I've been using Poser for 5 years now, and while some aspects have improved much, it still retains some pretty unprofessional features. Now granted, I haven't used P6 yet, and I'm not sure what real changes it made over P5. I'm working with Liteluvr's cathedral (yes, still. it's awesome!) and it's got fairly large pieces. It takes me forEVER to get into view when I'm using some of the cameras there. Top camera? Left or Right camera? It takes me more time to get into view than it does to change the part itself! I'll click on the name of a certain piece (for instance, Floor Parent 1) and when I try to move it, the frigging thing re-selects some random part that happens to be near the "translate/pull" button. I only realize this after it's too late, because the name doesn't change until I'm done moving it. So I go to undo, and it only lets me do undo once. Once! What the hell? The hassle goes on and on. I can't move anything on a specific axis, I can't pan in on a particular joint without losing the whole object because it shifted so fast... Granted, I'm used to Lightwave, but I also use Vue, Bryce, and Cinema 4D, and even Vue's interface is a bazillion times better than Poser's. It just feels like I'm walking through mud with Poser, while I'm skating along with all the other programs I've got. I say this after years comparing Poser to these other apps. What would it take for the next real step for Poser? What would it take to make "Poser Infinite" or something of that nature? I HATE the interface. Simplicity is one thing, but lack of precision is something else entirely.

I'll click on the name of a certain piece (for instance, Floor Parent 1) and when I try to move it, the frigging thing re-selects some random part that happens to be near the "translate/pull" button... The hassle goes on and on. I can't move anything on a specific axis... I know it's not what you asked, but both of these problems can be solved by using the parameter dials rather than the mouse pointer to click and drag. OR if you want to drag a specific part that you have selected, hold down the shift key while moving it with the mouse; this ensures that the part stays selected. To move something on a specific axis, use the parameter dials for Trans X, Trans Y and Trans Z. (You will also find Rotate X, Y and Z in there.) Using the parameter dials makes posing and creating scenes very much easier, especially when you're in a big scene and your display becomes sluggish. Hope that helps alleviate some of your more frustrating problems. Karen :-)

That does help a little, but with this particular model, I can't even see the piece I'm moving. I just know the name. I'll try the shift thing. Thanks! What else? What would you change if you could program Poser?

definitely needs improvement on navigation controls. would be a great help if i could just navigate a poser scene by clicking around the viewport with my mouse instead of using navigation thingies at the side.. takes ages to position a camera in a tight scene in poser :( the undo thing doesnt really bother me much.. but would be nice if there was an option to undo more than once.

To be honest I really do rate Poser as a potentially pro tool with the arrival of 6. Yes, I know the interface is well, a pain at times, but Ive kinda got used to it after working with the prog since version 2. And I have worked professionally in that time as a 3D character artist along with using MAX and Lightwave too. My advice would definitely be to go for version 6... the lighting is awesome now!! I got the free copy of Shade 7 with version 6, but havent bothered using it as I`m well pleased with my Poser renders using AO and IBL. Poser Infinite... good title! a MAX-like interface would be enough ;-)

To answer the topic subject directly - a sizable enough professional userbase willing to pay the price! ;) Qualifications: Let's face it, most Poser users wouldn't be willing or cannot afford to pay $799 or $999 for a Poser Pro (not ProPack). And it is apparent that CL doesn't think that there is enough demand for such a product to warrant the investment required. Your valid complaints about Poser are why I use Cinema4D, Vue, Bryce, anything with more features, better rendering capabilities, and faster workflow/response. To the direct point about views and cameras: There is no way in Poser to center the display on a particular object group, object, body part, or area thereof except by maybe temporarily setting PointAt with the camera. At least, I have not read or found one. I have found myself scrolling around trying to find my lost object in the viewport too often. The cameras' lack of visual feedback about focal and their relation to the viewport/scene are aggravating. Multiselection, as in Cinema4D where only shared dials/channels (analogously) are displayed, would go such a far way to improve workflow that I think the suggestion should be emphatically made as a feature to be added in Poser 7! My understanding of user-desired feature/fix/change requests and CL implementation is this: * Add/fix/change one or two requests (with the exception of outright bugs fixed in SRs - this is a standard necessity). * Add a slew of new features noone really asked for or that should have a much lower precedence than other features of which many seem to be easier or minor to implement. For example, after what appears to be many, many years of requesting multiple undos, there is still only one undo level. I think the only other Windows application with only 1 undo is NotePad! ;) And I agree completely: the interface actually causes the sluggishness in workflow. Those damned 'dials' must go! An entry box with arrows seems to work well in every other application. Also, one should be able to access EVERYTHING in the Parameters Window instead of having to select the figure with that stupid drop-down on the View and then change, and select the next figure in that drop-down and then change. When working with dozens of figures (clothing, figure hair, etc.), it becomes annoying. I must agree with karen1573, though. The direct manipulation features should be used seldomly. Dials, although damned', are more reliable. I'll stop there as this could go on forever. There seem to be obvious changes to Poser that would alleviate much sluggishness and seem more common sensical. Why they still remain is the mystery.

