Quote - What deecey said!

In the last year, I've been putting in a concerted effort to get more familiar and friendly with Poser renderering and materials. It's a really nice setup for a pretty simple application, and does the trick for a lot of things.

Howeverrrr..... When I want to achieve top notch results, I keep bumping it's limitations and awkwardness in how it handles a number of things.
I have to go through five tutorials, dozens of posts and a lot of trial and error to get a pretty high end render out of it - with nice lighting and soft shadows and AO etc...

Last week I finally decided to get my hands on Max and Vray combo that's been sitting around here unused while I've been tinkering with Poser. Guess what, in a day of reading documentation and tutorials I had renders with much higher quality.... and I'm barely scratching the surface of what Max+vray or max+mental ray can do.

Trying to compare Poser to high end apps would be a little like comparing a Toyota to a Jet. Both can get you from point A to point B, but in a different way, different time frame, different cost, different purpose, different capacity... They both have their purpose.

But, when a car driver tries to convince, or even persistently insist to a jet pilot that their toyota can do the same thing as a jet, well, it is very likely to encounter a bit of an annoyed attitude.
Toyota driver would be equally annoyed if a bycicle rider had the same isnistant (and non understanding) attitude towards them.

Well, the point many of us were trying to make was not that the Toyota is a bad way to get around, just that it seems silly for the makers of Toyota to start expecting you to pay "Jet" prices for it.

I really like Poser - get a lot of use out of it at home.  But it's not a pro level application and needs a huge overall before it could even come close to being considered a pro application.  A couple of extra features and some exporting importing utilities are not going to make most 3ds max users say "Hey, where can I go to give somebody my $500 for Poser?"

The point we were attempting to make wasn't that Poser is a bad program, merely that it is not now nor has it ever been a professional graphics app, and Smith Micro's strategy of going after the "pro" market is going to go over like a lead balloon.  It's just a horrible idea.  Most pro's have a very dim view of Poser to start with, and while the app does have it's advantages it's certainly no where near as feature rich as most of the stuff you can get in the $500 price range.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...