Hello there! I need help in making a decision. Can you help me out? I currently use Poser 6, but am dissatisfied with its rendering capabilities. I want to purchase software with a superior render engine (including radiosity and global illumination) to render my Poser-assembled scenes with. Some of the scenes will be indoor, some outdoor. I don't need any modelling capabilities neither do I need foliage, sky, water or landscape generation tools. I am never going to animate anything. I have a 2.8GHz PC with 2 Gigabytes of RAM (not a MAC). Regarding the export of Poser models: the less painful, the better. I do not have the patience to re-rig OBJ's into the new software program. Professional quality toon rendering would be a plus, but not mandatory. I have only four options: Vue 5 Infinite Carrara 5 Pro Maya 7 3D Studio Max 8 I can obtain only ONE of the four options above. Which would you advise me to purchase? My system requirements can handle any of them. Thank you.

Vue or Carrara are probably your best choices, as far as out-of-the-box Poser compatibility is concerned. According to the feature lists, Carrara will even read P6's external binary morphs.

The other two applications don't have built-in import for Poser files, but Reiss Studio sells hosting plugins which will add another $180 or so to your budget. The Maya plugin doesn't support P6's dynamic hair yet.

If you go out to Max you can get Final Toon plugin for your toon rendering. As LD mentioned, you also need a transport program to move things from Poser to Max. If Wolf comes along, and is so inclined, he'll tell you about Carrara, and others may also. They are on the upswing with Poser compatability. ::::: Opera :::::

If you go out to Max you can get Final Toon plugin for your toon rendering. There's also the Illustrate! plugin, and CartoonReyes. Don't know if they work with Max 8, though.

The best renders for Max and Maya are done in Brazil and vray anyway. Try Pov-ray. It's got radiosity and is within your budget.

I see you've come a long way with Poser's render engine, but your next step is a Loo-Loo! Max is where you are headed, but it's price tag is there for a reason, because with it you can acquire really high end Render Farms, and Networks, to do your actual rendering. Daz3D has a plugin to import Poser to Max, but i still wouldn't expect things to not get as much more intricate as Max is definately a Modeler's tool. Maya is the same deal. Vue is really nice because it imports Poser really easily, it renders faster/larger, and adds environmental aspects to your archives. It is also the only application your not buying to "Modeler" with. This is where your other listed applications get much of their price tag, though you say you'd prefer to stay away from that. Carrara is another option that will alter your render Power, but, as is the case with view or any other render engine foreign to Poser, masking between the applications will prove rather difficult. Your Poser learning curve lends toward Carrara. Carrara was owned/raised, in large part, by Metacreations. At that time they also owned Poser. Both applications were really introduced to the mainstream at this time. So, Carrara is really the closest relative to Poser.

How about downloading the demo versions (if available) and try them?

One issue with Vue you should be aware of is that it doesn't do polygon smoothing like Poser does, one of the reasons I dropped it in favor of LightWave.

LightWave 8.5 does all you want, and a whooole lot more.

Lightwave 8.5 (soon to be 9.0) and the Worley Labs plugins (G2 for skin shading, Fprime for speckle free ray-traced soft shadows, Sasquatch for dynamic hair) are a great combination for doing people renders. Lightwave 8.5 by itself doesn't do SSS (not sure whether LW9 will or not), so I highly recommend G2 to go with it. Greenbriarstudios has Poser import plugins for Maya, C4D, and Lightwave, although I haven't tried them yet. Also, LW64 will let you load up multiple characters in complex scenes (Neither Maya nor 3DS MAx 8 support 64bit computing yet!) Whatever way you go, make sure it's 64bit!

