Renderotica

Don't shoot me.....

I've been a user of Poser since version 4, long time ago, you'd think I'd have picked it up by now....

Anyway, with the advent of Victoria 9 coming out for DS, is it time to accept for us old time Poser users that the software is effectively dead....

I mean, DS users now have Vicky 9, we have LaFemme or still use Vicky 4. Now don't get me wrong, both figures are ok, but with nobody seemingly willing to make decent genitals for LaFemme, it's use for here is limited.

I've also not heard of any new female figure arriving for Poser any time soon, and indeed, the business that owns Poser are also catering more and more for DS users on their website, suggesting to me that even they have given up on it...!!

What's your polite thoughts on the situation, I know this is quite emotive for some people....

I used to hate Daz Studio, used Poser up to 11 (and paid for it). But once I made the switch and went through the pain of the learning curve, I never looked back. Maybe 10 years ago? Mainly Genesis 2 and later. I encourage people to switch. You won't regret it.

BANG :-)

Ok, I made the switch to DS for the advances in figure realism and pursuit of affordable photo-real but I still use V4 for many works, she is getting on a bit so I can't ask her to get her ankles up round her ears but she knows how to dress and still looks fantastic in many scenarios.

In short if Poser does what you want and can produce the art you enjoy why worry. If however you want the latest advancements and content then it looks like DS is the way to go.

Most Poser content will work in DS although a few tweaks to mats may be required. Some scripted content and utilities won't work and I agree it is a steep learning curve.

If you are happy on the hill you are at why climb another, but if it is adventure you seek...

 

None taken, it's part of the learning curve - Iray will do things to the enth degree by default but with a couple of tweaks you can get acceptable renders in seconds, or you can halt the render when it gets to an acceptable quality and save that or you can use one of the other render engines including 3Delight if you want.

But I don;t recall mentioning quality, I was just sayin' if you want the latest figures etc you will need to use DS and whatever that entails but if Poser does what you want, no problem.

 

Poser is finished and it hurts me to say that because I fuckin love the program. Now if you see images from DS that you know you'll never be able to attain, and I'm talking about the versatility of the figures, not the quality of photo-realism, but you desire to have that juicy looking babe with the nice bending body and you know you'll never get to do that in Poser, then time to face the music and make the switch. I kicked and screamed the whole way, put it off for years, but after actually delving into it and figuring it out, it's not that bad of an experience as I thought it would be. Because you know Poser and have some feel for how things work, you will be able to navigate the program in a shorter amount of time than a total newcomer to 3d.

Pros: (This is coming from somebody who just learned it recently and has been using Poser since version 4 and posette)

-The clothing just freaking works on the characters, even heavily morphed. No more bulky shoulders in clothing and having to copy morphs from one figure to another, don't ask me how they did this but it's a godsend. I rarely, if ever, have a poke-though.
-If using Iray, and mind you, that's about all people support anymore, it is a WYSIWYG preview. No more guessing if the shadows and lighting is going to look like they do in poser preview versus the final render. You get what you see. PBR was dabbled with, but they never address transparencies with it and that's fucking useless. What is useful about the PBR preview is that it's fast, not color or texture accurate, but very fast previewing, then you can do an iray preview and final render. Hint, switch back to PBR preview before doing an iray render, that way your machine won't be trying to do two iray processes at a time.
-You can adjust the environments hue, saturation, lightness, intensity and all that stuff before a render.
-Light emitting materials work in iray preview and do leaps and bounds better than poser.
-You can actually bring in poser models and access poser runtimes. If it's a custom poser character, you will have some issues maybe, but props and environments load fine, you just have to adjust the texturing.
-DS is free. I know, I know, if poser had a free version there might be more newcomer interest in it which might spark more vendor effort, but it's not free and I have whipped that horse to death at the other site to no avail. The poser 'new products' section is, well, you know what it is, and no, you are probably never going to see a LaFemme pussy because DS outsells Poser more than 2:1, way more than that actually and vendors are in it for the money (for the most part).
-A vendor like myself can choose to put all the product content into one convenient folder and subfolders. For example, bondage table 1 product has a subfolder for the table, poses (broken down by figure), materials, props, etc, all in one product folder, no more hopping around to figures, then poses, then materials, then hands, then props, then lights, then back and forth. It can all be in the same folder in the same library if I choose.
There are some other things I do like about it but don't want to be here trying to remember everything.

Cons: (Please be kind to me, I have just learned DS this year and still have a ways to go on my knowledge base, this is my disclaimer and I'm sticking with it).

