...did the quality of our work increase?
My opinion if I look at my work and what is posted in the galleries is no.
Looks like better tools do not automatically lead to better results.
Whats your opinion?

Better tools not ever mean better works if there are no better ideas 

Some people think they DRAW 3D having a Poser copy, but draw is more than putting some default figures in a default background with default lights and leaving default render

Mine is emphatically yes.  You of course must be your own judge.  ^_^

I'm sure that there are some people who have improved. And if you took away their P7 and gave them back P6, nothing would change.
 
I know that I'm better with P6 than before P7 came out and that has nothing to do with P7 as I don't have it.

It's not always the tool.

So asking an individual if they are producing better renders with P7 seems pointless to me. There is no difference in P6 and P7 with regard to rendering. There is no useful difference in the material room. And the few other new features don't even begin to compare to using programs designed for those purposes. For example, I haven't seen anybody doing an awesome job with the P7 sculpt/moprh tool because while its an  improvement over having nothing, imagine what you could sculpt with real modeling tools.

And the HDRI lighting - foo - Poser lighting is so stupidly simple - without global illumination and specular IBL, HDRI is a total waste of bits. Give me 5 minutes to do a couple conversions and some shader work and I'll reproduce any result you get with P7 HDRI using P6 alone.

Some of my favorite artists are still incredible - but I see no improvement in their work now with P7. In some cases, I've seen a decline, as they got distracted playing with a couple new features and stopped spending as much time on lighting and shaders.

Personally, I think P7 was too expensive for such a minor improvement in results or workflow.
 

Oh and P6 does shadows better than P7. P7 is full of lighting bugs. I'm so tired of tossing ideas out for poor P7 users who can't get my clean P6 shadows from their P7.

Quote - So asking an individual if they are producing better renders with P7 seems pointless to me. There is no difference in P6 and P7 with regard to rendering.  

Not in quality perhaps, but there's a huge difference in being able to multiprocess in 4 threads.  Since I have a quad core processor, for me, this means renders in similar quality in far less time (rarely 1/4th, because there is no real intelligence in how multithreading is done, but a vast improvement in speed over P6).  This also means I can render at far higher settings in the same amount of time.  Memory management while rendering is also tremendously improved, allowing higher quality again with fairly trustworthy stability.

Now, as you have pointed out elsewhere, a lot of people (e.g. me) are inexperienced and don't really know what good quality IS - e.g. I usually have been using 256x256 shadow maps because I didn't know any better - but really, the better memory management and multiprocessing are a huge help in learning these things.  If I had to fight with Poser 7crashing very frequently at high quality, as P6 does for me, then I'd learn slower.  If my renders were taking 2-4 times longer with the same settings, I'd learn slower still.  I don't learn too fast as it is.

Quote - Oh and P6 does shadows better than P7. P7 is full of lighting bugs. I'm so tired of tossing ideas out for poor P7 users who can't get my clean P6 shadows from their P7.

Glad you brought that up.  I was trying some of your shadow suggestions out and I have come across some major wierdness in P7 - this may not be news to you, I don't know, but the P7 default lights are somehow different from lights you create via Object -> Create Light.  Typically I was taking the default lights, changing properties on the Parameter Dials -> Properties tab, and I've come to find out they just act fundamentally fruity.  A lot of things don't work correctly with the default lights, even though I'm not very experienced I can see that they're wrong.  I'd like to discuss this in more detail, but it's kind of far off topic from this thread so I'll start a new one.

Good points pj. For improving the learning curve, speed is paramount. I know what I know largely because I've figured out when I should do super fast renders and when I shouldn't, so I can maximize my time. 

P7 clearly improves time maximization and that is a good thing.

But I gues you're balancing that against those occasions where it is buggy, and then you waste HOURS and HOURS trying understand what's wrong with what you're doing, and it turns out you're not doing anything wrong at all.

If I hit one of those, rather than do 20 experiments in P7, I'd jump back to P6 and verify the problem.

No, now that I know what to look for I think I can capture it very clearly.  A few minutes and I'll throw that thread out with some screens of what I'm talking about, maybe you can give some advice.

I guess I'm kind of stupid anyway for continuing to try to use Poser for rendering at all, now that I own a copy of Vue 6i, but it'd be good to really understand why this is happening (the shadow problems).

Oh wow - show us some comparison renders against Vue - the GI in Vue makes such superior renders over Poser.

Yeah, I have been very lazy in properly integrating it (there is a dumb little scaling problem that occurs that I haven't researched the fix for, svdl posted it and I forgot it).

Results here:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2697196&page=1

Very strange, unexpected results! 

Great thread. I'm not set on not buying P7 ever. I have P6 already

I will never buy any Poser product until 2010 when i get my new computer. I had previously thought on buying P7 but no way. thanks guys for all the information. i'll stick with p6 which is awesome

Personally I love P7. I find it faster and much easier to use. I appreicate the multiple undo feature I also like the quality of render with the material room. I use P6 to make mat files for products but i am alway happy to go back to P7 for render and speed.
cheerio  lululee

I love my copy of P7.  I don't use the default lights that came with it - I have my own default lights + a couple of other sets I've customised (mostly increasing the shadow map and reducing the bias - thanks to BagginsBill for that tip :) ) I am slowly getting the hang of Vue and I plan on using it to render the scene a lot more once I get another Gig of RAM :)

DISCLAIMER - I never used P6 so I've not got anything really to compare P7 with but I like it nonetheless