I was fortunate enough to get a chance to play with the new Poser Pro version 7 recently, thought I'd give everyone a quick overview of what I found.  Please note that this information is meant for people who actually use and like Poser.  If your one of those "I prefer my $12,000 program because blah blah blah" kinda folks, please don't bother to respond. 

First impression was pretty good.  They didn't seem to change much of the interface from Poser 7, which was quite nice actually.  There  are a few additional menu items here and there, but all of the old stuff is still in the same place, so workflow is pretty much unaffected.  I must give the programmers over at Smith Micro credit there, they didn't start making changes to the interface just to be making changes to the interface.

New content - the CD itself doesn't seem to install any other than one new male figure, which is nothing to write home about. I would imagine there might be some available for download but since this install was on a business PC owned by someone else I didn't exactly feel right about downloading a ton of stuff, so sadly I can't report much on new content in Pro.

64 bit functionality.. well, gotta read the fine print here folks.  Smith Micro delievered exactly and only what was promised, a 64 bit upgrade to the rendering engine.  Firefly is now 64 bit, which does help speed up the rendering process somewhat, but it appears that Poser Pro itself, the main program, is still a 32 bit application, so all in all your not looking at huge performance boosts over the original Poser 7.

Network Rendering.  Ok, this is uber geeky cool, no doubt about it.  You can send your render over the network to machines that have the queue manage installed on them and let them render for you.  I can see where this would be very, very useful if you had a cluster of machines or at least one big fast server system on your network to allow it to do all the heavy lifting, so you could render in background while still working in Poser in the foreground.  That having been said, I'd say odds are pretty good that most other home users are in the same boat I am, I only have one machine at home capable of really running poser much less rendering a big scene, so for me at least network rendering just isn't a huge selling point.  Cool, yes.  Useful for my setup at home?  Not really.- at least not anytime in the near future.  I'll have to plunk down a lot of cash on some more hardware before network rendering will really be worth having.

Render Quality - A slight improvement here, with emphasis on the word slight.  All in all the new rendering engine does appear to be more stable and faster if run on a 64 bit machine, but all in all not huge, can't live without kind of  improvement here. 

So the verdict?  Well, at $200 for the upgrade package I'm afraid Smith Micro has gotten themselves a no sale from me at least.  Granted, I'd like to have the 64 bit render engine, but it really isn't such a huge improvement that it's worth that kind of price tag.  I payed less for my full version of Poser 7 than I would for the upgrade package, which seems a bit silly to me. 

I'm left with the impression that Smith Micro really doesn't understand the 3d market in general, much less the market for the Poser program.  While they did make a few nice upgrades to Poser 7 with Poser Pro, it's hardly worth more for an upgrade than it was to buy the original program, and Poser Pro is certainly not worth $500 by any stretch of the imagination.

For that kind of money you could buy some pretty serious 3d apps, ones who's capabilities far outstripe Poser Pro.   No, I'm afraid that Smith Micro has priced themselves right out of Poser's market.  One can only hope that they soon begin to realize their mistake.

The only other real "feature" that Poser Pro offers that the original Poser 7 didn't was the ability to interface with programs like 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema 4d with ease.  However, I can't imagine too many people using 3ds Max who are going to look at spending $500 on Poser Pro - same with most of the folks that own Maya or Cinema 4d.  These programs already have far more capabilities than Poser Pro, and while integration is nice it's hardly worth that kind of cash outlay unless you have a pretty significant need for Poser in addition to 3ds max.  I can't see this being a huge market by any means.

So I for one will pass on the upgrade, at least for now.  Until they cut that upgrade price at least in half I wouldn't even consider it, I'll stick with good old Poser 7 for now.  Poser Pro does have a few nice features, but it is certainly not worth $200 for an upgrade when I paid less than $150 for the original program I'm upgrading, and there are most definately not $200 worth of additional features in Pro.

So I'm afraid Smith Micro will probably be in for a rude awakening, I can't see a lot of Poser 7 owners upgrading, at least not for the time being.  What worries me is that they won't realize there mistake and readjust there pricing soon enough, with Daz Studio already making in roads into the Poser market place every day they leave those outlandish price tags on Poser Pro is another day they'll be losing market share.

