Zbrush 3 is to be released on May 15th with major upgrades.
Judging from previous versions, it will be virtually bug free.
Pixologic is also proving the upgrade to version 3 FREE OF CHARGE to all registered users.
Kind of puts e frontier to shame doesn't it. Charging $129 for a very buggy upgrage.
Now if Pixologic could only take over e frontier, that would be nice.

Yea, but is the interface any earier to use?? 

Probably not **RAMWolff.**It's quite unintruative isn't it.
Great program that can do so much but so hard to use for the beginner.
I've had it for over a year and it's still a mystery to me.

It also costs twice as much as Poser, which is what's stopping me from trying it.

I have Poser7 and Zbrush2  I have paid for it. I  also would like to use them free of charge.
But,the cie and programmers need to eat also.
I will be happy to have Zbrush 3 for free but hope Pixologic find a way to have enough money to continue to develop it.
Orphan soft is not a good thing for users that need more functions and bugs free soft
Open source and contents  development are may be solutions for somes ,
But i thinks a dedicated people ( and money to paid them) to the soft development are the better assurance for version 3,4,5, 6 etc

"Will be virtually bug free" is quite a different thing from "IS bug free".  Don't count your chickens until they hatched.

Quote - It also costs twice as much as Poser, which is what's stopping me from trying it.

 
Giolon, they do have a 30 day free trial, although you might wait until version 3 is properly available that way.

Yeah, I jumped over to their website to look at ZBrush but $500!? I'll pass. Maybe if they offered a competitive upgrade or something.

I have heard good things about ZBrush, but it's simply too expensive for me. I have bought Silo not too long ago, and find Silo 2 (which is public Beta at the moment) really great for making morphs.

Programmers have to be payed, so usually new versions are not free. Good if ZBrush sells that well, that they don't need to charge for an update. I don't think I have spent $500 for all my Poser versions all together, and I use Poser since Poser 4.

Uwe

It's not just that "programers have to be paid." It's the owner/intrepreneurs who carry the ownership and the risk of any product wish to prosper and even become wealthy. That is a worthy goal and moral ambition.

A case can even be made that the shame is on a publisher for not charging enough for their product, and that eFrontier (and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates et. al) should be celebrated for creating a fabulous value for all of us and are proud to charge for it.

I look forward to paying my $129 (or whatever) for Poser 8.

::::: Opera :::::

Poser has the problem of backwards compatibility with the most primitive geometry engine one can imagine. That's what you're paying for-- for people to continue to develop for all those gigabytes of stuff you own. Poser has the unique problem of a large user base, heavily invested in massive geometries . . . sitting on an architecture which dates back to the 1980s. There's no question that newer architectures are more powerful-- but where do you find the oodles of content for them? You don't . . . Someday, someone is going to figure out how to do smart decimation of the high poly Poser characters, rendering their detail to normal and displacement maps, so that we can work with low poly, low memory impact models, and still render beautiful stuff. That's the way zBrush does it-- but how to back out all the zillions of man years of work in Poser characters? No easy way, not anytime soon

Simply put, ZBrush is the bomb.

Yes the interface is somewhat whacky, but for what it is capable of doing; it is without question a very large tool in my toolbox.

Do we get notified via EMail of these updates by Pixologic ? ..... I haven't heard a squeak from them yet but I am a registered user.

I think e frontier is doing a great job with Poser.

Poser 6's series of Service releases were so much more than just any fixes. Most of them all updated major behind the scenes aspects under the hood people never even would notice or didn;t read about.

Service release 3 was completely unnecessary, and was to be the base for Poser7, and they released it anyway as SR3 just to improve compatibility between version 6 and 7.

I know some Mac issues need to be addressed but I was disappointed to see "Shame" in the title of this thread.

You do NOT want the owner of Zbrush owning Poser. :) Never add stuff from the cookingn cabinet into the sauce if there is no label on it. :)

Hmm,  let me see next gen games for the new xbox 360 are now supporting figures with 20k poly counts.  That's an increase of 16k from the usual 4k .  So if the gaming industry has decided to up the poly count,  where does that leave us here in the poserverse.  Are we behind the times with our 20k to 90k figures?

Side note:    Pixologic may be getting competition from Adobe.  Imagine an application like zbrush combine with the power of Photoshop.

Peace
Patorak

Quote - You do NOT want the owner of Zbrush owning Poser. :) Never add stuff from the cookingn cabinet into the sauce if there is no label on it. :)

Yes, best to keep the kids seperated.
"Are we there yet!?"

Well, let's see.......

I need to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 Extended, Vue 6I, Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro, Vista Ultimate (full version), the next incarnation of Lightwave when it comes out -- plus buying several plug-ins for Lightwave (they ain't cheap).  Fortunately, the latest version of AutoCAD is provided to me by my office.

I've just upgraded to Mircosoft Office 2007 recently.

Plus I'd still like to buy Poser content.

Not to mention that I'd like to keep up with the hardware which is necessary to drive all of this.

ZBrush?  Maybe someday.  I'm sure that it's great.  But.......we have to draw the line somewhere, don't we?

Perhaps I can somehow convince my electrical engineering firm that they need to supply me with ZBrush...........because it's a great tool for drawing schematics..........

BTW - IMO, e-frontier is doing just fine by its customers.  Which includes me.

