My copy of it is still downloading ... and good grief it is a slow slow download tested my speed and everything else will download with my usual speed except for the smith micro downloads I sure hope poser 8 is going to be faster then its download other then that i am pretty excited to see what it will be like ... in 8 hours or so -_-

My impressions are:
 
better rendering + (better results, realistic )
faster loading + (the content and the startup)
docking panels + (good)
drag and drop - (this is useless, is better the old double click)
tree navigation - (the thumbs are ridiculous small, you have to click an item to see a descent thumb)
firefly only- (no poser 4 render engine)
lights + (a lot better)
besides this changes, the program is the same.

Ockham have you got everything else up to date? video drivers, flash that sort of thing? I know a long shot but whenever Poser throws a hissy fit for me it's 99% the video drivers. oh yeah,  what version of Windows are you using it in? 32bit/64bit?

@ ockham

Looking at the psycho pic you just posted I noticed sumfink.

Are you sure you have a previous Poser Runtime attached to your Poser 8?

The reason I ask is that... you are showing:

Poser 8 containing 3 folders

Downloads with no folders

C: with 1 folder

Should there not be a Poser 5, 6, 7 or Poser Pro with a gazillion folders..?

Okay.
Using indirect lighting?
I can't even move the mouse anymore, it lags my machine so much. (1gb SLI Nvidia cards, 5gb system RAM, AMD Phenom. Not exactly a slow system.)

Gonna have to work out how to do the GI part still, but so far I've crashed twice, I ended up crashing it on purpose the third time, because I couldn't do anything anymore on this box because I ticked indirect lighting...
Results so far?
Nil.

Quote - Hey, this is fun.  I widened the library until I saw the circly thing, and now it's stuck
in a wonderful psychedelic arrangement, with no way to pull it back.

This is a graphics driver problem for sure.  Whether it's something you can fix I've no idea, but it's almost certainly graphics driver related.

Quote - Okay.
Using indirect lighting?
I can't even move the mouse anymore, it lags my machine so much. (1gb SLI Nvidia cards, 5gb system RAM, AMD Phenom. Not exactly a slow system.)

This is an obscure phenomenon called "100% CPU utilization".  In rendering, it is generally a good thing.  If you really, really, really need to do other crap besides render, you can try reducing the # of threads (assuming you have a multi-core machine).  Renders will of course take longer.

Quote - Okay.
Using indirect lighting?
I can't even move the mouse anymore, it lags my machine so much. (1gb SLI Nvidia cards, 5gb system RAM, AMD Phenom. Not exactly a slow system.)

Gonna have to work out how to do the GI part still, but so far I've crashed twice, I ended up crashing it on purpose the third time, because I couldn't do anything anymore on this box because I ticked indirect lighting...
Results so far?
Nil.

Where do you find the settings, etc., for indirect lighting and GI..? Please.

The bad news is that there is no more P4 Renderer. If you still use the P4 Renderer for your artwork, I created a tutorial on my website about how to "tune" your material settings to work with the Firefly Renderer: P4 Style Render with the FireFly Renderer. And, yes, I knew about this issue way-back-when (which is why I created this tutorial), but I couldn't say anything because of the NDA. ;)

Here are some other answers:

1. Since Poser 8 uses Flash to display the Libraries Palette, you will need to install Flash Player 10. If you don't have Flash 10, the Libraries Palette will display a message saying "Please upgrade to the latest version".

You will also have to allow FFRender.exe through your firewall, even if you don't use network rendering. I don't know if FFRender.exe has to access the internet every time you use Poser or if it just needs to connect once to update the Flash Player.

If you don't allow FFRender through your firewall, or if you don't upgrade to Flash 10, the Libraries Palette won't display for you.

1. Once the Libraries Palette is working, it's very nice. Like other people have said, switching between Runtimes is almost instant. The folders display how many items are in each one, which is a cool feature.
   The icons in the new Library are tiny, but expand to the full 91x91 pixels when you click on them. See attached screen shot.
   I haven't come across a preference setting to enlarge the size of the icons.

There aren't really any settings to speak of.  There is a checkbox "Indirect Lighting" and a quality slider.  Irradiance Caching quality also affects it.  That's all the settings.

Ok, my first render.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1926668

3) And the major issue for me is that the document window doesn't display properly. This was fixed in an earlier build, but for some reason, it's not working for me in the "final" build with a "hotfix" applied. Whenever I open a new scene, the scene is displayed in the lower-right corner of the document window.
Now, granted, my video card is a Radeon 9200, which may be out dated, but P7 and Poser Pro both worked fine and this issue was fixed in an earlier build of P8, only to be "broken" in the final release.