Naturally your mileage may vary, but I for one won't be upgrading soon, not at those prices.

My question is: What do the programmers do the long time they "worked" on Poser Pro?

As you said allready: Network render isn't what average "Poser Professionals" do.

Anything other? Interfacing with other 3D-apps, Cinema-4D in my case, is just a joke. Nothing more then what you get with the free available "Riptide". Not even 1% of what is possible with InterPoser Pro.

What else? The gamma function is just a joke. No gamma correction in the renderpipe, just a rough correction of loaded textures (try to mix gamma corrected textures with plain shaders).

What we got with this so called "Poser Pro" should be a normal update for P7. If SM means to ask money for this bugfix: $10 is a reasonable pricetag, IMHO.

I don't understand the thinking here. One of the main advantages of Poser Pro is faster rendering? How many "professionals" even use Poser for rendering?

And if they want to appeal to professionals, then the last thing they should do is leave the interface alone. Most professionals are trying to be productive and the Poser interface, while it may be "pretty" and even intuitive from a hobbiest's point of view, was definitely not built with productivity in mind.

Quote - One of the main advantages of Poser Pro is faster rendering? How many "professionals" even use Poser for rendering?

Actually it isn't even that much faster from my testing.

Anyway, my take on the whole thing is that if you remove the 'pro' from the 'Poser Pro' name then it is actually a pretty decent Poser 7.5. It has many of the features that people have been wanting in Poser for some time like 64 bits, support for rendering to HDR, network rendering, fixes in 32 bit displacement and so on. Also if enough people buy it, hopefully it will inject much needed cash into the brand and if they keep doing regular updates then perhaps we may yet see a true 'poser pro' someday.

And if nothing else, most of this stuff will perhaps wind up in Poser 8 as well, so even the people who aren't rushing to buy PPro will benefit.

I know a few people that found PoserPro very helpful and worth the upgrade cost. The main interest for them was the render queue , so they could continue working while rendering . It also allows multiple projects to be queued for overnight processing .     If you are really a professional any improvement in throughput is helpful.

Personally I think Poser is dead unless it gets picked up in the professional area. Daz Studio has made a big move in the hobby market and will do better if it gets a cloth simulation package . After all why pay $250 for Poser when studio is free, particularly for a beginner.

$500 does seem to be a big increase for what you get but that price tag for a commercial shop is petty cash.  One decent job pays for it all.

Quote - I know a few people that found PoserPro very helpful and worth the upgrade cost. The main interest for them was the render queue , so they could continue working while rendering . It also allows multiple projects to be queued for overnight processing .     If you are really a professional any improvement in throughput is helpful.

Personally I think Poser is dead unless it gets picked up in the professional area. Daz Studio has made a big move in the hobby market and will do better if it gets a cloth simulation package . After all why pay $250 for Poser when studio is free, particularly for a beginner.

$500 does seem to be a big increase for what you get but that price tag for a commercial shop is petty cash.  One decent job pays for it all.

Sadly I think you might be mistaken here, I think Poser is dead if they try ot move to the professional market, they are just way too far behind the curve and if anything the name Poser in the professional community is not one that makes most graphics pros stand up and go "Oh.. ya.. great program".    Poser doesn't even offer a decent modeling application, which almost all of the other programs in th $500 price range do.  It's rendering capabilities are fairly basic by comparison to most other apps in this price range, and a simple network render function and 64 bit functionality (on the render program only mind you) simply does not close this gap.

The closest thing Poser has to modeling capabilities is the face room, and it still doesn't work with anything other than the two or three figures that came default with Poser 5, making it nearly useless.  Nope, I just can't see Poser making too many inroads into the serious pro market - they've managed to hang onto there market share in the hobbiest market this long because of good third party support, but with Daz Studio gunning for them the last thing they needed was to slap a huge upgrade price tag on a program that quite frankly just doesn't measure up to others in the same price range.

I'm sure there are a few people out there who might have found Poser Pro worth the upgrade cost, but I can't see a lot of other folks like me in the hobbiest realm falling all over themselves to pay more for an upgrade than we paid for our original software.  I also don't see a lot of true graphics pros dropping there $500+ software and flocking over to Poser anytime soon, I just don't think Smith Micro understands this market all that well.  Poser has a niche already - trying to carve out a new niche among true graphic pros is fine, but adding a few features to Poser and more than doubling it's asking price is not going to have the pro market banging down your door by any stretch of the imagination. 