- Iray seems to be the render engine of choice. I don't even do any other material settings for my products than iray. 3delight is now off my list. Iray yes, it takes longer to process and is a slowdown. Like I mentioned above, you can do a PBR preview and it's fast, then switch to iray to poke around your image to see if most things look good, then switch back to PBR preview and do the render (the render will always be whatever you tell it to be, 3delight, pbr or iray).
- Renders are always output at 96 dpi. I did ask this question at the other site and got the prompt reply this is what it is. It turned into quite the argument about why this is or is not important and the response will always be "just render the width and height larger than you want and downsample it". I thought this would be an issue, but it hasn't been.
- Yes, iray is an NVIDIA bitch. It does do better on higher cudda core graphics cards such as the 20 or 30 series. If your image uses low lighting for a scene, there will be these awful white pixels until they wash out after a long render time, but you can use the render settings to de-noise the image, you can set the render settings to only render for a certain amount of time. There are work-arounds for these issues. I do have a high end machine, so I can't really feel your laptop pain. DS is better on a higher end system. Did I mention DS was free and the figure are much more awesome?
- I don't like photo-real and DS doesn't really offer much on the graphic art side. You will be told there are some nice shaders that do this, but they are outdated and some of the scripting doesn't work on the new version of DS apparently.
- Here is a little something I both LOVE and HATE about DS. When you get DS, you get the Genesis 8 bases for free. There are a couple of standard morph upgrade packages that will get you by and you should get them. After that, like V4 or M4, you get custom characters. Here's the catch. When you buy 4 of 5 custom characters, and I'm talking about body morphs and shaping, you install them to your PC like you do poser. What is different, is the morphs are already going to be available and built into your base character. All the siders and dials will automatically be added. I thought that was great, until I had a shit load of characters, like 20 to 30 that I got all at once when I made the switch. Suddenly, the base G8F character takes a long time to load and a long time to reset to default pose, she's now loaded with a ton of shit, unlike poser, where you pull up your V4 base and only load the one custom character you purchased, saved that back to the library and your base character was pure and morph free. I learned the hard way, I had to create a new external folder for all my G8F custom characters and load that path into DS paths when I want to use it. When I want a faster loading model for say creating several poses (as a vendor I have to do this), then I remove the G8F library path and it reverts back to the base. Like I say, it's a LOVE/HATE relationship. I know people are going to chime in and tell me about the morph management system somebody created so only the morphs I want will load, and I will look into it, but until then, that is what I know.

For those folks that are Poser users and nervous about my future intentions about Poser....

I still rig, add morphs and externalize geometries in poser, so it is one of my tools to get products into DS. That being said, there will be a time when I am going to grow tired of supporting lots of poses for multiple figures, it's time consuming and when this is my only income, time is money. I've asked and asked for a LaFemme pussy time and again, all I hear is crickets, nobody wants to touch her.

In a nutshell, Poser is finished and when some really good suggestions on bondwares own website for product suggestions get shot down, it's just not a good sign they have a lot of plans for it's future other than tweaking a few things here and there. I'm not on any inside loop about their plans, I could be dead wrong, but Daz Studio presses forward while Poser stagnates. I really, honestly never thought I'd be saying these things and honestly, it hurts.

Davo

I used to use Poser exclusively (Again, like Davo from way back with posette.).  Then, I began to see this Daz Studio thing take shape and release after release it got better and better and it was free.  I bought 4 or 5 upgrades to poser and I decided to stop when I kept seeing the price comparisons and decided it was just way to much for me to continue to afford. 

 

If she's a sinking ship, I'm sorry to hear it because I know I really liked it back when I was using it and I feel bad for those who liked it and wont be able to get newer versions. 

 

For my part, I decided to take the plunge and learn Daz Studio and im so glad I took the time to do it.  It gives me pretty much everything I want out of these types of programs and the basic program is free.  Realistically, when I saw they were offering it free I figured Poser was living on borrowed time.  Over the years, I have spent a shit load on stuff to use from a variety of different companies and especially the last couple years where daz introduced the ability to conform older outfits to newer figures I was floored and never looked back... I dont know if poser has something similar or if/when it occurred as compared to studio, but when it did I really had no more reason to do poser at all.  Now it sits on my hard drive taking up space in case I want to use some of my old resources in studio.

 

The only problem I have in Studio is learning how to make more complex animations (like people having sex, etc).  I wish there was a really good tutorial showing an actual scene being created. It would be a huge help...but there you have it.

I started with "Poser 3" when it was owned by MetaCreations. Back then MetaCreations also owned Bryce and RayDream (RayDream later become Carrara). At the time I naively hoped MetaCreations would integrate these three software packages, but it wasn't to be. Then Poser was sold and I really started to fear that Poser was on its way out. For a while I held out some hope when Curious labs took over Poser, but then it ended up being sold again and development on it seemed to cease. Then, I believe, to impart protect their content creation business , DAZ3D (formerly Zygote) developed DAZ Studio, which I think was pretty much the proverbial nail in Poser's coffin. Then the current owner acquired Poser and there was some hope on the horizon for Poser. So, I don't think Poser is dead yet, but I do think its continued existence is precarious despite the size of its user base. Poser's development has been ignored for so long that I don't know if it will ever catch up to DAZ Studio

Although I started with Poser, I used to use both Poser and DAZ Studio, but stopped using Poser around version 10 or 11, and switched over to only using DAZ Studio. I'm one of those weirdos who prefers DAZ Studio over Poser. I was never a big user of Poser to begin with, because it simply wouldn't do the things I wanted to do. I used Poser as a digital replacement for artist's mannequins as originally intended, but anything beyond that was just too difficult at the time.

My one gripe with DAZ Studio has always been the lack of a detailed User Manual. There is a lot of utility hidden in Studio which would have remained hidden if it wasn't for the growth of tutorial videos on YouTube.

Thanks Matt. I knew I forgot one or two owners, but couldn't remember the names. I suppose I should have mentioned something to that effect. Jeezu, it was discouraging how many times Poser changed hands!

That is true, and I miss painfully a morph Brush, like Poser's in DAZ Studio. 
Aside from all that I am so done with Poser. In fact, I sometimes still use it for splitting morph targets into left and right. It is so much easier in Poser.