well, I really ahven't gotten any real warm and fuzzies with the release of Poser 7, nor Poser Pro.
Remember when Poser 4 was released, or 5, even 6? There was so much chatter here about these versions...for a long time.
Now 7 came out, pretty quiet.
Pro just came out and there is hardly a peep about this baby.

I'm still using 6, and have been contemplating the question of upgrading to 7 or not. And now there's Pro...maybe I would upgrade to Pro Basic ....

But is there really any reason to? Some earthshattering thing that I have to have in either version? Or just something cool?

No one seems all too excited about either version, especially Pro.

Upgrade to 7. Usually each new Poser version doesn't work OK until SP2

Upgrading from P6 to 7Pro is reasonable inexpensive but I wont make a final decision until June 29th. The reason why there's no buzz about P7 Pro is that everyone's investigating its new capabilities ;)

The basic version is simply not worth the money. Not more than what other companies delivers as free updates.

The larger version may be usefull if you want to hand over Poser data to another app. But, in most cases, this job is better done by some external free or commercial apps.

Stepping from 6 to 7 makes sense. But perhaps it may be clever to wait two or three month with an upgrade to what they named "pro".

Getting 7 is a no brainer, it supports multiple cores so you will be able to render faster and it's generally more stable then P6 IMO.

PPro is more of a challenge to justify. If you specifically need one of it's features, like say 64 bit (for rendering large scenes) or export to other apps (via COLLADA or plugins) then it's worth considering. Otherwise i would wait till at least the first service pack.

I would have bought pro if quidam was included, but will stick p6 and p7 as can render large scenes with p7 under xp 64.

I have to say I upgraded to Poser 7 and yet, I still do 99% of my Poser work in Poser 6. Poser 7 hasn't added anything that I really use that I can't do in Poser 6 with more stability on my systems.

Maybe I haven't given it much of a chance but when I try doing something as simple as changing the colors of the nodes in the material room my cursor dissappears and I have to mouse all over the place and just pray i find the color I'm looking for. It still locks up my systems with minimally large scenes, even my new Dual Core Vista machine with 3 gigs of ram. Not So, Poser 6!

All of my Poser 6 content works fairly brilliantly in Carrara 5 & 6 Pro now as well, if I want to make larger scenes or make use of a better Renderer. What other tools do you have? Do you really need to upgrade to get what you already have with other Poser supporting apps? If so, why throw away your money?

There are a few little glitches with Poser Pro, though it's nice and stable, and fast on a 64-Bit machine / OS. I think they're going to have to put out an SP1 quite quickly to deal with the glitches found so far.

I, likewise, upgraded to Poser 7 and found myself using P6 all the time. P7 was just sluggish on my system, dualcore Vista with 4 gig.
I went ahead and got Poser Pro Base and, after an initial problem with video card settings, I find that I prefer Pro to P6 or P7. For me, it renders large scenes better, is much more responsive navigating the viewport, and all around is just more pleasant to use.
I find the gamma correct very useful, especially the ability to choose between final render gamma or individual gamma correct for each texture in the material room.
If upgrading from P6, it would probably be better to spend the extra $25 or so to get Pro Base.
 

You can do gamma correction even with P4.

If you use individual gamma correction with PP for a texture, you have to do it over and over again, because PP will loos this parameter after a restart.

When I first got P7 I sang its praises but since I upgraded my video card P7 isn't playing nice anymore. I may find myself going back to P6 and with me upgrading to Vue 6 Inf in the near future I don't know if I will be doing much rendering in Poser. Vue also has the ability to adjust the gamma as well as my paint program. As far as PP I really don't have use for the collada, max ot poser fusion plug ins as I do not have these programs nor would be using them. Actually, I'd like to see an SR3 patch for P7 with the hopes if it fixing some of the bugs but I don't know when that will happen. Poser 7 has some really great features and I love the multi core support but the program is subject to strange crashes caused by things that shouldn't be making it crash.

Never had or used P4.
Just checked and you are correct on individual gamma not being saved in the pz3. Still, for my purpose, Pro is more usable for me than P6, and P7 was not. JMO.
Maybe we could at least give them one service release.
I'm sure nearly everyone here is more technically proficient with the program than I am, so take any opinion of mine with a grain of salt.
 

