I currently have Poser 6 and have purchased many things over the last year for Michael 3 and V3.  I use Poser 6 under Windows XP Pro 64bit Edition.  My primary use for it is to setup characters (m3 and/or v3) to be imported into Vue Infinite 7.

My questions are the following:

1.  How well all the things I bought for Michael 3 and Victoria 3 will work under Poser 7.
2.  If I open M3 or V3 characters with Poser 7 which I had saved under Poser 6 and save them as Poser 7 items how well the new file format (if there is one) will work with Vue 7 Infinite.
   3)  Can I have both Poser 6 and 7 installed at the same time and if so will Poser 7 be able to see all the libraries I have for Poser 6 or will I have to copy all the libraries to the Poser 7 directory strucutre?
   4)  How well does Poser 7 run under XP Pro 64bit edition?  Poser 6 is ok under it.
   5)  Are there any improvements in the Facial/Photo Image creation process (taking multiple facial photos to create a new face)

Any questions anyone can answer would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

Runs well under Windows XP 64-bit

Memory management is tremendously better

If you have 2 or 4 core processor (or multiple processors), rendering can be 2 or 4 times faster

V3/M3 stuff appears to work fine for me, never had a problem with that but I mostly use V4 now

In my experience, P6 and P7 both installed on the same machine worked fine

No opinion about Face Room

 

Vue 6 infinite ...  :)  works okay for me although I am not a "power user" of Vue just now.

I really love P7.  The multiple undo (up to 100 actions) is priceless for me.  I also stil have P6 installed for beta testing, etc and I am able to use all my p6 installed content in P7 no problem.  I just installed the p6 runtime into p7 as an external runtime.  All my old content works fine in P7

Thanks Pjz99 for the info. 

Apparently it was too early in the morning when I wrote the note because I said Vue 7 but the latest release is only version 6.  I downloaded the latest Vue update last night, Version 6.05 - Build 290396 (beta).  It fixed a lot of Poser import problems I was having.  So I was thinking of upgrading Poser as well to version 7.  Guess I'm thinking too much about the Poser 7 upgrade now.  All these products with their updates is a luney thing to keep up with at times.

After spending the last three days working pretty intensively in P7, I will warn you, the new functionality comes at a price of incredible flakiness. Some examples:

When I go to the Materials room, actions in there cause materials to flip 180 degrees. Another action will normalize them.

The keyboard functions go skiwopus with no warning. Suddenly Del doesn't delete, Down Arrow doesn't move you through lists, etc.

Older figures come in with screwed up previews. If you try to fix them, you screw up the renders. For example, hair is suddenly "too small" and skulls show through.

Things will just go nuts. I'm working with an old Steph2 PZ3 right now. The Ground won't render, so she's hanging in space. Ok, I remember: Ground is just for previews now. So I inserted a "floor" with the Cloth Plane. No, that won't render either. So I moved y 0.1. Nope.

Same model, about three years old. She came in with AutoBalance on. I didn't turn it on. I never use AutoBalance. But I was warned: Mysterious square plates with little rings attached were visible on screen. I'm so used to seeing things screwed up, I ignored them. Then I tried to move a selected element. The entire figure rotated into some IK-like pretzel like a perverse animation. Right. Just what I wanted. Undo. I selected something else. New plate. Moved something a smidge left. The entire figure folded up like a corpse in a trash compactor. Right. Undo. Yes, this is what AutoBalance is supposed to do, and the problem went away when I discovered it was on and turned it off. But the result of AutoBalance is supposed to be a better, more natural look, not something from a horror movie. I consider it the evil twin of IK, surely the dumbest "helpful tool" in the Poser kit.

The new Select option on Right Click is indispensible, because Poser 7 is actually worse at letting you click-select the only bloody thing that is under the cursor. I try to select hair, and I get GROUND. Right. Worse, you can click select something in the Doc Window, and the Parameters panel selector doesn't update. If you don't notice and you move a dial, you move the thing selected in the panel, not the thing selected in the window. And still worse, you can click something, it turns red, and when you move it, the selector shifts to something else in the vicinity -- your only warning is a screwup, fortunately fixable with the other indispensible new toy: Undo.

The usual inexplicable refusals to load, refusals to redisplay, refusals to do what you just asked it to do.

The usual total disconnect between the light in the Preview and the light in the Render.

It continues to amaze me, after 5 releases, that Poser is so riddled with trivial annoyances and major flaws. Accounting for it is beyond me.

Would I give up P7? I guess not. But if it had a neck....

M

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow mickmca, that's quite a review of problems there.  Are you using the Mac or Windows version?  If windows then is it XP Pro?  Also, are you using the latest Poser 7 Service release (patch-update) 1.1 that is supposed to fix some problems?

I'm wondering if those problems exist even with the patch and under Windows XP Pro.

I also noticed that the hardware requirement went up with version 7.  What kind of processor is your PC (Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon?) and how much ram does it have.  And what kind of video card are you using?