All they are really managing to do is price themselves out of there niche, the hobbiest market, and I don't see the improvements they've made as being anything a true graphics pro is going to be falling all over themselves to purchase.  Most of the graphics programs the pros use already have all this functionality and have had it for quite some time, as well as features that Poser still lacks.  Poser still lags far behind the field when your looking at programs in the $500 price range.

All Smith Micro has really done has made most of us hobbiest types think twice about upgrading and three or four times about the future of Poser itself.  If they are no longer going to keep Poser affordable for us, then odds are good Poser is going to die an untimely and ugly death.  It just doesn't have the power of a $500 3d app, and it certainly is not well spoken of or even well thought of among most true graphics Pro's, who consider it very much a hobbiest app.

Simply slapping a hefty new price tag on what are some nice, but albeit minor upgrades, does not make any of these facts change.  Smith Micro is going to have to do a whole lot more to sell Poser to the professional community as a truly professional app, and I just don't see that happening as it stands now.

I really hope I'm wrong here, I hope that Poser can continue for a long time to come, I really like Poser myself and have spent a lot of really enjoyable hours working with it.  But like most hobbiests I can't afford to plunk down that kind of cash for every minor upgrade that comes down the pike, and while some of the new features are nice, there not $200 nice - at least not to me personally.

But sadly I really think that unless Smith Micro wakes up and smells some coffee, and soon, they are going to end up killing Poser deader than elvis.  Poser is a great program, don't get me wrong, but it cannot and will not compete in the $500 price range - not now, and probably not for a long time to come.  It just doesn't have that kind of horsepower, and if anything they would have to go a long way toward attracting graphics pros - Poser's name recognition actually hurts it in this market, it doesn't help it.

I upgraded to Poser Pro. I wish they'd have come up with a name that didn't seem so much like Poser Pro Pack. Slight improvements. On the bright side, Smith Micro actually did release something. I had my doubts.

I'm one of those people with the $12,000 programs. Okay, Vue Infinite is $700 which is almost there. I use Poser 7 for posing, IMHO only DAZ Studio is better than Poser at posing figures, and only Poser can export them easily to my favored application. I also have more than one computer: the new one and the old one, so network rendering works for me. Plus I'll agree that background rendering is valuable. Set the scene, and once you're happy start a high quality render and go on with the next project.

Poser Pro is buggy in my experience. I tried it, it was noticeably more responsive than P7. Unfortunately, when I set up a test animation with a V4.2 walking into a room, only the animated V4.2 and the room imported. With Poser 7, V4.2's clothes also imported! :-)

(If you're already happy with Poser 7, I'd suggest joining the DAZ Platinum Club and buying their Economic Stimulus Bundle for the $200 that Poser Pro would have cost. Never mind DAZ Studio, Cararra seems to be getting updated and if I didn't have Vue I'd use Cararra.)

Apparently the new PP doesn't add anything in the area of animation?
The ads and documentation don't mention it, and nobody here has said
anything about changes or even bugfixes.

Well, the collada support is sort of an animation enhancement, at least from an integration-to-pipeline-workflow point of view.

I only got it because it was $200, would not have paid $500. It does render better and a LOT faster on both my 32 and 64 bit machines. I have Maya, got it mainly for the import, but I have to say the program that works with Daz Studio is much better for that. I probably won't be upgrading again, not real excited about it. Most folks won't feel the need to upgrade at $200, much less $500, yes, I think they are pricing themselves out of the market. I do use Poser for quick little jobs, but moving more on to using Maya as I learn more.

Poser Pro seems an attempt to resell an existing package at a higher price with a minimum of improvements. As a marketing ploy, it is muddled. There is an assumption that professionals will want to export Poser to their high-end programs, yet the actual improvement in Poser Pro is limited to a native renderer few professionals would bother with. Poser still survives because of content (largely the product of its user base.) How is it that Daz is able to gain the upper hand in content creation? The creators are out there and largely free agents who would jump at the chance to work for the flagship of Poserdom. There are Poser figure riggers who have exceeded the best attempts of Poser and Daz. Some of them haven’t even released a product yet. If Poser Pro had come packed with new content, great figures with improved rigging, there would have been a chance of attracting the dollars of its user base. Courting the professional market with a half-baked reissue of Poser 7 is doomed to fail, I fear. I can’t blame Smith Micro though since this strategy originated with e-frontier.

