I was concidering bying P7 (got all excited when I first read about it), but after reading through all the threads here, I see that they are pretty much only filled with bugs aso ...

Is there ANYTHING good about Poser7 ?

Does ANYONE have ANYTHING positive to say about P7?

sigh

Yes, I have something positive to mention:-
Poser 7 does not crash as frequently as Poser 6;
Poser 7 renders faster for me than Poser 6 does;
Poser 7 library is a bit more efficient to use than the Poser 6 one - but not by very much.  I still prefer using PRPC and Advance Library in combination to find and load my 3D content.

Note that usually people will post only when they find a problem, not when they are satisfied with a feature. So these threads you read here are not exactly a representation of P7's quality (or lack thereof) If anything the fact that since the release and thousands of people getting P7, there have only been a few threads about bugs (not all of which turned out to be actual bugs,) should be an encouraging sign for you.

If there were lots of major issues the board would be in flames by now.

Also, new versions of anything always have bugs, that can't be helped. As long as they fix them in service releases, it's all  good.

I am very very happy with P7, for me its faster (maybe smoother is a better word) and the new morphing tool is awesome, let me say why as i don't think its been mentioned, you can use the brush on a figure/clothing when its in the POSED position, so say you had poke through when posed but not at default its so much easier to fix......the app for me is great but this is like the icing on the cake........Steve

I've heard it's better than Poser5 & that's the best reason of all to get it or Poser6.

I posted nearly a dozen bugs yesterday, but I have to say that overall, in spite of the frustration level, I'm pleased witht the program's potential. For a newbie, P6 SR4 is a better investment, because buggy software is hard to learn and some of the bugs in P7 are world-class, such as the abberations in the effect of clicking the mouse. If you don't know what's supposed to happen, it's counter-educational.

P7 is much faster, and the new "Select" menu when you right click a stack of objects is a life-saver. Sydney kinda grows on you, and Simon is the best male figure yet. I'm glad to hear Steve endorse the new Morph Tool, because my experience with it was pretty frustrating, but I trust his judgment, so I'm looking forward to getting it to work as described. That in itself would be a reason to buy. No more Fisher Price joints when people sit down!

M

You know whats wierd, Poser 3,4,5 and 6 never crashed for me, they would do all sorts of wierd things like all the menus greyed out and others but P7 has had none of those BUT it crashed to the desktop once, couldn't make it do it again though ......M, Its like the one in Cinema 4D so maybe thats why i like it :o).........Steve

I love P7 so far. It renders so much faster then P6 and seems to run very smooth from other first issues of poser. I too have had the crashing to desktop but that seems to be a bug many have had to contend with and with hope is something EF has in the works to correct. Outside of the intermittent crashing to desktop I haven't had any major problems as yet.

I know what you mean about the threads. I felt the same way as you. I was waiting for my boxed version to arrive and thought to check and see what those who downloaded, thought of the new version.

I received and have been working with Poser 7 for a little over a week now, and the only crash that I had was when I tried loading a scene but did not have the figure installed yet (Teri) Other than that, I have not had any problems with the application. It does render faster especially if you have a Duo Core system or any other type of multiprocessor setup. I have played with P6 at a friends home and it was quite buggy. I wonder if the bugs are due to a person's system instead of the app. Before I received Poser, I decided to move my data to an external drive and start from scratch with the OS, needed apps, etc. I have not had any of the issues stated in most of the threads. I'm not saying that everyone should do the same for their systems, but perhaps a defrag may help. 

Well, I'm pretty satisfied with it. I've had P6 for a year, and SR3 was a godsend, but P7 is even better in regards to Firefly. I've only had it crash or disappear twice; once when I tried to rename a folder in the new Collections library, and another when my system over-reached it's VM.

Using Stewer's texture filtering script is great, since it sould only be used on selected items, otherwise your scene is blurry. I had a chance to play around with the new Morph Brush, and love it for clothes. Denser meshes, like faces is more difficult and will take time, but I nearly got the desired effects I wanted with the new brush than I ever did with magnets, and it's so easy to zero out, unlike the magnets, if you make a mistake. It didn't want to work on hr2's parented to a head, though. Need more time to play with it :)

The lights are easier to pose, and are not automatically set so far out of bounds as they use to be, but they seem a bit cranked up compared to P6 lights.

