I had no intention of buying it at all, but after looking it all over and reading some of the initial testers comments I discussed it with my wife (as I do with most of my purchases) and she told me to get it. so I went ahead and got Poser Pro Base. I'm not interacting with higher end 3D applications, don't have lots of computers at home and never use Collada, so base is sufficient for me. I'm upgrading from P6, don't have P7 at home. PC Specs: AMD Athon64 3500+ (2.2Ghz), 2Gb RAM, ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512Mb, WinXP Home (32bits).

The purchase went smoothly..... CP is never slow for me, but once my purchase was done, I was able to download PP without a problem in 50 mins or so. Not bad for almost 1Gb. It's kind of worrying that I was able to download so fast from CP, seems like people are holding off their purchase, normally servers are slow with major releases.

The installation went smoothly, no problems, everything straight forward.

Starting up..... started PP for the first time and went WOW, this opens fast, very fast, even after installing all of my runtimes. Poser 6 takes minutes, PP 20-30 secs. Next thing I noticed was scene opening and saving is a lot faster. Scenes that take 5-10 minutes to open in P6 (yes I'm creating huge scenes at times) only take 2 minutes at the most in PP. Again a huge improvement!

Interface.... still pretty much the same. OpenGL preview compared to P6 is much better. PP reacts quicker and smoother then P6 does. Even when working on larger scenes, PP still reacts well, much better then P6 which tends to get slow.

The new figures.... much has been said about them and most people completely ignore or have no clue what they're meant to be. These new figures are for game engines & visualization applications and such, so need to be low poly and using as little textures as possible. They're not created with the regular Poser user in mind, but with a completely different purpose. They also have a different distribution agreement, not the one for regular poser models. Good move from SM, but a bit too late for me, I wished they would have done this 1-2 years ago.

Stabilty.... unlike previous releases this one is pretty stable, suprisingly stable. Not a single crash after creating, loading, editing & rendering a lot of scenes. The only problem I've come across so far is a problem with finding the location of a few textures. After saving a scene (previously created in P6)  in the PP folder, using save as, I'm getting I get a message: Texture could not be loaded and so on. Enough memory, seems like PP can't find some of the texture correctly. I recall people having the same problem with P7 also, so perhaps anyone knows a solution for it?

Rendering..... I'm not using a 64bit system but still I do see a difference. First of all the renders look smoother then they did in P6 (even when using the same settings), I like the way the renders look now. The gamma option is pretty cool also, gets rid of the too dark scenes. Be careful with it though if you use fog, rain and such, if the gamma setting is too high it will overlight them and you cannot see them well anymore. If you set the gamma real low it darkens the scene and that looks pretty cool also. My wife looked at some comparisment renders I did and she thought that the PP renders had a more proffesional look to them then the P6 renders, even when same settings were used.

Rendering speed.... hasn't changed much for 32bit. With smaller scenes I do notice a slight increase in time 20-30 secs on 4 minutes, but larger scenes render a bit faster. The scene shown in the image attached took just over 20 minutes to render and that is about 5 mins faster then in Poser 6.

Memory usage.... has changed a lot though. The image attached is the max I can render in Poser 6 as long as I do use the P4 rendering engine, which takes up less memory the FF. when I using FF P6 will crash. When trying to render the scene in P7 it will crash even if the P4 rendering engine is used. The scene refused to render in P7. For me when rendering in PP a big suprise occurerd, it uses a lot less memory for rendering then P6 & 7 do. I was able to render this scene in PP using FF with final settings and still have enough memory left over, something I couldn't do with P6, let alone P7. The big change in memory usage is during rendering. From the start PP uses a little less memory then P6 & P7, but for rendering it uses a lot less memory. With some scenes rendering with FF in P6 I had 280Mb of physical RAM left, in PP I had 700-800Mb Left. I'm very impressed by that and finaly I can render my scenes completely with FF instead of having to fall back to P4. Great improvement, this means larger scenes or higher image resolution!

Still many things to explore but upgrading from P6 to PP Base sure is worth it and PP has sure found some ways to impress me, more then I expected it to do.

Thanks for the review. It's nice to hear something good about a new poser product for a change, instead of the usual complaints. I can't afford to get this right now, but I was curious for a possible future purchase.