Quote - I don't understand the thinking here. One of the main advantages of Poser Pro is faster rendering? How many "professionals" even use Poser for rendering?

And if they want to appeal to professionals, then the last thing they should do is leave the interface alone. Most professionals are trying to be productive and the Poser interface, while it may be "pretty" and even intuitive from a hobbiest's point of view, was definitely not built with productivity in mind.

Absolutely right. Poser's renderer is so far behind almost anything else out there that I can't imagine any 'Pro' user choosing  it above anything else,  and the rest of Poser's navigation and interface is so clunky and inefficient that it's an ordeal for anyone who is accustomed to 'pro' applications.

I try to do as little as possible in Poser (just posing and exporting) because I'm always amazed at how tedious every little operation is. Even for a hobby application (where, by definition, users are trying to pass the time) simple tasks in Poser just suck too many hours out of a lifetime. The developers have steadfastly refused to make ANY aspects of workflow more efficient. Calling it 'Pro' in its current state is just laughable.

Almost any 'professional' application understands that there will be 'power users'  who like to set up their own keyboard shortcuts, or users who have a three (or more) button mouse and would like to use more than just one button. And the fact that I have to turn off IK EVERY @^($^& TIME I LOAD A FIGURE just kinda sums Poser up for me.

Sure, Poser has 'power users' too but I view them as stubborn masochists who are prepared to invest astonishing amounts of time and effort in creating ok-looking skin or in overcoming the program's 3rd-rate lighting, things which are easy in a typical 'professional' application.

Two things that would make Poser more attractive to me as a 'Pro' would be:

1. Support for sub-D mesh, so I could build and paint a sub-D figure in modo, bring him into Poser for rigging and posing, then export him back to modo for rendering.
2. Decent user interface, preferences settings and navigation so I can set it up the way I want to work. The Kai interface was cool once (compared to the DOS command prompts of the day) but this is 2008, the world has turned a bit since then.

If they are going to call it 'Pro' it follows that there will be some distinction between a 'Pro' version and a 'Hobby' version, right? So the people who actually like the the current interface will have a choice to stay with it if they want.

I doubt they will change the UI anytime soon. Too many people have been using it for years and will scream bloody murder if they touch it. Easier to just start fresh with new code and a new app, which is what i had hoped they would do with 'pro.'

Maybe they should just buy Quidam or something and incorporate that into future versions.

Quote - I doubt they will change the UI anytime soon. Too many people have been using it for years and will scream bloody murder if they touch it.

That's the thing. How long does it take to get used to a new interface - a few days? As soon as you move between several 3D applications on a regular basis you become more flexible and more able to accommodate the differences between them. When you're fluent in several applications it may take an hour or two to really settle in after switching from one to another and conflicting keyboard shortcuts will probably catch you out from time to time, but moving from one well-designed interface to another well-designed interface really isn't a big deal.

I think the only people who will resist any change to the interface are those whose whole 3D world is Poser, those who use only Poser, no other 3D, rendering or modeling software. Surely Poser Pro, with its fancy exporters, isn't aimed at them? I would say that all 'professional' users and a great many hobby users routinely switch between different 3D programs and for them a new, efficient, well-designed and customizable interface for Poser Pro would mean far more than the current clunky-but-familiar one.

And there's always Poser 7 if you don't like Pro, can't justify the outlay or can't cope with a change.

Eh.... I've been using Poser since version 4, BEFORE the update to 4.01...

No interest here in upgrading. Sorry, but for all the issues there is with 7 (don't EVEN get me started on things like the absolutely rediculously HUGE MEMORY HOLE), I'm not even going to CONSIDER 'upgrading' until I see some SERIOUS work done on the renderer, the gods-be-darned memory hole, the load times, the random firefly crashes, the random jack-up of my textures between objects in a scene, the random crash-to-desktops.... some actual DECENT lighting controls instead of this hair-pulling insanely frustrating system we currently have, a cloth room that actually does NOT make my computer choke, laugh at me, and then spit Poser out it's hind end and laugh some more at me....................