The Preview window is so much better, and closer to the actually textures now. I love it! Unfortunately, shadows and lughts still don't show properly (i.e. exactly as in preview) since those have to be rendered. Dial control seems to be more user friendly and exact. Works great with my Wacom tablet and pen :)

SR 1 should be out in January, so the first round of "bugs" should be fixed or somewhat addressed in that.

-- Jeff

I love Poser 7. Best Poser version so far. It renders much faster than P6 (which I LOVED also) and I've been able to render several scenes that Poser 6 just wouldn't even start rendering.

That and the new features are great. Steve mentioned the Morphing Tool, which is a nice new toy, and the HDRI capability is lovely. It's easier now to switch between several runtimes, you don't need to go all the way to the top level, andI like the Talk Designer which IMO yields better results than Mimic. (or at least it's easier to use)

And of course the multiple Undos is a Godsend!

Yes there is some bugs, the most annoying one is the delete key that sometimes just stops working at random - and sometimes starts working again. It seems to be a focus problem of some sort.

I've had ONE crash-to-desktop, I was in the Hair room and when I clicked "Show Populated", Poser went bye-bye. Thanksfully I'd saved not long before I did that.

All in all I would recommend P7 to anyone, without hesitations!

infinity10 and  TrekkieGrrrl, you both mention that Poser7 renders faster than Poser6.   I only installed Poser7 a few days ago and, so far, I have tried only to render a few things that Poser6 wouldn't (Poser7 doesn't either).   In your cases, does your hardware have features which Poser7 can exploit, but Poser6 couldn't, or is the improvement all in the software?   I'm interested, because my PC is making occasional ominous "I'm heading-west" noises.   If I'm going to have to replace it eventually, or sooner, I'd like to make the new box capable of using whatever functions Poser7 allows. 

Poser 7 rendering can take advantage of multiple processors (HT, Dual cpus, Dual (or possible Quad) core).  But I've heard that the rendering has been optimized generally as well - no testing on my end.

Trekkiegirrl:i see what you mean about delete key
I am happy to see  someone else  have seen this erratic  delete key functionning
Hope it will be corrected

Morgano to get teh best possible speeds out of P7, do the folowing:

In Options there is a Render tab.  Set your processes to 4, despite your number of processors.  I only have one processor (single core et al), but there is still a speed improvement.  This is because P7 still takes advantage of ather little things in your computer (that I don't completely understand, but the results speak fo themselves.)

Also when you are doing a final render of a complex scene, choose the "render in separate process".

IMPORTANT (so many don't get this, ti seems):  Don't use "render in separate process" when trying to do a spot render or a very simple scene, in the one case you won't get anything but garbage, and int he other case you don't get any speed advantage because of the way it sets up before rendering.

BUT, if you are doing a complex scene, then you will have a marked improvement.

Yes, P7 will make use of higher end machines capabilities, specifically mutli threading and multi core processors.

Anyway, stability alone makes P7 worthy of an upgrade.  I am loving it so far.

As I said, if your processor has 'pseudo-mutli-processing' (i.e.: HyperThreading), this is usually taken advantage of as a separate cpu process (even though, technically, it isn't, but close enough, but it works, but ...) ;D

i think that the human behavior aspect noted so far is correct.  if you don't ask them, people who are happy with p7 are just going to render and be happy with it.  if you're frustrated, you're likely to come to the forums and curse the software and its makers and hope that someone has a solution.

when i started a thread specifically asking whether p7 was a more stable and powerfull renderer, i got lots of positive responses and maybe one negative one.  but if you look at all the recent threads, all you see are complaints.   personally, i have a fairly simple scene that's crashing p6 in a very annoying way (permanent hang- just  leaves a blank render screen, says it's rendering, and takes up a whole processor and 1.1 gigs of ram).  i'm really hoping p7 will like it better (i'll revisit it when i get it).