Agreed, thank you for the impressions. IMO this is really the best way to get a fair idea about what PP can and cannot do, ie listening to actual users rather then the company demos.

Hopefully other people who have bought PP and have done work in it will also contribute their renders/reviews to this thread...

I have Poser Pro and am running it on XP Pro 64 bit with a quad core Core 2 and 8 GB RAM. A very large problem scene (from someone else) that I was able to render almost half of in Poser 7 (half was quite a bit more than anyone else could!) in Poser Pro rendered 95% (the second half of the last row of tiles didn't work.) I was rendering in the background while I was testing network rendering and also setting up other scenes. When I have time I'll retry the render in the foreground. I suspect that the failure was a bug, the rest of the render went smoothly.

It also seems more responsive in the user interface, enough that Poser Pro is my new posing app. P7 has these hangs for no apparent reason. I just wish they named Poser Pro something else, I am already confusing it with Poser Pro Pack!

**aeilkema,

Thanks for the review.  You hit on enough points to satisfy my curiosity about PPro for the moment.

-G
**

The improved interface performance is the best selling point I've heard so far. Still not enough to justify the price for a Lightwave owner with Poser 7 imnsho.

That's an interesting render.  I recently have looked into interposer as an alternative to Poser Pro.  A friend showed me C4D's render of an interposer import into C4d.  It makes poser content look really outstanding and that's without any mods to the materials after being imported.  I'd have to try Poser Pro's solution before making a final decision though.

Unfortunately, I have to BUY the app before I can tell what the quality of import is like.

Well the cost of Cinema4D + interPoser really puts it on a completely different table from Poser Pro, I don't think you can expect them to be too comporable.  I use interPoser Pro and Cinema myself and it's a great combination (imo the best available anywhere), just quite a bit more expensive than any of the Poser brand products.

Good, balanced review aeilkema. 

Quote - Well the cost of Cinema4D + interPoser really puts it on a completely different table from Poser Pro .

Remember, PPRO comes with a hosting plugin for C4D.  By including this feature, the devs are stating that PPRO can be part of a pipeline.

The review nicely touches on the speed and stability of the app.

And my comment is in regards to the quality of that included C4D hosting plug vs having say, P7, interposer, and C4D (best suited for a different thread possibly).

No insult to the original reviewer intended.

Peace,
              CG

If your goal is to get content into Cinema4D, imo interPoser is vastly, vastly superior to scene hosting plugins like what Poser Pro is offering (off the topic of the original post, sorry).  With interPoser you don't even need to load anything in Poser, you can treat all your Poser content as native Cinema assets and do everything strictly within Cinema, rather than set up in one app and then re-tool it in a different app (hope you get it right the first time too!)

Quote -
Interface.... still pretty much the same. OpenGL preview compared to P6 is much better. PP reacts quicker and smoother then P6 does. Even when working on larger scenes, PP still reacts well, much better then P6 which tends to get slow.

Elaborate on "much better" please.  Is it just smoother and more responsive, or does it actually look better also?  I'd pay $400 just to get shadows and bump maps in the preview.

Thanks for the review, aeilkema. I didn't know about the "Base" package. I'm using P6 too, and there are options in P7 would like to have like better animation controls, the morph brush, and Faceroom for the figures that don't work in P6Mac (but work in P6PC).

Does the PP Base have all that?

I wonder how well it works on the Mac PPC and Intel Mac?

It's smoother and more responsive for sure, but too me it also looks better. It still could be looking better then it does, but I do see some improvements. But keep in mind I'm coming from P6, so some of these improvements could have been in P7 also, but I didn't notice them at work where I used to work with P7 for a while.

I don't think the bump maps and shadows are really there, at least no shadows cast from objects on other objects. Ground shadow yes, but only when default ground is being used.

*Thanks for the review, aeilkema. I didn't know about the "Base" package. I'm using P6 too, and there are options in P7 would like to have like better animation controls, the morph brush, and Faceroom for the figures that don't work in P6Mac (but work in P6PC).

Does the PP Base have all that?

I wonder how well it works on the Mac PPC and Intel Mac?

*Yes Base has all the P7 features like the ones mentioned, including multiple undos, copy figure from the edit menu (very handy), talk room and more. Not sure about the mac stuff, since I'm on a pc.

Discovered  the first bug in  PP  jpg _save always jump back to 75% quality. :bored:

Mazak

waiting for the demo before buying,....