i love Poser for the people. I just don't have the time to model the characters i use. But it would be so uch faster to be able to place cameras easier. The renders actually look really good if you take the time for better settings. Getting something in the frame you want to render, THAT's the hard part.

"What would it take to make Poser a "Professional" application?" It can be a professional application as it is right now (aside from the memory issue in P6, which will be resolved soon I hope), but it all depends on what profession you're talking about. For just about anything to do with stills, Poser can already be used professionally (there's lots of people using it for commercial works dealing with still images). For animation/video, it's not quite there yet. It's fine for general animation use, but when you get into things like complex feature-film animations, FX, and high-end CG compositing, it falls VERY short. In fact, it barely takes off at all. Even P6, with it's new "shadowcatcher" and great lighting/shading features doesn't help this. Some features that would help Poser find it's way to more professional use, without the need to export to other apps/renderers might be: * Extensive G-Buffer/multi-pass output, for higher levels of control over video post-processing and compositing. The shadow-only renderer is a step in the right direction, but far from ideal. * Multiple and configurable levels of undo (already mentioned time after time), because no professional is going to trust their paid works to an app that is so unforgiving to error. * Deeper rigging and animation controls, because animators can't really spend the rest of eternity fixing bad joints/bends in animation after the fact. * Resolve shadow map flicker without the need to rescale the scene. This is a devistating problem even in P6 where shadow maps (regardless of resolution) tend to produce flicker in certain close-up animations. Raytrace shadows solve this, but at the expense of much longer render times. Which brings me to... * Native network rendering capability.

I'd agree with most of what's been said about the details of the workflow.

FWIW, I think what P6 does is superb. One boost in the 'professional' direction would have been to lose the MetaUI look, and to introduce something more conventional. By this I mean standard toolbars top and left, palattes or panels on the right, and the viewport taking up the rest of the space.

With minor variations, this is the default layout shared by 3DS, Maya, Vue, and others - even DAZ|Studio (XSI is a slightly different animal, but not by much).

Right at the start of the P6 threads, one or two people regretted the opportunity lost in not doing this, and I think they were right.

You can still have eye-candy in your interface if you want, and you can still have it completely customisable - but the 'out of the box' look becomes more professional.

At the moment, Poser's UI reminds me of the old car bumper sticker - 'This program has hidden power, but I'm damned if I can find it!'

"would be a great help if i could just navigate a poser scene by clicking around the viewport with my mouse instead of using navigation thingies at the side.." Have you ever tried keyboard shortcuts? If you hold certain keys while clicking and dragging with the left mouse button, you can change your view: alt + mouse: rotate space + mouse: translate command + space + mouse: zoom (command key is the control key in Windows) For moving objects in the scene, I like the direct manipulation tool.

stewer, allow me to worship you in thanks!.. i never knew those keyboard shortcuts lol

Please, poser with max interface, no thanks. I think poser has a nice, easy to learn interface now, perhaps not easy to move objects with the mouse in the screen, but the dials are fantastic. One thing we can be thankfully to metacreations is their applications interfaces. The render now in Poser 6 is wonderfull, it is as good as any other application(yes I know not as good, but almost) I think Curious labs has choosen the right way for Poser. I think the hair tool and the cloth tool can be improved, now they are better than some plugins for max for cloth and hair creation. And why not, making some changes to these tools they can add to poser some "nature world makeing tools", the hair tool can make grass and many things like that, the can cahge the cloth tool in some way it can make terrains, liquids ... It would be fantastic to get in poser the tools we have in Poser 6(improved) and some other tools to make natural stages for the characters without to go to other application like bryce, vue...