ThrommArcadia and kuroyume0161, many thanks for your advice, which is always greatly appreciated.

Quote - infinity10 and  TrekkieGrrrl, you both mention that Poser7 renders faster than Poser6.   I only installed Poser7 a few days ago and, so far, I have tried only to render a few things that Poser6 wouldn't (Poser7 doesn't either).   In your cases, does your hardware have features which Poser7 can exploit, but Poser6 couldn't, or is the improvement all in the software?   I'm interested, because my PC is making occasional ominous "I'm heading-west" noises.   If I'm going to have to replace it eventually, or sooner, I'd like to make the new box capable of using whatever functions Poser7 allows. 

I installed P7 first in my old machine, an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1.5 Gb of RAM. I managed to re-render this scene at 2730x2100px in Poser 7 in 5 hours, using AO and IBL, displacement and high quality render settings. Poser 6 had flat out refused to do the same scene at 1820x1400, citing out of memory errors, and I had to render it in three passes (background, middle and foreground) to compose a final image. That improvement in performance alone made the upgrade worth it.

The new machine I have is a Core2Duo, and in it Poser 7managed a render of AikoBot Maria, with HDRI+AO, at 2800x1800 pixels, high quality render settings, in about 20 minutes. Yes, there are issues, like the crash to desktop: it's happened three times to me, and every time it was right after a quick change in camera view, so I suspect the graphics drivers are guilty. And yes, the spot render doesn't work sometimes when rendering to separate process, and the delete key stops working randomly too. But that's about it really. In your case, with an older machine, I still think it would be worth getting as you will get better results with P7 if you do big or complicated renders like I do.

I've seen the delete key "feature" also.  I think it is something to do with what you've most recently been working on, because it seems to me that when 'delete' fails to work if I just switch to another room and right back, that clears it up.  It's like the software is focusing on something that prevents you from deleting, but switching back and forth between rooms causes it to reset itself.

Other than that, I've not had any problems with P7.  I have a brand new Core 2 Duo E6600 with 2GB of RAM.  Poser 7 was the first piece of software installed after Virus Protection and Firefox, and I started completely fresh runtimes.  It is a hassle reinstalling everything from scratch but it seems that those old runtimes that have been passed from 5 to 6 already just get too junked up over time.  It's also a good way to weed out older stuff that no longer makes the grade, as well as finding old things you forgot you even had.

Here's a separate question:  The machine I run Poser on is also my gaming box so I have a pair of 7950GT's running in SLI on it.  Does this pair of very high power GPU's do anything for Poser or does Poser not offload any work to the GPU?

• Drew

Rendering is fantastic....Posing Simone and Sydney is sluggish you move the dials and have to wait about a sec or two before anything happens...Disapointing that the lip syn is limited to a few characters...Universal poses do not work like they are suppose to...Hdrvfx lighting is great....These are just a few of the things I found that are good or bad....

But over all e-frontier should be a shame of them self for releasing such a buggy system...Where were all the Beta testers....Software companies are making this such a normal practice that it's getting disgusting...But it's also our fault for rushing to buy the program.If we didn't do this software company's would think twice before releasing such a buggy program.

Let's see how fast MS Vista will fly off the shelve...Just to have a Million complaints the next day...LOL

I think P7 will be fab when SR1 comes out in January.
EF's bosses must have said "ship it before xmas, or else" and they just rushed it out of the door completely untested. I didn't expect this because there was a beta test programme for it.

If I was into conspiracy theories I would speculate that they had a certain feature, like enhanced cloth room, that they had to pull out at the last moment for legal reasons or because of other problems, so they spent the last weeks on that rather than getting P7 solid. The sort of bugs in P7 are just embarrassing to EF because they clearly show that nobody actually took a closer look at the new figures or features at all.

Attached Link: Simon - Poser 7

Why can't I open my Poser 5 renders in Poser 7?  All I get are distorted faces and hair.  Is there a trick?>