What is the difference btwn the download and the shipped versions?
Thanks

I'm interested mainly in the ability to handle larger scenes, so my question is whether the larger scene is a 64 bit thing, or does it carry across to 32 bit?
Currently I do all prestaging and posing in Poser 6, then use Transposer to import multiple pz3's into Carrara.

Starting Poser
20-30 seconds for PP. Yea I get that with P7 too. For that matter P6 also what's with you? Library?

Interface
Pretty much the same. You said it. I haven't seen it, but now I know not to look forward to much being new.

Stability
Yep got those memory messages in P7 too.

Rendering
Try comparing it to the latest version P7 and as far as gamma correction does anyone have PaintShop Pro? It has a one click image correction button. Try it some time on those dark images. It's works miracles. lol.

Memory usage
For 32 bit users it ain't changed from P7. I'm still 32 bit and so are a lot of others. You're comparing it to P6.

As far as upgrading from P6 to PP is concerned I'm sure it was a step up however it would have been nice if they would have fixed the bugs in P7 along the way. If this company sells out, will the next company fix the bugs in PP? Hey it's aimed at the Pro market. They won't put up with that and as far as I'm concerned I'm not putting up with P7 left in need of service either. However it's still usable just quirky. You get used to it and learn tricks to enhance stability. Try saving often and restarting the program every so often. lol,

XENO
Anything good said about the new release would have got a thumbs up, are you in their pocket or is their success connected with you in any way ? I want none biased ok buddy. I found the review lacking comparison to it's earlier release( P7) myself, but still give the review a C for effort and information. Over all I haven't seen the program, but my guess is P7 updates would ultimately have killed most hobbyist need for it completely, but who knows right? How hard would it have been to get low poly figures for earlier Poser versions? Later

dogor,

Not only comparing to P6, got P7 at work and memory usage has changed in this version, a lot, even compared to P7.

Thanks for the review. Very informative. Well, we can hope that some of the "bug-fixes" will see their way to a P7 Service Release. take care jdc

it's silly that i haven't figured this out yet, but how do you get "render in background" to do your entire timeline, rather than having to click "render in background" yourself for each frame?

and if your answer is "use the render queue" i would love to, but i haven't figured out how to add my entire timeline to that either lol; have to add each frame to the queue individually, which totally defeats the purpose

I just got Poser Pro (full), and I find it to be a lot faster than Poser 6. It might be a Mac Intel thing--I also just recently got an Intel iMac--so maybe PPro is optimized for Intel or something and P6 isn't, but on this same machine, PPro is significantly faster than P6, particularly for rendering. That in itself is worth it to me, particularly for animating, since I can now render out test animation without having to get up an go make a cup of tea while I wait.

I also have InterPoser Pro, and find it to be great for rendering my full animations in Cinema 4D. I still use Poser to compose the animations, since the interface is a still a bit easier to use than C4D's for animating Poser figures.

I haven't had a chance to try the Poser Fusion plugin yet, however, since for some reason Cinema 4D isn't seeing it in the Plugins folder (I have a call in with Smith Micro). I'm not sure if I'd end up using it or not. The only advantage I can imagine is that IPP has one flaw in that it seems to have a little trouble interpolating "smooth" spline animations from Poser to Cinema 4D--it tends to flatten the curves out an make the moves jerky--but that can be generally fixed by making sure that you have a keyframe for each frame of the animation for each part that moves before exporting the animation from Poser. That can be a little bit of a drag to do, since it has to be done manually (anybody know an automated way of doing this??) That said, having the figures in Cinema 4D (via IPP) has a lot of advantages, mostly in that your figures can interact directly with their environment, and can take advantage of C4D functions like cloth, hair, etc., plus adding and changing textures is easier and more direct as well.

tvining,

Thanks for the additional PPro info.  I didn't know interposer has an issue with bézier keys.  Have you tried the hosting plugin PPro provides for C4D?

Regards,
                     CG

tvining: about keyframing moves in Poser, that is quite easy to do in PoserPython. I assume you'd only want to keyframe translations, rotations and maybe scaling, not morphs?
I could whip up a script that would do this in about 30 minutes max.