However, this may be one of times when I'm the only person having this issue. So, this may or may not be an issue for other people. But, if you have an older computer, be aware that existing scene files may not display correctly.

I reported this to the Poser 8 techs, so they know about this issue.

Quote -  You will also have to allow FFRender.exe through your firewall, even if you don't use network rendering. I don't know if FFRender.exe has to access the internet every time you use Poser or if it just needs to connect once to update the Flash Player.

The FFRenderer in Poser Pro also needs permission to go through the firewall, but it is NOT accessing the internet for anything.

If you check in your firewall settings, etc., you will find that the FFRender.exe is accessing your own computer.

I don't understand all the techno babble, but a techie friend assured me that that is the case.

I suspect it is the same with Poser 8.

Quote - There aren't really any settings to speak of.  There is a checkbox "Indirect Lighting" and a quality slider.  Irradiance Caching quality also affects it.  That's all the settings.

Ah ha... found them lurking in the manual render settings menu. I hadn't found them before as I always render in max auto render settings.

Ooh boy this "precalculating indirect light" sure takes its time. And I don't even know if it'll make any difference with the lightset I'm using, I just imported the scene I was working on in Poser 7 earlier today to do a comparison render. It's still precalculating... leaving little red dots all over the place, I assume it's a represenations of photons or whatever. Looks pretty funky L

Other than that, installation went well. I used the last option of the four (?) I think because I have my Poser all installed on their own harddisk away from the windoze install and all. Dunno if it made any difference than the default but I thought I'd try.

ETA Ah now it finished precalculating the red dots and went on to Rendering. My computer is now seriously lagging but the rendering has started ^_^ I suppose I should have set the number of threads and stuff like in Poser 7, but I was too eager and forgot about that so it's probably only utilizing one of my two cores at the moment. Oh well... it WORKS!

Chances are it will be way too bright.  Indirect lighting (GI) brightens a scene, so it is likely you will have to tone down your lights everywhere to stay around the same brightness, and also many fill lights may no longer be necessary.

Quote - Ok, my first render.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1926668

Are you on Facebook?  Can you post that to the Poser facebook page?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Poser-3D-Figure-Design/106113697478?ref=ts

Or submit it to the gallery at CP -
http://support.contentparadise.com/submit.html

We'd love to show off the first Poser 8 renders to the world and will be adding more to the Poser 8 website!

I have a render precalculating indirect light at the moment as well... looks like all the figures in the scene have the meezles..!!

Quote -
Where do you find the settings, etc., for indirect lighting and GI..? Please.

Hi,
go to render settings, "manual settings" tab, press "acquire from auto", then checkmark the
"indirect light" box.

Best regards,
   Michael

Thanks Michael... found it a couple of minutes ago :-)

 Bleh. 2/3 through the rendering, it crashed. 
I noticed that it was a LOT darker than the Poser 7 version. I haven't looked yet (because I don't know where to look or what to look for) but could this be something with the gamma correction thing? Since I haven't tried Poser 7 Pro I'm not sure what exactly it does.

Quote - Chances are it will be way too bright.  Indirect lighting (GI) brightens a scene, so it is likely you will have to tone down your lights everywhere to stay around the same brightness, and also many fill lights may no longer be necessary.

Actually it was a LOT darker.

And I used the Albany Nights HDRI AO lightset from Poser 7, so there weren't a lot of fill lights ;)

Now I just need to figure out WHY it was so dark...

In view of what pjz99 said regarding intensity of existing lights, etc., I cancelled my render... deleted ALL lights and added 1 infinite light directly above the scene I am rendering.

It has gone through the calculating phase and is now rendering with some interesting results :-)

The overall brightness is almost the same as the 6 lights I deleted.

Objects on top shelves are normally lit. Objects beneath those shelves are in varying degrees of softer shadows... not dark black shadows as one would normally get with just the 1 infinite light above the scene.

The render has a fair way to go yet and is by no means perfect... but... I can see the benifits of the indirect lighting... I guess I just need to adjust settings until I find the optimum setting.

Certainly looks as promising as anticipated. :-)

Ziggie, you bring up a good point.. You normally do not need all the lights if you are using IL.

Unless the Lights are representing true Light sources, you should try the scene without them if using IL.

Quote - Actually it was a LOT darker.

