My two penny worth

I have Poser Pro- on Vista 64bit (intel i7 and 12 Gb Ram)- networked to a couple of other machines for rendering

Poser 8 - like the GUI - although a bit busy
Like the indirect lighting still playing with it to get the feel of it however
Linked my main external runtime with no problems and  loaded saved poser pro scenes into P8 with very little problem

I find that renders from Poser 8 (32 bit) are a good deal slower than the 64 bit firefly (mainly because of the memory handling)

I''ll probably still use Poser Pro as my main tool and use P8 as a training aid for the future Poser Pro next year.

I'll add my thoughts also. Let me say first of all, certain persons on this forum did a good job in promoting the newest release of Poser 8. But after using it for a while I can only say there was a lot of hype surrounding that promotion.

Pro's

• Starts up a lot faster..
• Scenes open and save a lot faster.
• Rendering is a lot faster (at least on WinXP home 32bit)
• OpenGL preview seems to be a bit better.
• Indirect Lighting is interesting.

Con's

• The new library system is a mess. I seriously wonder who tested it, it's full of bugs. Libraries go blank or missing, items cannot be applied. It's causing me a lot of problems.
• The new UI interface, isn't that new at all. OK, it looks a little bit different, but it's not as good as the old system. It actually blocks workflow, since you cannot move everything as freely around as you wish and could do with the pevious versions. Windows are parented now, while before you could place them anywhere you wished.
• OpenGL isn't as improved as I expected it to be and still doesn't make use of the full power modern gfx cards offer.
• The new content..... 1.5Gb really sounds impressive, but I found it very disappointing. The new figures look terrible, there's hardly any variaty in content.
• Indirect Lighting way to slow to use it in a more complex scene. It sure adds more realistic shadows, but it's not as mind-blowing as I expected it to be. It takes up more time to get the IL correct, then it took setting up 'old' light system (contrary to what we were made to believe). On top of that come long rendering times and still it lacks the impressiveness expected. I do understand the excitment, but once that wears off, I can see many people abandoning it because of it's slowness.
• The biggest con is the let down of new features. For the price asked there's hardly enough in it to justify the price. I know some will disagree, but compared to for example Vue (the versions that come in the same price range), Poser 8 hardly gives you anything new at all.

If I had paid the regular upgrade price of $129 I would have returned Poser 8 by now. Crashes, not properly working features, dissapointing features. BUT.....I was lucky enough to buy it at the $1.99 super deal, so I'm happy with it. For that price I can live with the shortcomings and lack of new features. The rendering speed improvement is worth the $1.99.

I felt for the hype, but I'm glad I only paid $1.99. If I paid more I would have seriously felt dumb for falling for the hype some managed to create......

Here:

Quote - So, in your opinion, using the D3D python script would be the thing to go than the Poser settings/render settings? 

If you're unhappy with the way Indirect Lighting renders with the built-in interface's settings (and if you have used GI in other apps, you probably won't be) then yes, you'll probably prefer to work with this script, at least for the time being.

Quote - Is there a place in the manual that lists all the python scripts (coming IN poser) and what they do??

No, although you can poke around in:
RuntimePythonposerScripts

Many of them are heavily commented.

I went from P7 and bougth the Poser 8 upgrade, have no regrets and I dont feel dumb.
Was actually pleased that there was a release of Poser 8 and not only another pro version.

Regards / Jonny

intel mac, poserPro user. I really miss the backgoround render feature in PoserPro a lot.

But you would have to kill me first to get me to stop using P8 now.

Yeah it has a few glitches here and there. But I can now render scenes in P8 that brought poserPro to it's knees and or crashed it unless I sent the file to Render Queue or broke the scene apart and re-assmebled render layers it on Photoshop.  Scenes without IDL render way faster then PoserPro. The IDL even at lower settings is giving me more realistic shadows then hours of fussing around in PoserPro could ever achieve. I love the docked pallets, really cleans up my work space. To me P8 is a major home run.

PS: I have been a long time SM hater based on what they did to a middleware webserver software package they purchased a few years back, which they recently spun off. I am not a fan of the new CP layout either. But I will give credit where credit is due.

Quote - I installed from the disc with no problems. 

This time I purchased Poser 8 Full instead of the upgrade.  Normally I would have purchased an upgrade, but this time I decided to pay more  for a full version of Poser 8 download and I haven't had any problems either. 

Frederick
Poser By Design

Quote - > Quote - I installed from the disc with no problems. 

This time I purchased Poser 8 Full instead of the upgrade.  Normally I would have purchased an upgrade, but this time I decided to pay more  for a full version of Poser 8 download and I haven't had any problems either. 