Attached Link: Poser Pro Released

LOL that is so not true. It's just that we don't need 50 threads about it.

Follow the link. At the time of me writing this, it has 499 replies and has been viewed 12,607 times.

Hardly a peep? Hah. That's several hundred peeps.

Well most of my peeps in that thread are really just to help my dragon eggs grow. LOL!

Quote - well, I really ahven't gotten any real warm and fuzzies with the release of Poser 7, nor Poser Pro.
Remember when Poser 4 was released, or 5, even 6? There was so much chatter here about these versions...for a long time.
Now 7 came out, pretty quiet.
Pro just came out and there is hardly a peep about this baby.

I'm still using 6, and have been contemplating the question of upgrading to 7 or not. And now there's Pro...maybe I would upgrade to Pro Basic ....

But is there really any reason to? Some earthshattering thing that I have to have in either version? Or just something cool?

No one seems all too excited about either version, especially Pro.

Well, I don't own a copy of pro but I've worked with one on the job - had a chance to peruse it, I can tell you I won't be upgrading to it anytime soon.  Don't get me wrong, it isn't "horrible" by any means, it looks and feels a lot like 7, in fact it's nearly identical except for a couple of extra options here and there.

Ok, the upside to pro - it does have a new 64 bit render engine with network rendering capabilities.  Sounds great, but a couple of caveats - the network rendering looks fantastic on paper but so far in practice I'd have to say it's relatively unstable in the testing I've done with it.  Sometimes I get a render, sometimes I get an error and the process blows up and I get nothing.  Seems to be almost a coin flip as to which you'll get with network rendering.

The 64 bit firefly renderer - ok, honestly, this sounds cooler than what it actually is - it doesn't seem to render much faster than the 32 bit version.. my testing indicates no real appreciable speed difference on an AMD 64 3400+ with 2 Gig's of ram.     The 64 bit is just slightly faster, to the tune of on average 5 -10 seconds on a 5-8 minute render.

Also note while the render engine is 64 bit, the poser application itself is still 32 bit.

So all in all I thought the $200 upgrade price was pretty outrageous considering it is only a very minor upgrade from the 7 I already have, and the fact that I only paid about $150 for the full version of 7 I currently own.. no upgrade price break for me, this was the full version.

Your situation might vary - considering that your already considering upgrading anyway.  Personally I'll stick with version 7 for now - it's stable on my system as long as I keep the drive defragged and does what I need it to do.

Be a long time before I look at Smith Micro for an upgrade after this debacle - $500 for the full version is outrageous consider how far behind hte curve Poser "PRO" is compared to every other 3d app in that price range, and $200 for an upgrade is a total joke considering how minor that upgrade really turns out to be if you already own version 7, especially when like me you paid less than $200 for the full, non-upgrade version of 7 to begin with. 

So nope, Smith Micro hasn't really impressed me overmuch - they obviously lack a serious understanding of the market, they have massively overpriced Poser Pro to the point where I fear they are going to kill the app.  Not many true pros use poser, and simply adding in a couple of minor upgrades and almost quadrupling the asking price is not going to change that or make in roads into any market.  That's just, well, forgive my french but really damn stupid.

Every other 3d app you can get in the $500 price range stomps Poser into the dirt in almost every category.  Not sure what they are smoking over there at Smith Micro, but whatever it is I fear it's going to leave them with a serious hang over and soon.  Just hope they don't manage to completely kill Poser in the meantime with there absolutely moronic marketing strategy.

Ok, rant over.. Poser Pro?  Not worth the price IMHO, no significant advantages over version 7, and certainly not $200 worth of upgrades from Version 7. 

Going from P6 to P7 wasn't worth it for me so I skipped. Worked with P7 at work and compared to P6 it was just to sloooooow. I did like some of the new features, but they weren't worth the money and the slowness.

The release of Poser Pro seemed interesting and discussed it with my wife, she encouraged me to really look into it. I read the initial very few reports about PP and how it behaved much better then P7 and looking at the dollar rate (compared to the Euro) I decided to buy.