Curious George: I have the Poser Pro plugin loaded, but it doesn't seem to be working--C4D isn't seeing it for some reason--I notified Smith Micro, but haven't heard back yet. (And I don't mean to take away from IPP--it really is a remarkable plugin--very stable and easy to use--and the guy who created it is super-helpful and responsive.)

Svdl: wow, that would be great! I guess what I'd need is a script (for Mac) that would add keyframes for each frame for anything that moves (can python do that?) since morphs like facial expressions can be splines as well. If that's not possible, translations and rotations would help a lot (not so sure about scaling--I generally don't scale anything on my figures when I animate.) I once tried just adding blanket keyframes to everything, but that made a gigantic file, so I guess it would be key to create fully-keyframed "curves" for only the body parts that move. Thanks!!!

I had the same problem, you need to go in and install the plugin for C4D, at least that's what I had to do for Maya. I physically put the folders in the Maya folders and it showed up. Not sure if that's what you need to do but give it a looksee anyway.
Poser Pro renders like a bainshee now, crazy fast even on firefly final quality.

Quote - The only advantage I can imagine is that IPP has one flaw in that it seems to have a little trouble interpolating "smooth" spline animations from Poser to Cinema 4D--it tends to flatten the curves out an make the moves jerky--but that can be generally fixed by making sure that you have a keyframe for each frame of the animation for each part that moves before exporting the animation from Poser. That can be a little bit of a drag to do, since it has to be done manually (anybody know an automated way of doing this??) That said, having the figures in Cinema 4D (via IPP) has a lot of advantages, mostly in that your figures can interact directly with their environment, and can take advantage of C4D functions like cloth, hair, etc., plus adding and changing textures is easier and more direct as well.

Poser uses Natural Cubic Spline interpolation whereas Cinema 4D uses Catmull-Rom Spline interpolation.  The difference is that Catmull-Rom interpolation isn't continuous across multiple points (keys) on the curve (only between points and, with proper tangents, at the points) whereas Natural Cubic Splines (Konachek or TCB) are continuous functions across the entire curve (no matter how many points/keys).  Except for using a plugin track/sequence(ccurve)/key, the only solution is to do some massaging of the key tangents to get results closer to Poser's - which is what I am doing with some help from Dave Eberly.

PoserFusion/BodyStudio probably does animation like a BVH file and sets each frame so that discrepancies between the hosting systems and Poser are mitigated.  But this requires the Poser SDK to get at the frame-by-frame values.  They are not included in the Poser file - only the keyed frames are.  The changes between C4D R9 and R10 haven't made it easier since the results are different for Spline interpolation in both.

Of course, I'd appreciate any assistance/information from users that would help me improve the spline interpolation used for animation created by iPP from Poser.

Robert

They never gave you access to the Poser SDK?

Quote - IPP has one flaw in that it seems to have a little trouble interpolating "smooth" spline animations from Poser to Cinema 4D--it tends to flatten the curves out an make the moves jerky--but that can be generally fixed by making sure that you have a keyframe for each frame of the animation for each part that moves before exporting the animation from Poser.

Tvining,

If you take your poser anim, export it as a BVH and then re-import it, you'll see that every element of the figure is then keyframed on every frame.  So that is a quick workaround for you (and others if this is of interest to you).

Kuro, thanks for the info on how C4D's key system differs from Poser.  I've generally liked C4D's results with keyframing.  The advantage of Poser is that the UI is more intuitive to,...well, posing.

Peace,

                   CG

interPoser has grown a lot over time - since K added some new function to the camera handling (the CamFrame tag) to make it auto pivot around the selected bodypart, I've gotten to like it better for posing than native Poser itself.  It's really pretty spiffy nowadays.

Quote - They never gave you access to the Poser SDK?

I haven't heard back on the situation.  What I'd love is a collaboration between Poser (to be generic about who owns it at any given time), Maxon, and myself for something like the support in Carrara via Transposer or Vue via Xstream - but as an improvement on my work additional to the support in the aforementioned.  Imagine if my plugin suite were a supported module of Cinema 4D without all of the workarounds due to SDK limitations and lack of knowledge.  I can dream, can't I. :)

The script will take quite a bit of time to run, that's why it shows feedback on what it's doing. If no new text lines appear within a reasonable amount of time (processing a single parameter shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds to maybe a minute, depending on the length of the animation and the processing power of the CPU), then the script has crashed.