I could go on. But I won't. : )

Long story short? I'm sure as hell NOT shelling out $200, MUCH LESS $500!!!!....for a program like P7 'Pro' until I see some serious improvements on pretty much ALL aspects of the program. shrugs Not worth it to me. I've used Poser, I've used Daz Studio, and ALREADY, for all the issues I have with Studio, and all the headaches it causes me.. Studio will render scenes on my computer that Poser simply crashes on and is incapable of rendering due to 'memory issues.' For that reason, I find myself lately building my scene in Poser, saving the .pz3 and then just importing it to Studio for the sole purpose of lighting tweaks and rendering.

Poser 7 Pro? No thanks.

~ Seliah

Quote - the random crash-to-desktops

Does anyone know if this has been fixed? I've got all the service packs for P7 installed and the latest video drivers for my graphics card and P7 still does this. Sometime in the middle of rendering and sometimes, at the finish of rendering a scene, it will pause at the last few render bars, the crash to desktop. Just recently, P7 crashed to desktop while rendering a simple picture frame sitting on the ground plane with nothing else in the scene. I thought that was really odd and it shouldn't have crashed.

Quote - Studio will render scenes on my computer that Poser simply crashes on and is incapable of rendering due to 'memory issues.

I've noticed the same thing. Studio will render scenes that were saved as cr2's in P7 that P7 simply  crashes on.

Quote - I've noticed the same thing. Studio will render scenes that were saved as cr2's in P7 that P7 simply  crashes on.

The biggest shining example I have of that is AerySoul's Justice set for V4. I LOVE that set. Absolutely adore it. But I can't work with it (or V4 in general at ALL) inside of Poser without a constant series of crashes and inability to render. If I do the main setup in Poser (for me the workflow in Poser during scene setup is far preferable to that of Studio), save the scene then import to Studio and hit render.. well, that's my solution, anyway. LOL!!

~ Seliah

Quote - > Quote - the random crash-to-desktops

Does anyone know if this has been fixed? I've got all the service packs for P7 installed and the latest video drivers for my graphics card and P7 still does this. Sometime in the middle of rendering and sometimes, at the finish of rendering a scene, it will pause at the last few render bars, the crash to desktop. Just recently, P7 crashed to desktop while rendering a simple picture frame sitting on the ground plane with nothing else in the scene. I thought that was really odd and it shouldn't have crashed.

Quote - Studio will render scenes on my computer that Poser simply crashes on and is incapable of rendering due to 'memory issues.

I've noticed the same thing. Studio will render scenes that were saved as cr2's in P7 that P7 simply  crashes on.

I couldn't say for certain, I haven't had a problem with Poser 7 crashing in a long time, it used to happen regularly until I found something very, very odd.  At one point Poser 7 was crashing on me about every 15 minutes or so, I tried everything to fix it, and started doing some reading on the subject when I ran across a blurb somewhere about the firefly render engine caching files to disk.

Naturally this wasn't a huge piece of information, but it got me thinking, so I tried running a defrag on my drive, and sure enough Poser was stable as the rock of gibralter afterwords, I was rendering scenes that was crashing it just a few hours before with no stability problems at all.  Since then I've been regularly defragging and Poser has been solid as a rock ever since.

Bizarre really, since fragmented files on a disk should slow access times somewhat, but certainly should have such a huge effect on a programs overall stability, but it does.  After I learned this little quirk I setup the machines at work to defrag automatically overnight, and sure enough the stability problems on the few boxes that use poser are gone.

Can't say as that will fix your problem, but it sure fixed mine.

Quote - I doubt they will change the UI anytime soon. Too many people have been using it for years and will scream bloody murder if they touch it. Easier to just start fresh with new code and a new app, which is what i had hoped they would do with 'pro.'

Maybe they should just buy Quidam or something and incorporate that into future versions.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind some changes in the UI personally, but I'd like to see the workflow improved.  Programmers have a really bad habit of changing the UI just to change the UI - they have a particularly nasty habit of add a lot of complexity without adding a lot of functionality in a lot of cases.