Have not regretted it. Poser Pro feels like what Poser 6 should have been al along. Better memory managment, faster response, faster loading times, faster rendering, better handling of larger and on top of that all the good features from P7.

I seriously do not see the point in not upgrading from P6 to PP Base since you get all the extra's from PP for just $20 and have a more stable & faster version of P7. I seriously wouldn't waste my money on P7 at all.

I'm very sure Poser Pro will not save Poser at all from being taken out of development, far from it, Poser Pro may well prove that the poser community has lost interest in the development of Poser AS IS. Smith Micro needs to get on a completely different road with the deveopment of Poser and give it a complete overhaul and fixing and adding the features that should have been added or fixed years ago. E-Frontier completely failed to realise that and the same team from EF is still working on Poser. I'm 100% sure they will not do what is really needed and will continue the same road of adding features and content, leaving untouched what should have been taken care of years ago. Poser Pro must have cost quite some $$$ to develop and I'm pretty sure the sales are even worse then P7 sales, so this may well have been the last version of Poser released, I'm not going to hold my breath for Poser 8 (or PP 2 or whatever). SM will wake up soon enough to realize they've got an product that cost a lot to update, maintain and develop, with an expensive development team & staff and a small user base that gets smaller with each new version. They will realize also that EF made the huge mistake by thinking they can read the 'high end' users by adding the word Pro to Poser without offering anything substancial to the audience they're aiming at. Adding it all up will most likely lead to a very sad conclusion.... the end of the development of Poser.

Have you all noticed how the complete development team of Poser and the staff at CP gone missing? They used to interact to an extend with users, now they don't even bother to reply to emails anymore. Anyone try to reach SM customers service with questions/bugs related to PP? I've tried and others did, to no avail. All of these aren't good signs at all & SM clearly shows they do not care about nor understand the poser community at all. Letting the P6 users in to the PP deal is worrying also.... don't get me wrong I'm very thankfull that SM allows me to upgrade from P6 skipping one version, peying the same price, but it isn't a good sign at all.

With all of that in mind I can rest assure that I did purchase the best available Poser version that will serve me well for many years to come if it comes to the worse and SM decided to stop the future development of Poser..... which to me seems just a matter of time.

Has anyone found a solution for PoserPro and Open GL preview?  Apparently my graphics card, GeForce 8800GTS or Windows Vista Ulitimate won't support it and I'm forced to use the Spree preview.  I've got the latest drivers.  My computer has plenty of beef to run PoserPro and generally I'm pleased with the exception of the Open GL issue and the occasional crash.

My system is:
Motherboard  Asus Maximus Formula Special Edition
CPU   Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Quad-Core (Penryn)
Ram   4 x OCZ DDR2-800 Reaper 2048MB w/ Heatpipe Cooling
Video Card  XFX GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
Sound Card  Asus Xonar D2X PCI-Express
Hard Drives  3 x Western Digital SATA Raptor 150GB
CD / DVD  Lite-On Blu-ray Burner SATA
Asus 20x DVD-RW Lightscribe SATA
Case   Antec P182 with Extreme Liquid Cooling Package
Power Supply  Seasonic 700W Modular
CPU Cooling  Koolance CPU Waterblock CPU-330
Liquid Cooling:  Video Koolance GeForce 8800GT/GTS Waterblock
ATech 28-in-1 USB 2.0 Internal/External Card Reader (black)
Monitor    SAMSUNG SyncMaster 305T 30 inch LCD Monitor
Speakers   Logitech X-240
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1

Try a downgrade to XP :))

so its a tossup then :)
I did read some of that thread when it first started that bagginsbill posted .... will have to give it another read.
It seems if I'm to upgrade at all it will be PP Basic...not much sense in going to 7 with PP just $25 more, but I guess I'm looking more at whether it even makes sense for me to upgrade at all.

Will have to look a lot closer at the feature lists.

I'm not feeling a whole lot of excitement over either release..more like the end of the app.