Frederick
Poser By Design

Don't want to crash your dream, but the upgrade and full version are exactly the same, both are full version that don't need a previous version of Poser installed or do install over a previous version. The only difference is the price discount you get, because you are a previous Poser owner.

Price wise there are 2 version, full and upgrade. Software wise there's only one, the full version. You just paid over $100 more for exactly the same thing you would have gotten when you would have paid the upgrade price.

You should really ask for a refund and buy the upgrade instead and spent the money you get back on something else.

78.532% of all statistics are made up on the spot. And I should know.

LMK

I agree with aeilkema on the upgrad/full thingy. "Return" it. There's a 30-day money back no questions asked policy.

Speaking of that, hundreds (thousands? who knows) of silent users have no problems. Maybe the chances are 10% you have some kind of problem. Maybe its 30%. I dont' know. But if you're into Poser, I'd get it and see how it works. If it's too messed up for you, either just pretend you don't have it yet and try again when the SR comes out, or return it and start over in a month.

For me, having it now, buggy or not, means I'm getting a head start on how to use it, versus my other virtual self that doesn't have it for another month or two.

Of course, I didn't actually have to buy it, being a developer, but if I wasn't a developer, I'd get it just to be able to play with it, versus not play with it.

aeikema

Thanks for the advice.  I guess for what ever reason the Poser 8 is just working better on my system than some of the others. I'm not feeling totally put out about over spending. Do I feel silly? yeah definitely that.

Frederick
Poser By Design

Hey speaking of upgrades, if you upgrade your Poser 7 (or other version) to Poser 8, do you lose your license to use the previous version?
Can you have one version on one PC and another on another, or does your upgraded license become your only existing license, and your previous license made void?

The smarter multiprocessing for rendering by itself is a good reason to upgrade.  Indirect lighting has some problems but I'm sure these will improve as time passes.  I think the new rigging features have a lot of potential also.  The other new features (content library improvements, interface flexiblity) are things that some people will like and some people won't care about, but overall it's a very big set of improvements.

Installing the Poser 8 upgrade does not make your Poser 7 install unusable, but I didn't read the wording of the license all that closely.  In a practical sense, both can be used - I don't know if there is specific language about exactly what you can do with the Poser 7 license though (e.g. I doubt you could ethically sell it).
edit: actually the license explicitly says it is non-transferrable (can't be resold).  I don't know if this is enforcible,  There doesn't seem to be any other specific language about the upgrade in the EULA.

Aeikema and Baggins Bill

thanks again for the advice. I looked at my order again and realize that I didn't pay for the $249. I forgot that I had a discounted price.  But I still asked the guys at Smith Micro since it doesn't hurt to ask.

Frederick
Poser By Design

Quote - Hey speaking of upgrades, if you upgrade your Poser 7 (or other version) to Poser 8, do you lose your license to use the previous version?
Can you have one version on one PC and another on another, or does your upgraded license become your only existing license, and your previous license made void?

You do not lose your license, you can still install and run Poser 7, but you can only upgrade each license once. 

Thank you Starlet. I always wondered about that.
I know NewTek allows us to keep using LightWave old versions - as many as we want - but all versions are tied to a dongle, which makes using more than one version impossible anyway.

Well,
I don't care if some other people decided not to upgrade, I have already ordered P8!!!!!!!!!

I entered with DAZ Studio 1.X and very soon upgraded to Poser 7 and later bought P6 for $2-74 as a Valentines day special and I do not use P6.

I just can't wait for P8. According to what I have read so far all over various reviews and forums, P8 is not Poser 7. something, but rather like Poser 9 or 10. Just for the better and faster renders alone it is worth it.

That's nice, jcrous, and the world is collectively jumping up and down with joy for you, I'm sure.

Quote - Well,
I don't care if some other people decided not to upgrade, I have already ordered P8!!!!!!!!!

I entered with DAZ Studio 1.X and very soon upgraded to Poser 7 and later bought P6 for $2-74 as a Valentines day special and I do not use P6.

I just can't wait for P8. According to what I have read so far all over various reviews and forums, P8 is not Poser 7. something, but rather like Poser 9 or 10. Just for the better and faster renders alone it is worth it.

Great that you're going to get P8, you will not regret it and really enjoy it once the bugs are gone. I don't agree that P8 is close to 9 or 10, not even remotely. While it has some great improvements, it's imo not worthy of being called P8, we, same really counts for P7 as well. Compared to the price one pays for the upgrade, you get relatively little of new features and improvements. P8 feels more like P7.5. I've looked at it and wasn't prepared to pay the upgrade price for so little new features and improvements, $129 is way to high a price for what's being offered. Now I was lucky enough to have only paid $1.99, otherwise I would have never upgraded.

But, somehow the people owning Poser seem to get away with releasing inbetween upgrades for full upgrade prices. Imo they should scrap all this additional content (especially their new figures) and focus on additional features instead.