So when I looked at Poser Pro 7 I was happy to see that they hadn't gone in and just given it a "face lift" for lack of a better term.  I wouldn't mind changes to the UI that actually improve the workflow at all, but if those aren't available my thinking is leave the interface alone.  Don't change it just to say you changed it.

Microsoft is probably the worst offender in this regard, having worked with dozens of different versions of office they have the most annoying habit of taking a menu item out of one menu and putting it under another for no explicable reason from one version of the software to the next.  The menu feature itself doesn't change, it isn't a more "logical" order or anything that makes sense, they just take a feature from one menu and put it on another menu, or worse yet a submenu somwhere, and it makes finding it from version to version a real pain.

Gets worse when your working in a shop that actually has several different versions of Office running at the same time on different boxes.. then you have to try and remember which version the guy has and where that particular feature is hidden.

Not to worry though, I have it on good authority that the guys at Microsoft who make there living moving items from one menu to another just so they can say they "upgraded" the program will indeed be the first one's against the wall when the revolution comes.

Why didn't they make PPro so that the UI gave the user a variety of choices? D/S is free and they give the user choices when it comes to interface setup. Take your pick.

I agree that the UI should benifit workflow. We're talking about one they didn't change much if any at all when competition has been. What's the point in expressing that others make their's wrong? The fact is they never tried to improve it; so there's not much to judge that you haven't seen before and if you liked it you're still happy, but then you've never seen anything they improved with the UI that you might have said that's a lot better. What's the point in mentioning UI? There is none. Been there done that.

Since getting Poser 5, then 6, I have seen no reason yet to go further down the upgrade line.
Poser is essential for the types of renders I like to do, ie. with characters, but I rarely render with Poser anymore.
I love Poser for characters, posing and skin shaders.
Vue for outdoor scenes - terrain, vegetation and lighting.
And C4D because it's so damn stable, quick and flexible with render options.
So I'm left with exporting, importing, re-sizing, re-texturing - quite a chore but very satisfying when you finally get all the elements to shake hands.
Now, if we could get a program to do all these things in one package, it would blow the rest away.
I'm not holding my breath.
A new program called Your All-In-One 3D Solution.

 excuse me - there is one really really major improvement.  remember how renders in poser are dark, and then asyou put in more lights the render becomes really awful.  well now the lighting looks way better - brighter and lighter and really nice.,
Love esther

**With regard to this estherau.
Lighting via HDR IBL with P7 looks really good.
But not good enough to pay for P7 or PoserPro when I can import to C4D or Vue or Max which I alread have, (and do the whole thing much better and much quicker.)
This "only one major improvement" is not enough for me to upgrade when I have these other programs to fiddle with. Some don't, so maybe the upgrade is worth it.
I do really love Poser and use it all the time. But not really a good enough3D renderer when it's now approaching the price of higher end programs.

**

i do have C4D and the sketch&toon renderer, but for my toons i really like olivier's art materials in combo with semidieu's shaderworks rendered in poser. (and they import into vue)
Sketch&toon isn't all that easy to use with transparency when i'm trying to make lots of toon panels
love esther
ps i often don't render in poser when i'm not tooning, but there are times.  it's worth it for me.

Making the render engine work as expected isn't really a reason to call it "Pro".

Quote - Making the render engine work as expected isn't really a reason to call it "Pro".

To me, everyone seems to be forgetting the whole point of this "Pro" version is the integrating of it for use with other (high end) rendering solutions in order to (again) integrate Poser into a more "Pro" pipeline for those "Pro" results that the pros require.  I don't see any point in wondering about speed increases and stability of the Firefly engine as the whole point of using Poser Pro is to output your Poser scene to render in another 3D application.  And for that Poser Pro seems to be doing exactly as promised.  Granted it's just Bodystudio (which had a bad rep) renamed to PoserFusion but it does work and like this new Poser Pro's grand daddy Poser Pro Pack it worked too.  

Let's honestly look at Poser Pro for what it is and not try to look at it as a replacement for Poser 7 or 6 or whatever...   it's the spiritual successor of Poser Pro Pack as far as I'm concerned.

Yay Poser Pro!!!

Gerard