HI all,
I use to use Poser a lot and kind of got into a slump, so  I haven't done much w/ it in some time.  I currently have Poser 5 installed. So I want to start creating art again and was wondering what to upgrade to.

Since I never had P6, P7, or the Newer Poser Pro... I have no idea how to compare the features.  Does Poser 8 have all the features of 5, 6, 7, and more? What exactly does Poser Pro have that Poser 8 does not?  The main things I noticed was the 64 bit rendering engine and the Network rendering. And I really have no interest in that  at the moment.  I have a newer computer than when I use to play w/ Poser before. It is an : Amd Athlon 64x2 dual core 5000+ w/ 2 gb of RAM. 

Sorry if any of my questions are repetitive. I looked at several post before making a new thread.

Thanks!

star****

 Poser 8 has all the things from Poser 5, 6 and 7 - with the exception of the old Poser 4 renderer and a lot of bugs.

I haven't got Poser Pro so I can't say how good or bad that is compared to Poser 8. But I do have Poser 8 and I love it ^_^

If you're used to Poser 5, you will love it too, it's SO much better than Poser 5 which by far was the most bug-ridden version in existence :)

My understanding is that alot of the features in pro that are not in P8 are to do with the rendering engine, not it's quality just some extra features.

Rendering in a background process
64 bit rendering

and probably a few others I can't remember :) there will be a new version of pro later in the year I think. 

There are some new features in P8 that aren't in the current version of Pro, like Indirect Lighting and the new rigging system.  And it comes with a whole host of new content, including new figures of course :)

John

Some of the things I consider to be an improvement on from PoserPro are:

Lighting
Renderer
Joint Dependencies
Interface Panels

The operation is faster and seems smoother as well.

Thanks for all the Fast responses! So Poser 8 is the winner! I like it that the price is half that of Pro too. lol. w/ my upgrade price I can get it for about $129.00.

Thanks again!
star****

Smith Micro's websites are all over the place, it's nearly impossible to find consistent links between their various random acts of websites....after an hour of searching...I actually found a real Poser 8 website beyond the crappy www.smithmicro.com online website, which is a store, and the somewhat better http://my.smithmicro.com that has a lot more info than the main site, which has almost no links to this place

but:  http://Poser8.smithmicro.com is the best link for officleal Poser 8 info

It also includes info about Poser Pro 2010 and the beta program.

There is very interesting news about Poser Pro upgrades to Poser 8 and how that will apply additionally to Poser Pro 2010.

This blog explains it:

http://poser8.smithmicro.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi

Long and short, if you are a Poser Pro user, you can upgrade to Poser 8 and that price will be applied to the upgrade price of Poser Pro 2010, above and beyond what the normal upgrade would be from Poser Pro 7 to Poser Pro 2010....

I.e. you can mid upgrade.

The mid upgrade will also let you in to the Poser Pro 2010 beta program this fall.

Poser Pro 2010 is scheduled for Q1 of 2010.

Thank you very much Jerry! This is indeed much more informative than the main site!  I'm still aggravated a bit that there isn't very many pictures of the content though.

Who knows, they probably have a ton of pictures on some other website...

SmithMicro is a bit wacky...websites all over the place and no master index...

I really think they need to reorganize themselves from a Marketing point of view to deliver a clear concise message.  e-Frontier/Curious Labs all seemed to be much more focused.

Right now I just google them to try and find links to find what I need.

Poser Pro is a more professional version of Poser 7. It has some features like gamma that showed up in Poser 8, but it mainly adds:

o a 64 bit render engine which rarely runs out of memory if you have a 64 bit OS and tons of memory. (I have XP Pro 64 bit and 8GB.) If you don't it's useless.

o background rendering. Start a render and then work on something else. Good for the final render, but for the test renders I just want to see results without losing my focus.

o network rendering. If you have more than one computer, you can let them all help!

Bottom line: if you have a bunch of computers or one with a 64 bit OS and more than 3GB memory then I suggest Poser Pro. If not then Poser 8.

(Apparently if you have Poser Pro then you can upgrade to Poser 8 and the cost will be deducted from the Poser Pro 2010 upgrade price, so if you want to get Poser Pro and upgrade to Poser Pro 2010 then Poser 8 is free. This was the deal for former Poser Pro owners, I don't know if it applies to new ones.)