-A complete overhaul of the interface and its options, prefereably with complete adaptation to personal preference. -Absolutely necessary is a window/manager on which you get a list of everything you have used in your scene and you can reselect by clicking on the object, be it a prop, a character or a light or whatever. -A second window/manager that, when selecting any object as said above, displays the properties of that selected object and allows modifying them al. -Multiple undo and redo, of ALL things, even better: a history in which you can go back to the step you like. -A toolbar that has icons for all cameras, ik on or off (four buttons),... -rock-stability -support for Hyperthreading, multiple processors and dualcores -better joints support (soft bodies, hard bodies, collision detection) -tools for doing morphing inside poser as the magnet tool is far from acceptable -etcetc and last but not least: a complete recoding that makes the "pro" version something more than a maintainance upgrade with some added options. This said: it's by far the best in its price range and, unluckily perhaps, there is no real alternative that can match it. But, even with photomaps, it is not able to give real realism due to the horrendous joints. No billion-polied Vicky 9 can do something about that.

I'm not sure that the Paint Brush or Pencil are truly "professional applications". Too much manual dexterity required for serious artists.

Exports that aren't microscopic. Surface Sub Divisions. Weights and more flexiable falloff zones in rigging.

Better rigging, soft and rigid body dynamics, more graceful interface, more stability. It's probably good enough for "proffessional" stills right now, but not even close for animation.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2232821

All they really need is for Poser to work well with other applications like Maya, C4D, etc.--most 3D professionals rely on multiple applications to utilize what each does best, whether it's modeling, rendering, hair, cloth etc. If CL wanted to get serious, they'd concentrate on what Poser does best--character creation--and let people use it with their applications of choice. Poser is never going to have as good lighting, rendering, modeling etc. as the higher-end apps, and shouldn't try.

Yes tvining, the problem for a thing like that is find money to buy maya c4d.- If price of Poser (next version) is around now, CL can make they want.

I think alot of people dont take it as a serious/professional application because the interface looks like a video game. Bring it closer to "standardized" look. As far as functional, it needs to have a much greater user customizable interface.

Dan, yes! Give the user a little control of the export scaling, please! Especially BVH where our only choices are "Do not scale" or "FUBARFAOA". I thought about the undo issue last night before bed. What is the problem here. Conceptually, moving from a single undo-level to multi-level undos is very simple. IOW, if you can do one undo, supporting more than one undo is the straight forward addition of a stack (one of the most basic programming structures around). This made me consider why they have avoided it for over a decade! The answer might be that the current undo implementation is so amazingly horrid that noone dare touch the code to fix it (in order to properly implement an undo stack). Adding the variety of undos that users would like might not be simple, but extending the number of currently available undos should be able to be done in a week. I take it that they'd need to destroy the codebase in order to do it otherwise. And that bolsters my suspicions. Under these conditions, then, it may be time to get some real programmers who have not so much vested interest to tear this heap of archaic muck into little pieces and reconstruct it. Otherwise, sorrily to say, Poser 99999 will still have that one undo... LOL ... pathetic...

Please read http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=108412&page=1&pp=15 (92pages at the moment) before creating a new character. Having better joints is not working if the mesh isn't created for them.

The interface looks a videogame?, more standar interface? Like max?, you must spend hours and hours to make the program work.... Why not use dos os mode, windows look like a videogame.....

"Bring it closer to "standardized" look." And that would be?

The programmers have told us before. Multiple Undo's is a major problem. If it was easy. They would have already added it. I personally hate the pro packages for animation. Their bones systems are a nightmare to work with. Poser's system is quick and easy. I can rip out a custom figure and make animations in minutes. The big boys can't compete with Posers simplicity. We do have a lifes to live ya know. ;-) Larry's reason for creating Poser was based on the overly complicated rigging systems in other programs. And he succeeded. It would be nice if they kept it the way it is. And just added more tools to it like weight mapping and better F-curve pallets. The body parts need to be displayed all the time and not hidden behind a dropdown arrow. Can you say "Carpel Tunnel"? If Poser adopts the traditional style of bones with all of their ugly wire cages surround the model BS. I'll drop it altogether. The bones system is Posers true stand out feature. It's easy to use and only needs a few more upgrades to make it even better. -ScottA

Um, a $3,000 price tag?