" A case can even be made that the shame is on a publisher for not charging enough for their product"
Perhaps Poser 7 would have been better developed if they had put more resources into it, which would mean charging more for it.
So the choise is, a cheap program that doesn't work as it should, or a more expensive program that works very well.
Put your hand up if you would pay $500 for a version of Poser that does what it is supposed to do, ie. doesn't have the large and ever-growing list of faults we see here each day. The memory issues, the hangs and crashes etc. basically the design faults.
I for one, would wait and save my pennies for the better deveploed program.
Don't get me wrong. I love Poser, I just hate the problems that come with it.

I think Poser works very well.  I think the current design is fine. 

There are things I "personally" wish they would still add to it, but we all do. You mentioned design faults a few times. What exactly are you finding ill-designed compared to what is advertised?

I know there are issues but I see mostly all the same ones just mentioned by different people, which ef knows about. And they did a wonderful and attentive job with Poser6's issues after release.

Quote - Hmm,  let me see next gen games for the new xbox 360 are now supporting figures with 20k poly counts.  That's an increase of 16k from the usual 4k .  So if the gaming industry has decided to up the poly count,  where does that leave us here in the poserverse.  Are we behind the times with our 20k to 90k figures?

These poly counts are getting up there, but the textures are tiny by Poser standards. Moreover, Poser's geometries aren't static -- they've got morphs attached to them . . .  in general, it seems to be the texture handling that slows Poser to a crawl . . . this is something that the game coders are way ahead on .  ..

ashley, yes please discriminate between 

1. missing features, badly designed features, etc  and
2. given features that are actually broken, with bugs.

I have Poser7 in use constantly and push it a lot. I don't find it vastly buggy. There are a few things, yes. All in all, however, it works quite well.

As for the feature list for the price of $249? We are the winners on that score.

::::: Opera :::::

Hmm.

• Inexplicably fruity lighting
• Very weak data validation, e.g. recent problem with V4.1 bad morph target data - sure it's a bug with V4.1, but really Poser should not load a broken file without raising any error, nor should it write a broken file that it cannot read back in again
• Generally very weak error handling - an application should never just exit silently or with a generic "out of memory" message

I like Poser, and it has a lot of features for $250 - however, it is most certainly not a perfect application.  It does have many serious, work-stopping bugs.  Don't kid yourself.  :)

??? I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that Poser was in any way perfect. And as long as we demand the backwards compatibility all the way to P4, then the program quirks that have been there -since- then are going to stay there. A compressed binary file format for geometry control would be a lot more efficient....but how many are really willing to give up the text based .cr2, and all the goodies that users have tricked out of being able to tweak the settings? I wonder if it would be possible for either eF or a third party to write either a script or actual encapsulated program strictly to convert older content to a new file format? If such could be made, so that we don't lose the years and $$$$$$$$ of content in incompatibility, then we may see a Poser Professional with a lot of nifty new lean capabilities. At the moment, though, its pretty much the animators who are driving the new features....and there just aren't enough of us. Look at the adoption time between the introduction of dynamic cloth in P5, and the -beginnings- of a mild degree of acceptance outside the 'Poser 12'. Dynamic hair is still in its infancy, and this is the 3rd iteration of the app with that capability. There is a lot of stuff that the current codebase simply won't support that could move Poser out of ghetto of 'hobbyist apps' that it currently still lingers in....but either there is going to have to be a change in people's wants, a hard splitting into two app tracks, or some solution is tricked out to allow us to have our cake and eat it.....

Quote - Hmm,  let me see next gen games for the new xbox 360 are now supporting figures with 20k poly counts.  That's an increase of 16k from the usual 4k .  So if the gaming industry has decided to up the poly count,  where does that leave us here in the poserverse.  Are we behind the times with our 20k to 90k figures?

There is a point of diminishing returns.
adding 16k polys to a 4k figure is going to show huge improvement, adding 16k polys to a 60k figure is not going to show a huge improvement.

the lesson I think we should take from this is not that more polys are better, but we should look at what is being done with only 20k polys.

I agree.  I feel that given everything that is available in the material room,   it is time to rethink mesh design,  and as crocodilian pointed out texture map size.   The above head is an experiment using diffuse+specular+displacement.  The largest texture map used is 2000x1000.  The poly count for the head is 20k.

Cheers
Patorak 

Our parent company works with a number of software development tool companies, including Digini's Blade3D, a tool for making 3D games for both XBOX 360 and PC - error handling has some special meaning to me ;-)

Most Meshbox models dont push the limits at all with Poser in terms of reporting errors, but Ive found that when we've reported a problem, its been fixed in the current version. I dont expect e-frontier to go back and fix bugs Ive found with Poser 5's importing 3DS, but on reporting it, they fixed the equivalent problem in Poser 6. They are incredibly responsive.

Silent passing of errors is a big problem. Im sure if DAZ took the time to discuss it with e-frontier, or if people strongly push it in e-frontier's ongoing betas (you are in the program, right?), it will get fixed. There are infinite combinations of parsing of commands that can arise in this situation - this one you mention is producing a silent error. Okay, I can buy that - that can be a really tricky one to track down - they will need to track it down and then analyze where the problem is, then prioritize it against other issues.

Wow, Patorak.  Impressive.

Yea, that's a really nice render!!

Sorry people,  I can't take credit,  this was an experiment using Bagginsbill's matmatic script.  Bagginsbill you are a genius.

Cheers,
Patorak