Get Kerkythea - its free. You'll have tons of new stuff to play with and once you learn to move your content into it (I'm learning) and learn to use its shaders system and lights, its like WOWEE WOW. Kerky renders faster than Poser does, even with global illumination! It does real subsurface scattering, diffusion, and absorption! It does multi-threaded background rendering and network rendering, too.

adp001:**
Try a downgrade to XP :))

**:thumbupboth:

that renderer looks mighty interesting. thanks for that link.

Using Vista 64 bits now with new computer
Poser7 and Poser 7 Pro Open Gl preview  are  very good on ndvidia  9600 GT . But Spree render preview is not as  good  as it was with my old ATI  8500

Working with Poser every day to generate art for an online comics site, I consider myself a "Poser Pro" and the target audience for the new release.  I just see too many features that I'll never use, and the ones I would just make me a little miffed that they weren't integrated into the standard release of Poser 7.  Looking at the limited time offer for the upgrade price of $200, I also think it's a slight to their userbase.  After suffering through the bugs and quirks that Poser 6 and 7 presented, I feel like the Pro version should be a bonus to the loyal users who continue to support the brand.

I've begun switching over to DAZ Studio where I can, and I use Carrara 6 Pro for more advanced render options.  The price for those packages was absurdly little, they developers interact with the community who uses the product and they seem genuinely interested in progressing the products.  The ball on Poser was dropped a long time ago, and Smith-Micro does not seem capable of picking it up.

I've been a Poser customer since version 1, but I'm passing on Poser Pro and moving my library elsewhere.  I'm sure it's better than Poser 7, but I'm not giving them another $200 for a product that has continued to let me down.

Well, I'm probably going going to get Pro because I skipped P7 entirely.

There is one feature of Pro that I think will really help IF PPro get's decent acceptance, and that's Normal Map support. It's a big deal event hough it seems minor. With Normal maps, a Very low resolution figure, in the 3000 to 6000 polygon range, can show as much detail as a figure with a 100,000 polygon mesh.

While Lightwave was excluded from the supported 3rd Party 3D apps, there is also enough support for better applications. If I'm going to make a living in 3D I need to learn Zbrush, Maya, and Max. That's just the way it is. Maybe Cinema 4D as well.

If PPro help me makes it easier to use my 3D library in those apps. It's worth it.

Otherwise, I see no reason to upgrade... from Poser 6.

If you bought P7, and use it, It might be worth it to WAIT for another Generation of Poser.

The other side of this is, Smith Micro is where graphic apps go to die. They don't really develop software, they buy it and  milk it into obsolescence. So this will PROBABLY be the last version of Poser. We've all heard that before, but Smith Mirco is different. They don't buy stuff with dreams of making it profitable now. They buy it to own it, and keep it going only enough feed the dwindling demand.

They aren't going to go Belly up, and they probably aren't going to sell off the property in 2 to 3 years.

Quote - Get Kerkythea - its free. You'll have tons of new stuff to play with and once you learn to move your content into it (I'm learning) and learn to use its shaders system and lights, its like WOWEE WOW. Kerky renders faster than Poser does, even with global illumination! It does real subsurface scattering, diffusion, and absorption! It does multi-threaded background rendering and network rendering, too.

Interesting.  Does it handle animations as well?

No it doesn't do animation or posing or morphs, and it doesn't do displacement.

So its really only good for stills, with all geometry imported in final form.

You can position, rotate, and scale things, but not pose them.

With the render in background and the 64 bit render and the queue manager Poser 7 Pro is a great suggestion for all who have a 64 bit OS with plenty of memory and processing capacity.

In short anyone with P6 and a 64 bit OS should sidegrade to P7P, anyone with P7 and a 64 OS should consider it (if you would like to continue tweaking your scene or another scene while rendering, or if you like to render several scenes or an animation overnight, or if you have a render farm capability), for all others the sidegrade isn't worth it and if you haven't upgraded to P7 yet this version isn't much better so there's no new reason to upgrade.

Personally I have sidegraded (from P7 to P7P) and what I've seen up to now I like. As I am moving to another machine and another OS I am taking the opportunity to reinstall all my runtimes in a new (and hopefully better) structure so it'll be a while before I'm actually going to use P7P properly.