"Bring it closer to "standardized" look." >And that would be? Toolbars that look and act similar to toolbars of the majority of windows based aplications. Toolbars with title bars that can be grabbed, docked and customized. When you close the toolbar, it goes away...completely. When you drag a toolbar over your document window, it actually stays on top of the document window. That whole Pose/material/face etc area is wasted space, i dont transition between the rooms enought to justify that much workspace expended on those tabs. I cant put my toolbar on top of the tabs because the tabs override the tools. I think the zoom tools could use a horizontal setup.

Funny thing is, Poser already has a great selection tool: the hierarchy editor. I'd love to see a few little changes there: - hierarchy window dockable (preferably left or right side of the screen, like in DAZ|Studio and Vue) - hierarchy window should show up collapsed by default, not expanded. If you have many figures/props in your scene, finding the right item in the hierarchy takes quite a few clicks and scrolls. And some other wishes: - parameter dial window dockable(preferably left or right side of the screen) - change the appearance of the dials to standard numerical textboxes with spinners. They take up less space, and both MacOS and Windows provide them straight out of the OS - efficient code plus standard behavior. - hierarchical library view, using less screen real estate. Vue does it exactly right. I KNOW that a library is a library, I don't need that damned folder icon! But I'd like to keep visual representations of figures, props and poses. - Layers like in Vue, or another ability to show, hide or lock entire groups of figures, props and lights. And the collision detection mechanism needs a BIG overhaul. It's so slow that it's unworkable, even on a high end PC or Mac. It's not reliable either, about half of the time I can pull an object through another object with collisions enabled.

• change the appearance of the dials to standard numerical textboxes with spinners. They take up less space, and both MacOS and Windows provide them straight out of the OS - efficient code plus standard behavior. I'm not sure which, if any, other programs do this but in PaintShopPro you can click in the text box and roll your scroll wheel to change the value. That would be awesome in Poser.

Hmm..Did you do a work of art in Poser? Did you get paid for it? If the answers to 1 and 2 are 'yes', then congratulations! you have a Professional package!.;)
To be honest, it's mainly attitude. I'm sure some people could do 'professional' work with MS-Paint..;) For some of those 'other' web sites..the only thing that would convince them would be if the name 'Poser' was retired, and a commensurate multi-hundred dollar price tag attached..;)

ScottA said: The programmers have told us before. Multiple Undo's is a major problem. If it was easy. They would have already added it. Did they specify the reason? As I said, the only conceptual reason not to extend an already existing single undo to multiples is in its implementation. If it is strewn willy-nilly throughout the code (which is my suspicion) that would make it a task. Otherwise, the extension to multiples is not a major problem. If it is strewn throughout, they could carefully start replacing it with a central call that does the same thing and eventually end up with a system that would allow multiple undo implementation. But at version 6.0, it doesn't look as if they've even touched a quarter of the original codebase... pakled: I don't think anyone is inferring that one cannot do 'professional work' with Poser. It is just that it lacks, and I think this is agreed upon, many workflow features that would make it work more like a professional application. My analogy: Could you write a commercial book with NotePad? Did you get paid for it? If the answers to 1 and 2 are 'yes', then congratulations! you have a Professional package! Notepad... professional...think about that and carefully consider the point made. (And, yes, you could write a book using Notepad!)

I can't remember exactly what the specific problem is Kuro. They told us a long time ago. I think it was when we were beta testing the propack.

What I love about Poser is the ease of character creation and aniation. I can animate in Poser more easily than with any other application I've ever used. What I hate are the view ports. For example, in Lightwave (and most other apps) i have three buttons on the top right corner of any viewport. These let me zoom in, pan around, rotate, whatever, but more importantly, i can choose an object and make that object the center of my viewport. That means if I lose the object, I don't have to pan WAAAYYYY out just to find it again. Poser has real potential, and could be a majorly useful application. I mean, the renders aren't bad at all. The strand-based hair really sucks (sorry, I've never seen any that looked good) but the dynamics are great for clothes. With some soft body dynamics for boobs and such, some hard body dynamics for collisions, and either a particle system or particle effects, there would be a huge market demand for Poser. Sure, people have made some money with it already. But how many feature films use it to render? People (like myself) export the figures into programs with more depth and render there.

