles away from any game engine, or indeed from modern renderers. The 70K poly figure with the giant texture maps, transmaps, that's never going to work well with a game engine, and its a waste in a world with powerful modern renderers. Displacement, subdivision surfaces, instancing -- these are the technologies that enable low poly figures to to render beautifully, and yet remain practical.
Bottom line is that adhering to "state of the art circa 2006" doesn't get you what you want. No one's building a game engine to manipulate 70K poly figures, because its a waste of cycles and there's no need to.
There really is a need for a more modern geometry and shading system. Look at what Zbrush does-- now 15 years old. Simply stunning levels of detail, without crippling geometries . . . but getting that kind of performance inevitably means an architecture beyond "lotta polys and big bitmaps"
Ah it's more complicated than I thought to go backwards, my bad.
On the topic of using Daz figures for gaming, that's probably why they started Morph3D?
Poser has moved far beyond 2006, even if you didn't with them. In the modern DAZ Centric world of Genesis you are liable to get left behind too. Already the conforming clothing look is a glaringly antiquated DAZ Studio look. I don't know how much of that is they are waiting for consumer level HW to be powerful enough to support more realistic cloth vs the cost of licensing or writing the code for that technology.
The standard exchange format is FBX and if it's not supported in FBX you can consider it non-portable and there goes much of DAZ and Poser features out the window, not that some of it makes sense to support in a game engine as they are modeling aids.
When your characters are used in a game you shouldn't be able to say whether it was a Poser, DAZ Studio, or other 3D software character maker.
As someone who ranted against daz Studio for years, I no longer open Poser (I bought every version up to PP 2014 game dev). DS with iRay does why I've always wanted much better than Poser ever did, and I don't really look back. I hate Poser's hair, but the cloth room had potential, and I'd like to see that with DS. But, that's about the only thing I really like about Poser over DAZ Studio. Poser's shader stuff was a little more dynamic, but I'm OK with what I can achieve with Studio's shaders for the most part, and there are lots of things to purchase for the parts that you can't achieve yourself.
So, if I were you, I'd invest that money in more content (maybe get some of the better shaders or some new environments/or figures). Of, maybe even consider spending that money on a better graphics card to speed up your iRAY renders.
Off topic but I'm interested to understand what this
adds (that's useful) to the discussion?
Edit: Bad,bad,bad spelling.