" Lightwave 8.5 (soon to be 9.0) and the Worley Labs plugins (G2 for skin shading, Fprime for speckle free ray-traced soft shadows, Sasquatch for dynamic hair) are a great combination for doing people renders. Lightwave 8.5 by itself doesn't do SSS (not sure whether LW9 will or not), so I highly recommend G2 to go with it. Greenbriarstudios has Poser import plugins for Maya, C4D, and Lightwave, although I haven't tried them yet. Also, LW64 will let you load up multiple characters in complex scenes (Neither Maya nor 3DS MAx 8 support 64bit computing yet!) Whatever way you go, make sure it's 64bit!<<<<" here's the bottomline: you sound like me you Demand DIRECT support of the poser pz3 format as in. make my scene in poser& save open my other program file import/open and get the poser scene with textures props hair all intact. your only real option for this is VUE or carrara pro and possibly "mojoworld' DO NOT buy lightwave maya or max just to import poser scenes via some tenuous third party plugin!! Why?? within 18 months a new version or point release of these other programs will be out and you will get the update either free or for little money and suddenly "greenbriar' "riess" studio" et als plugins will be broken. and you will have to stick with your OLD version of LW,cinema4D, your OLD version of MAX /MAYA and hope and pray the thes third party providers will "eventually" update the poser import plugin so you can import poser files DIRECTLY AGAIN!! I went through years of frustration after Curious labs released a poser import plugin with the propack for Cinem4DXL 7.3 and then abandoned any further releases as Maxon released newer version of Cinema4D that DID NOT work with my poser import plugin so i was stuck booting over into MAC OS9(UUGGHH!!) just to run my OLD version Of C4D to render poser scenes. Carrara pro offers DIRECTposer(PZ3) import as a standard PROGRAM FEATURE. so does vue in two years when the next cool version of Carrara or Vue arrive sthe question of DIRECT poser support will be Moot ...it will be there. who in creation knows where greenball and rice patty will be doing to support what ever version of LW/MAX/MAY etcis out in two years Cut out the middleman

Max $3,500, Body Studio $180 , Vray $799 If you can afford it, you won't be sorry. The work flow is easy and the renderings are superb. It will give you a lot of flexibility for the future.

"I don't need any modelling capabilities neither do I need foliage, sky, water or landscape generation tools. I am never going to animate anything. I have a 2.8GHz PC with 2 Gigabytes of RAM (not a MAC). Regarding the export of Poser models: the less painful, the better. I do not have the patience to re-rig OBJ's into the new software program." " Max $3,500, Body Studio $180 , Vray $799 If you can afford it, you won't be sorry. The work flow is easy and the renderings are superb. It will give you a lot of flexibility for the future." $4479 USD??? .....just to render indoor STILLS of poser people/props?? I just love these threads!!

Lightwave and Vue seem to play very nice together. Worth checking out. You'd get the ease of Poser import from Vue, plus the rendering capabilities (and other nice stuff) from Lightwave. About 5 times cheaper than that Max setup jeffg3 proposes, and equally powerful for your purposes.

"$4479 USD??? ....." Hey, at least I'm upfront about the cost. That $4479 will put you in the cat bird seat as far as rendering goes - a wise investment (if, as I said, you can afford it.) Come to think of it, you could cut VRay and use Max's Mental Ray - saving $800. The battle of the 3d apps is over. Max has won (this from a long time Maya/Power Animator) user.

Wolf and others....how do Vue and Carrara fare with regard to toon render DaQuestioner is looking for? Vue does not have a shader room, i belive, in which to employ toon shaders, and Max has plugins for it. ::::: Opera :::::

Vue does have a "shader room." It doesn't have nice toon shaders out of the box, but it should be possible to create some using the function editor. agiel has already done so AFAIK.

Do Poser shaders pass over into Vue? Such as the toon shaders you can make or buy for Poser from Crescent and Olivier?

Alas, they do not. Vue only imports basic settings, such as texture maps and transparency maps. Nothing from the material room. Which is not surprising. There is no one to one correspondence between the P5/6 shader nodes and the functions and filters in the Vue function editor. It would be nice if e-on came up with something that would be a decent approximation of the Poser shader nodes, but they haven't done so (yet?).

What about render farm abilites for Vue and Carrara with regard to massive single-frame images? Do they support multiple CPUs rendering the same frame? (would also like to know about Carrara's render farm solution for animation. I know VUE has render farm, although with issues.) ::::: Opera :::::

Vue can tile an image and have the tiles rendered by different rendercows. There are some limits, however. If a scene is too complex to be rendered to screen, it can't be farmed - ran into that issue far too often to my taste. Now I do my rendering on a dedicated Athlon64 4400x2. I do not know about Carrara.

For what your needs are currently, I would agree with the others saying Carrara 5 is your best bet.