ScottA; The multiple undo issue was a matter of memory consumption. With the way Poser handles content at the current time, you would essentially have to hold a complete, indexed copy of the pz3 file in either main memory, or a specially sequestered swap file if you were willing to wait out the load times. Three Vickies (obj, cr2, morphs, and textures) are potentially a lot of megabytes. And since Poser doesn't know what an 'instance' is, the undo would have to be a complete save. You get three or four saves like that, and you could easily bottom out a system with 512 megs. I doubt that any genuine large studio will ever use Poser for an Incredibles or FFTSI (pre-vis a different matter altogether) but it is getting closer to being the ideal tool for the 'weekend warrior' to take a serious stab at it. When it comes down to nitty and gritty, the real trouble is getting people over the 'But I don't WAAAAAAAAANAAAAA!!' stage of growth. I've begun to suspect that a lot of the continued vitriol aimed at P5 was also a distancing technique; not from the buggy piece of crap, but from that scary cloth and hair room. But both are starting to catch on, and people are finding out it is truly Poser. Little documentation, lots of experiementation, and some fascinating capabilities that aren't in any book. It's very possible that the community is going to split soon, and those who think P4 is 'good enough' will do their own thing, and the rest of us will hammer at the latest.

richardnovak77; Have you checked out WierdJuice Software's Metaform? It's not Particle Illusion, but you can do some incredible metablob effects with that little Python gem.

Now, the obvious response question, Dale, is this: Why? What program, in the right minds of any programmers, needs to store a complete scene/document/data set for every change in order to perform an undo? No person without a Python script doing so could possibly change that much information in a scene in one click. Even loading a fully morph-injected V3 wearing twenty layers of clothing figures and magnets with props should only produce a small data set that says: "CR2 so and so was loaded" in an undo stack. So it sounds like the core structuring of Poser is completely horrid and uncondusive to undos. Restructure (as was promised in 5). Restructure. Restructure. Restructure. When code sucks, change it.

No, I must contest one point: Material Room Cloth Room Face Room Hair Room IBL lighting AO These are not 'truly Poser'. They are truly third party creations welded into place to work with Poser. Half of this comes directly from Pixels3D! The Face Room from a university software. In other words - 'some fascinating capabilities' that weren't even programmed by CL programmers, but by some other good, really good programmers who were paid money so that CL would look good. Removing these features from Poser and what do you have? Poser 4 ProPack.

I think 7 is supposed to have NEW code so multiple undos 'could' be doable.

Great thread, IMHO. Thanx, richardnovak77.

"Funny thing is, Poser already has a great selection tool: the hierarchy editor. I'd love to see a few little changes there:

• hierarchy window dockable (preferably left or right side of the screen, like in DAZ|Studio and Vue)
• hierarchy window should show up collapsed by default, not expanded. If you have many figures/props in your scene, finding the right item in the hierarchy takes quite a few clicks and scrolls." svdl

Excellent point!!! I would love a better hiearchy editor, how long since it's been improved, before P4?

"'Bring it closer to "standardized" look.'" And that would be?" blaufeld
It wouldn't have to imitate the interface of 3D app. Why not a Photoshop-like interface? It's clean, efficient, and probably 90+% of "professional" graphic-software users are very familiar with it.

Get rid of the whole concept of "Libraries" and replace it with an efficient file-selection process. "Poses" "props" etc are just file formats. Photoshop manages to allow you to

open and save lots of different file formats without using up a large chunk of available screen space like the "libraries" do.

"And I agree completely: the interface actually causes the sluggishness in workflow..." kuroyume0161

"You can still have eye-candy in your interface if you want..." steerpike

I say ditch the cutesy/meta/oldMac-ish GUI crap. It's like trying to fly a plane with sticky candy-Apples [pun intended] as knobs on the controls.

Re the multiple undos:
"The multiple undo issue was a matter of memory consumption." Dale B

"Why? What program, in the right minds of any programmers, needs to store a complete scene/document/data set for every change in order to perform an undo?" kuroyume0161

I can see both sides on this. While it might not be necessary to store multiple complete pz3 data images in memory, the biggest single prob with Poser seems to be the memory hogging (everthing I else I had worked passably well when I had half a gig of RAM, I got 2 gig just for Poser). Hard to imagine how multiple undos could do anything but make that problem a lot worse.