And I used the Albany Nights HDRI AO lightset from Poser 7, so there weren't a lot of fill lights ;)

Now I just need to figure out WHY it was so dark...

Probably because there was something occluding the light.

IBL with indirect light will behave different than without - more realistic. Without indirect light, you can lock a figure in a closed box and it still will be light by IBL - completely unrealistic. If you packed a figure in a box and put it in that space where the IBL was taken, the figure would be completely in the dark. It would only get lit when you open the box and let light in. That's how it behaves when you turn on indirect light: light from an IBL will only reach surfaces that are in an open space where light from the environment can reach it.

Ok, I bought it. Still downloading the content...

Anyone else here has the problem that MAT-poses with the ending .PZ2 won't work until you change the extension to lowercase .pz2 and refresh the folder?

There a demo around yet? If not, will there be one?

stewer i agree with your post 100%.

i am afraid people wont understand GI. i hope people wont complain why they have ''shadows''  in their renders.

 Stewer that makes sense. This render is done in a room. And as such the walls and ceiling may be obscuring the light. I'll try pulling the blinds and see what happens :)

Ok, well I've been playing around mainly with the lights for a couple of hours since I have no content yet (download is painfully slow) and I like the results I'm getting with indirect light.

Renders seem superfast to me compared to Poser 7 - i'm on a quad core and in P7 after each section finished it would just get slower and slower with fewer cores being used.   The P8 renders seem to go by fairly quickly even with near perfect quality settings.

I'm in two minds about the Library - yes all my jam-packed runtimes load much much faster but navigating it is a pain.  First the tiny previews don't allow me to choose what i want unless I preview them all at a larger size and since I make extensive use of subfolders in categorizing stuff it's a pain to navigate back to the beginning of the main folder to exit it.  

Using the navigation arrows from the keyboard has no effect - works for 4 or 5 instances and then mysteriously stops.
I can see myself using P7 to set up scenes and using P8 for lighting and rendering only.   Unless of course P3dO Explorer will work with P8 as well since that's what I have been using up to now to navigate my libraries and open up files in Poser. I have yet to find a better solution to that.

As for the new content, I can't say since I haven't downloaded it yet but I'm pretty sure I will use it about as much as I've used P6 and P7 figures/content - a couple of weeks after getting them and then they started gathering dust.

As for the new UI I really don't care, I can work in that just as well as I could in the previous versions, never saw what the big fuss is about.  I think maybe I gain a few pixels in the preview window's width when it's docked but that prevents changing the window size (which is something I often do) so I keep it floating for now which really amounts to the same size window I had in P7. 

All in all I'd say, for me, the high points are the lights and rendering and I hope future service releases will enhance that.   Also looking forward to what developments we'll have with python scripts.

Ref: Indirect Lighting continued from above....

Okay... I cancelled the final render 3/4 finished as I said before it left much to be desired, but... the indirect lighting certainly works :-)

All the shadows are in the right place and vary in degree of softness.

The shadows pick up the colour of objects close by.

Objects that are in more open areas and with less shadow also pick up the reflected colour of nearby objects.

Looks very promising, however I shall have to wait for someone to produce... 'The Dummies Guide to Indirect Lighting'... otherwise I will just be pushing and poking settings without a clue as to what I am actually doing or effecting... and the renders take a little too long for random experimentation.

Quote - Ok, I bought it. Still downloading the content...

Anyone else here has the problem that MAT-poses with the ending .PZ2 won't work until you change the extension to lowercase .pz2 and refresh the folder?

Yes, this is the case anyway on my Mac, even with Poser 7 and Pro. I don't know about PCs.

But... you surely don't mean to say they've included content with upper case file extensions?
Words fail me.....

Quote - > Quote - Ok, I bought it. Still downloading the content...

Anyone else here has the problem that MAT-poses with the ending .PZ2 won't work until you change the extension to lowercase .pz2 and refresh the folder?

Yes, this is the case anyway on my Mac, even with Poser 7 and Pro. I don't know about PCs.

But... you surely don't mean to say they've included content with upper case file extensions?
Words fail me.....

I noticed that with several DAZ animals poses (MillDog/MillHorse). So far this was no problem on the PC. Don't know about the content, it's  still downloading (and the servers get slower and slower....)

Oops, I told a porky. I only get the problem with Python script extensions. Sorry!

Well my download crashed at 75%... :/

I really would have liked it if you could cancel something faster this time round.
It's still hit or miss.
It would have been damned nice to hit esc and it asks if you want to stop the current task.