Attached Link: posers native toon renderer

*" Hey, at least I'm upfront about the cost. That $4479 will put you in the cat bird seat as far as rendering goes - a wise investment (if, as I said, you can afford it.)"* I dont Doubt that MAX/Vray etc. is a good high end PRO level CG suite But as typical of these threads you here evangelising **YOUR** personal Dream render Set up While totally ignoring what the guy says he wants to accomplish So far the only thing missing from this discussion is that person, whom i wont name, telling use we dont need other renderers at all and we should learn to tweak,massage,optimize our scenes and render in sections in "firefly "and paste together in post BLAH BLAH BLAH DaQuestioner wants a fairly simple alternative to posers Slow firefly render engine to render stills of poser figures . I am with him on this as far as i cna tell he is not looking to re render the defense of "Helms deep " from Peter jacksons "Lord of the rings" :-) Opera: Honestly im NOT very impressed with Carraras native toon renderer And frankly this is one the the areas where I think poser is actaully underrated (SEE link) but carrara comes with five network render node liscenes for you own little render farm and has true HDRI/GI,has batch render of scenes on a single seat you can have MUTIPLE scene files open at once it has FBX so i can exchange scenes between Carraa LW/MAX/MAYA CinemaD4 and is easy to use and is faster than fire fly will ever be poser shaders?? frankly if its that important to you to have Faceoffs python skin shaders in every scene than stick with poser and deal with firefly. as an animator I dont have as much a need for Sub surface scattering and i already have TRUE subsurface scattering in the advanced render of my Cinema4D 9.2 studio bundle where I use the **FREE** interposer plugin to bring in propely textured poser scenes from exported object files

so the $549 MSR includes a 5-node render farm. Well, if not poser shaders per se, something to place granite displacement on skin, for realsitic closeups. The lack of import of those shaders might not be a deal killer. Thanks for the info. Wait....did they just drop the price? I thought it was $549 or so. On their site today they say: Carrara 5 Now Shipping The highly-affordable new Carrara 5 lavishes speed and power that enables users to create more freely and deliver high-caliber results under even the tightest deadlines. Full from : US$ 249 ::::: Opera :::::

Wolf, nice clip! Since you are linking to illustrate Poser tune render...what is your workflow? Is it OpenGL render of preview? Firefly render with toon lines checked so they get added at the end? Toon shaders in the material room? ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_5_easel/

Well, I'm a 3dsMax user myself, and as I mentioned in your thread over in the Max forum, I would suggest NOT getting it, and this is why:

"I don't need any modelling capabilities neither do I need foliage, sky, water or landscape generation tools. I am never going to animate anything."

If all you want is some better/faster rendering for still images, then I'd recommend something like Vue Easel ($89), which does have true GI, and static Poser import. No animation tools, no modelling tools, etc.

For what you want, spending even $200-$500 on Vue Infinite or Carrara 5 Pro is just a shameful waste of money. You won't be using even 1/3 of the features in either of those apps, let alone something like 3dsmax or Maya, where 90% of the features will sit there wasted.

Message edited on: 01/14/2006 11:04

Attached Link: perky ones!!

@ Opera :I still use Carrar4 4pro but C5 has real subsurface scattering and an excellent procedural shader system

that toon clip was rendered out of poser5 over a year ago with
"current preview settings" checked about 3 seconds per frame no tedious"firefly" nonsense

heres a recent test clip out of Carrara Pro4 with poser cloth simulation that averaged about 14 seconds per frame
MAXX Excellent point!!

Message edited on: 01/14/2006 11:23

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Mattb

I pose in Poser 6 export as .obj and import into Lightwave without any problems at all. There are a few examples in my gallery. And I think Newtek still has a Lightwave/Vue 5 infinite deal going on.

Matt

There is always PoseRay + POVRay. With the advantage that it's free, and the disadvantage that it is NOT easy. But POVRay is an impressive render engine.

i render my poser stuff in either vue or carrara. carrara looks more real and is easier to do tooning if needed so i will probably use it more but i only just got it last week. this is a carrara render of v3. love esther

also carrara5pro but using toonpro plugin then postwork photoshop i don't do modelling - i jut bought carrara cause i like its renders

" But as typical of these threads you here evangelising YOUR personal Dream render Set up While totally ignoring what the guy says he wants to accomplish...," They guy LISTED Max as an option. It isn't my "dream render" set up. It is the production setup I use day in and day out. AS I STATED, "if he can afford it", Max is the best choice because of the flexibility it offers. While Carrara and Vue can, in the right hands, produce acceptable results - they are both to some degree dead-ends. The latest and greatest rendering technology will almost always be Max-compatible first.

DaQuestioner have you considered Shade? It has a better rendering engine & comes with Poser import built in as the PoserFusion plugin Plus as a P6 owner you get a discount on sidegrading to Shade

Shade might be a good option, but I would strongly advise trying the demo first. Shade's UI is very unusual, but if you can get your head around it, it's a very capable program. I'm not trying to bash Shade in any way, but as someone who is able to use 95% of any new software without having to refer to the manual, I am completely unable to do anything in Shade without looking in the manual. The same is true of any software, though: always try a demo whenever possible. You may find the UI is easy to use, but maybe the software itself isn't powerful enough.