A sterile interface like CAD/CAM programs and about $12,000 for the program and $1000 for each plug-in and feature (so that it costs $30,000 to get to the same functionality)... oh, and an 18-month class (at another $3,000) to learn how to use the application! Nothing pre-built... no supplied or available content: you want it, you build it from scratch. THEN you'd be talking professional!!! It took 9 months to build the shader for Andy's hair in Toy Story... and it still looked like plastic, but the SGI rig and the high-end programs made the artist a professional. I'm not kidding. The bill for the single shader alone was NINE months, and the artist probably charged $150/hour because he was professional. (He could have done the shader in DKB/POV, and spent less than a week tweaking it to get a better result, but that is freeware, so he wouldn't have been professional.) Carolly

Qualien, yes, I see that there are actually two issues concerning undos which depend on the undo type. As someone mentioned, dial twiddling costs one real value (4 bytes of memory). You should be able to store thousands of undos for anything that can be encapsulated as a dial change (whether in the Parameters window or via direct manipulation). I think that this form of multiple undo would satisfy most of us for some time. 4-bytes * 10,000 undos = 40,000 bytes (40KB). That is practically throw away storage. You could do this, literally, on the Program Stack! Of course, some reference (what changed on what) will be needed. But that could be done simply as [internalName][figureNumber][channel][real value]. At worst, that might incur, let's say 1024 bytes. So divide 10,000 undos by 1024. You still have room for ~10 undos. In 40KB of memory! But for some reason, the programmers at CL can't even do this! I would sell the code and go into flower arranging if it's THAT bad... :)

Lightwave and vue have interfaces I dislike in the extreme -- so does photoshop. There is no answer to the interface issue that will please everyone. none. Those interfaces are not options for me. In short, they suck (tis an opinion, as any thoughts of design on interaface are, since it is an aesthetic issue regardless). To make it a professional application? why, professional users. And it has them already.

It seems like a lot of people are hung up on a term Professional. Professional has nothing to do with the amount you pay for a program, the classes you take, or the money you get paid for using an app. Take a look at V5 Infinite. They were going to call it professional, but let's not get hung up on names. We're talking about a program that's got some great radiosity, renders relaively quickly, seems stable, makes amazing use of instancing, integrates with other 3D apps, and costs $600.00, not $3000.00 plus classes. The workflow is ok (not the fastest, but not as muddled as Poser is). The point is, it's not the app, it's the artist that makes great works of art, HOWEVER, the app is the artist's tool, and if you have a styrofoam hammer, it might get the job done eventually, but there are better tools available. There's more to an app than price. Wings 3D is free, I believe. Blender was too, at least it used to be. What makes something professional is the results you acheive with it, and the efficiency of getting there. I can make a Poser render that looks like a photo, but if I can do the same thing with Lightwave in 1/10 the time, which is the professional app? (That's why I use Poser instead of Lightwave for 3D people, but still render in Lightwave.)

Poser is not at the professionnal level yet, the integration of the different modules ( cloth room etc...) is still not solid. The interface is left over from the day when Kai Krause was all the rage, it is a complete pain to work with for precise work. What makes (for me at least) a professionnal app is knowing you are consistently going to get predictable results without crashes, freezes etc... we are definitely not there yet. P6 is the only app I have ever had crash XP Pro to the point where I have to physically shut down the machine. Reflections are sometimes great sometimes full of artifacts with the same file. I think we want it to do everything, while for me I would be content if I could pose the character and animate it,and have access to professionnal quality export functions to other software for rendering. But at this stage CL still has some work to do to clean up the code. But for the price the range of functions although not always reliable is pretty impressive.

lol ;) -- the reason they are dealing in the semantics of it is the way the question is worded. Given your adjustment, the response I'll give is the same -- both of them. The use you just gave is the stated use for poser. That's it. That's all it is. That's the goal of the program designers. To be used as a tool for setting up human figures. everything else we've sorta added -- that is us, as in the users. Recognizing that, the makers adjusted some things and added additional features that would be useful for the purpose to which is is now used widely -- making nekkid vicky renders. Some people can create an incredible picture in Poser in an hour that takes them a month to do in Lightwave. The key and crucial difference is the approach to the prgram and using it with other programs. Knowing how to use your tool can make more difference than the capabilities of the tool. in other words, it is the user. Professional is a specific term meaning a person who has a profession. Anything they use would be a professional tool -- and most of them use a whole crapload of different tools to get the job done. A scalpel and pocketknife can both be professional tools in the hands of a skilled surgeon. Or bloody murder in someone elses...