 So far it works with all my old runtimes, Poser 4, Poser PRO 4, Poser 6, & 7.....(I never did install 5).  Each one is working great.......must be something I am missing, cause I am just having a wonderful time.

 I am so glad I bought the upgrade, and before I even got the email...did not really need it.  I put in my account and there was the offer at the upgrade price......this is the first time I bought the upgrade right away.  This time I did not wait....and guess what?

I SURE AM GLAD.....................I AM LOVING THIS NEW GUI, IT RUNS GREAT, Really happy so far.  The install was a little tricky but I went slow and read instructions.  Also, I am glad I bought it early this morning, the downloads were slow then, but were moving.

Sharen

Starlet, are you aware that the manual contains screenshots of the P7 library, not the P8 one -- which is significantly different?
I was looking for a way to open/close it (the way you could in P7) and all the info in the Help Pdf shows the old library.

@ Silke The cancel button is much more responsive if you use the external render process option. You won't get that dumb not responding thing.

Quote - In Poser 7, one could make a Windows shortcut for an item from one runtime, and locate it in a folder in another runtime. The shortcut would load just like the original item. Short cuts take a lot less memory than all the files that might be associated with a specific item.

This also worked in Poser Pro "the first." Does it work in Poser 8?

lmk

No, shortcuts don't work anyymore, they only produce lots of errors.

External render process?

goes digging

Ummm.... where is that?

Another note of first impressions...
I've just started the download for the content for the 3rd time and I'm getting seriously pi$$ed off with it.
Why couldn't this have been split into 3x 500mb files?
Or at least be an FTP download where you can RESUME?

External render is in Edit>Prefs on the render tab. While you are there set the number of threads to match the number of cores your CPU has.

Uh... that's not external render. Nowhere on that tab does it say external render -- I'm guessing you're looking at Poser Pro.

Separate process is under the Number of Threads. (And I already set that to 4, since I'm on a Quad Core.)
I'll give it a shot with that though.

My P8 first impressions (used all Poser versions since Poser 4):

Positive

• P8 with all my runtimes attached (all in all around 100 GB) loads in just a few seconds. My P7 used to take several minutes lately to start up.

• The new library is lightning fast compared to earlier versions and adding and switching runtimes works like a charm.

• Render speed and quality is much improved.

• So far, P8 runs stable and smooth on my machine (WinXP, NVidia, DualCore, 2 GB Ram), but I never ever had a crash with P6or P7 either and I use Poser almost daily.

Negative

• The thumbs in the new library are ridiculous small (until you select an item) and that alone makes browsing the library imho in no way an improvement over earlier versions. It seems even more annoying than before to browse your content. And I couldn't care less for the new search function. I have a lot of content, but it is well organized and I know where to find my stuff.

• Some older python scripts don't work anymore but that was predictable.

• Digital download of P8 and all the content is a pain in the a$$. Slow servers, gigantic archives (why can't they split them in smaller ones?), many dropouts and no resume function. Still wasn't able to complete the content download and I started 12 hours ago.

More later...

tomlin, for me the tiny thumbnails are very annoying too. Is very difficult to browse for content.

Yeah "Separate Process" sorry using the wrong name. It puts the render in a whole different process and the main app (the cancel button) remains much more responsive.

Remember that when you use the separate process you will need to give Poser permission in your fire wall. It needs to assess the FFrender process.

Is it possible to change the thumbnail size?

I wanted to offer an option for all thumbnails large. The Flex tree viewer control got all borked up. It has issues with variable size content.

We're working on it. I want to allow several options for the library, such as all thumbnails large, a multi-column thumbnail-only mode, etc.

Sorry about that.

Regarding system sluggishness while rendering, here's a tip. I've been doing this with all versions of Poser forever.

After you launch Poser, go into Task Manager. Find the Poser process in Processes. Right click and choose Set Priority ... Below Normal.

This means that Poser will run 100% CPU unless you try to do something else. Then it will briefly let your desktop or other applications respond immediately to your mouse and keyboard.

I do this all the time, because while I'm rendering, I browse the forums. The browser is really sluggish with Poser at normal priority, but fast as ever with Poser at below normal priority.

If you're not doing something else, Poser will still get 100% of the CPU for the render, so it doesn't really slow anything down while you're reading stuff.

Unfortunately, there's no way I know of to make this permanent. You have to change the process priority every time you launch Poser.