My machine was built specifically for Poser exactly one year ago. It has a 2.8GH AMD processor, 2G of RAM, etc. Running W2K SP4. I finally installed the 1.1 SR in hopes that it would resolve some of the problems; it made absolutely no difference.

The kinds of problems I'm talking about have been endemic to Poser since P5 at least, and I've seen them on three different machines, each one optimized for Poser. This is the only Windows machine I have left, and I only run Windows on it to have access to my 3D apps. I'm going to switch to Linux, and if that means abandoning Poser, so be it. Between the sub-standard OS and the shabby implementations of Poser, I don't see that I'm losing much.

P7 doesn't like Mil figures generally, which is a new wrinkle on the DAZ/Poser feud.

M

 

 

 

Hmm...that's all good feedback to hear mickmca.  At the moment, I'm a bit frustrated with the makers of Poser 7 because I just tried to purchase it this morning.  The online order system they had recognized I had an id in Content Paradise and told me I had to make a new one with a new web page they sent me to.  I filled out all the credit card info and gave details for a new id.  As soon as I pressed the continue button it kicked me out and sent me an email that I was a new regestered user, but it gave me no link to download the electronic copy for which I was trying to buy.  Now I can't order anywhere else because I don't know if the order went through. 

I tried to contact Curious Labs customer service but their website has not phone number for such things.  They only want to deal with email.  I sent an email describing the purchase problem but have heard nothing.

In my frustration I went over to DAZ 3D which is at www.daz3dc.com because I know that they have been trying to put out a product that poses characters.  Their tool is called DAZ Studio and its actually free.  I thought that since my main poser character investment in props, clothing, and charactes such as Michael 3 and Victoria 3 were actually created by DAZ 3D that I might as well give it a try.  Well, it appears to be a very simple product.  So far, I have been able to load in a .pz3 file created in Poser6 and pose it with little effort.  I don't know the full product so I can't fairly say what else it does but it certainly shows you don't need Poser to pose DAZ characters.  

I have attached a picture of a character I used to only Pose with Poser but am now trying to manipulate with DAZ Studio.  It is Michael 3.

I couldn't advise you on ordering P7 (did you go through the efrontier website, or Content Paradise?), but I can tell you that the problems mickmca is having aren't typical across the P7 userbase.

The Delete issue was handled with the SR1 release, and other than the lighting issue, I haven't encountered any other the other problems he's got in the 4 or so months I've had P7.

However, if you're main interest is in regards to exporting a poser image to Vue for rendering, I'd say don't bother getting P7. A lot of the improvements are geared toward better rendering (support of dual-processor systems reduces render times, though maybe not enough to compete with Vue), and while Poser 7 does handle memory better, a large enough scene with multiple Mil 3 figures will result in blank renders. And I seem to remember hearing that Vue and P7 don't exactly work together as well as Vue and P6, but that may be another aspect of Poser's "different machine, different problem" problem.

So, unless you're having issues with importing scenes from P6 into Vue, or are actually interested in rendering in Poser, there's little that P7 has that P6 doesn't already do for you.

"Is Poser 7 Worth The Upgrade From Poser 6?"

Only if you don't enjoy wasting your time postworking broken and distorted joints:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2692439

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2946849

The base software of DAZ|Studio is free, yes, but if you want to be able to use things like INJ morphs or Magnets/Deformers you have to purchase separate add-ons.

As for Poser 7, I wholeheartedly recommend it over P6 for most of the same reasons previously listed (far better memory management, multi-threaded rendering, multiple undos), but if you're looking to solely export to Vue, you might not notice a difference between P6 and P7.

wow...I have never had any of those issues in P7...and I am glad, lol...sounds frustrating

Very helpfull thread indeed.I was thinking about upgrading.
I was silly enuff to pre-purchase Poser5 when it came out and paid premium price for it (it dropped alot very quickly).I'm still waiting for the service packs for it on CD which they promised me (dial up user), fortunatly someone else was kind enuff to get them for me.Its still full of bugs tho.
I had real hopes the new owners of Poser might have started from scratch and rewrote the program so that it actually worked smoothly rather than trying to stuff in more features.
I think I'll save my money and stick with Pro Pack and render elsewhere.

Thanks :)

Is what I'm reading correct? Does Poser 7 have multi-threading and 64-bit optimization?
someone has to have a link to a curious labs page about this... please...

Multithreading: yes. It can use up to 4 render threads. There is no change in thread use when it comes to setting up scenes.

64 bit support: no. Not in Poser 7. It's still a 32 bit application, but it has been compiled with the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag, which means it isn't limited to a 2 GB address space, but to 3 GB on Win 2000 en XP Pro (with the /3G startup switch) and 4 GB on 64 bit Windows.

It is possible that Poser 8 will be 64 bits, e-frontier has been asking input a couple of weeks ago on this subject.

I haven't had the funds yet to upgrade to Poser 7, but the two determining factors that made me decide that I wanted to upgrade (okay, three with the multiple undo) was the morph brush and Sydney.