Right, the moniker "Professional" is getting over used. My entire take has been leaning towards workflow and features - not whether or not the application can be awarded the vacuous title "Professional". :) A skilled surgeon, in an abnormal situation, can skillfuly use a pocket knife in place of a scalpel. But when in the surgical arena, he wants the best and most modern tools available to his profession (sorry about that). Correct? At the least, he wants the standard tools to which he has become accustomed and which are standardly used in all surgical operating rooms. Ah! But Poser is lacking these standard tools: multiple undos, for instance. My God, Jim! There are freeware 3D applications written by JimBob in his sparetime using an Atari that have this support!!!!!!! So, here we are in the surgical operating room with a chainsaw and a pocketknife. Doesn't something seem fishy? :)

In the surgical arena, he' take, use, and find new ways of using, the instruments and tools that the hospital's budget can provide. In this case, let's be frank: although we've got the new (used) liquid cooled MRI unit in the corner, it isn't hooked up fully. Doesn't mean we don't use it (although them older doctors hate the hum of it and bitch about how it only works some of the time), cause it is a good tool, and it doesn't mean we don't try to get the fancier, more costly tools. But until we have them, we learn to get the absolute most out of what we've got already. That's workin on a budget, though. Doesn't make one any less competent a doctor -- in fact, I'd argue the skills of adaptability and creativity honed in such a fashion will generally make for a better doctor who will look a things from different views first. Not everyone can work that way though.

"But Poser is lacking these standard tools: multiple undos, for instance. My God, Jim! There are freeware 3D applications written by JimBob in his sparetime using an Atari that have this support!!!!!!!" That, and shadow maps for point lights. I know of not one single 3D application, aside from P6, that have shadow maps, but can't use them on point lights. I think it's perfectly obvious to any sane individual with experience in 3D that Poser 7 needs to be rebuilt with modern code from the ground up. I love P6, but every upgrade since P4 just feels like they're patching holes in the same old tire. Time to buy new tires already, guys! ;-)

So, guys... go out and WRITE your own damned "professional" program if you can do it better, cheaper, in a fraction of the time it takes to arrange a bucket of daisies. Isn't that what they are doing at DAZ? How many YEARS (3+?), and how many programmers and how much has gotten farmed out overseas to other houses... and it still is in beta? And it still only does part of what Poser does? It has a "professional" Lightwave-styled interface, so you should be happy. If you aren't, just write your own app. That simple. Fresh start, no legacy code to worry about... you can probably get something ready for market in a few months. In the time you spend complaining and waiting for somebody else to fix the leaky roof, you could build a new house... with modern appliances... right? Right. I'll see you at Christmas. Carolly

Richard, If you already have Lightwave, why are you even bothering with Poser? If you want to render your movie inside of Poser, you will have to learn the dials and controls and to do things numerically. But with Lightwave, why aren't you building and rendering natively, since that is a professional application? If you don't like Poser, or its interface, don't use it. Go over to the Lightwave Forum and learn how to do character-rigging or whatever it is that you are using Poser for. And we aren't hung up on the word "professional". YOU used it, in quotes, provocatively, to make the point that Poser somehow is not a worthy application in its own right to those of us who really are professionals. Carolly

hauksdottir, that's what I'm doing, in a sense. I'm writing a Cinema 4D plugin that allows direct Poser content access. Oh, and it supports as many undos as needed through the SDK interface. :) You should also all check out David Matthews' Toolbox II (Greenbriar Studios). It is becoming sad when a small group or even a single programmer can build programs like Poser that surpass it in some ways. Eventually someone is going to have the SDK, programming language, tools, and whatnot to just make their own version while CL (or whoever owns it by then) is still flinching at this dinosaurian codebase.