Poser 8 is cool, but it sure isn't worthy as the next release, it's another .5 version.

Quote -
But, somehow the people owning Poser seem to get away with releasing inbetween upgrades for full upgrade prices. Imo they should scrap all this additional content (especially their new figures) and focus on additional features instead.

You got that right! Who do they think they are, Autodesk? ;-)

You should see the features we got in LightWave, between version 9.0 and 9.6, two and a half years later. Every upgrade from 9.0 to 9.6 was absolutely free and the stuff they added along the way is just amazing. I mean, they cut the render speed in about half, added fur and hair, several new nodes, and all kinds of other features, plus bug fixes. In Poser Land, that would have been 2 or 3 paid versions later...

Poser pro, IMO, is the only real useful upgrade they've had yet in all of Poser history, and Poser 8 just doesn't seem to be anything particularly special. Aside from the improved CPU usage, there's not a single thing new about it that was on my list. I couldn't care less about the new library, and I had no problems with or complaints about the interface.

Quote -
Poser pro, IMO, is the only real useful upgrade they've had yet in all of Poser history, and Poser 8 just doesn't seem to be anything particularly special. Aside from the improved CPU usage, there's not a single thing new about it that was on my list. I couldn't care less about the new library, and I had no problems with or complaints about the interface.

So becase you don't like it, it sucks, and all of us who DO like it are idiots?

Right.

Eat shit. 10 billion files can't be wrong...

2 comments ...

Then P8 would be a good upgrade from 6 ?
and
When are they putting P8 on sale?  Isn't there always some big sale along the way? I realize they have $50 off full version. Also, Purplus is seling it for $180 FULL retail box version.

From Poser 6, it would be a great upgrade!

Quote -

So becase you don't like it, it sucks, and all of us who DO like it are idiots?

Right.

Eat shit. 10 billion files can't be wrong...

Wow, such anger. You Poser fanboys/fangirls really do get unrealistically upset at times.

I didn't say anyone was an idiot, now did I? And I'm pretty sure I didn't say it sucks either.

I think the upgrade (I have poser6 ) is 129.99

Quote - From Poser 6, it would be a great upgrade!

From Poser 6, it would be the life saver for your interest in Poser. But seriously if you have Poser 6 and you are just not upgrading, then you are doing better than most of us who purchased Poser 7 or Poser Pro.   If I could have seen the future then I would have stuck with Poser 6 until Poser 8 came out.

Frederick
Poser By Design

does the poser 8 library system update automatically if you move a bunch of files
around in the runtime through windows explorer? i am not sure if I have read that
anywhere

I don't have p8 yet so i can't say  anything about it, but I'll put my 2 cents worth in. If it's a matter of buying now, or buying when the 1st sr is out, get it now while it's on sale (see http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2779410) and then if you have problems, continue using your current version until a fix is available. I'm getting the feeling SM is paying attention to what we say and is trying to bring us a good product.

There is certainly more openness from SM than before. Beta-testers were allowed to comment before release, and more of the Poser developement team are leaving comments. The extra information is much nicer than before.

LMK

And usually you're such a nice person Trekkie :-)  EVERYONE it's only software folks and I doubt anyone here is going to live or die based on Smith Micro's stock price. Turning a simple question into a healthcare townhall does not speak well for the Poser "communtiy."

Quote - does the poser 8 library system update automatically if you move a bunch of files
around in the runtime through windows explorer? i am not sure if I have read that
anywhere

No it doesn't automatically track. However, if you know a folder has changed, you select it and hit Refresh. Whatever Poser knows about that folder and its sub-folders, it will revisit. It will rescan anything it has scanned before. Unless you open a sub-folder, it doesn't bother reading the contents, so it doesn't bother re-reading it either.

If you know that an entire runtime is different within a particular category, select its top-level folder in that category tree and hit refresh.

The refresh button is a little circular arrow icon that shows on the right side of an item in the tree when you select a folder.

Personally, I have found Poser 8's refresh a bit... hit and miss, Bagginsbill. I installed a product yesterday to my M4 runtime, and it took about 3 refreshes in order to get it to show. (Actually, because the product was called a "refit" I was getting concerned that it was just a pose file, not a figure.)

The Refresh is not instant. It runs in the background. Did you refresh a small folder at the leaf level, or a top level folder? If it was top level, then everything from there on down had to be scanned over again.

well, i ended up ordering it. hopefully the service
release will be ready when I get it. :)

Yeah, I started out at the runtime level. I take it the lib doesn't scan the figures folder first? It probably took 2-3 minutes, which doesn't really match my experience with the speed of the library as a whole. (This was my M4 runtime, which I wouldn't exactly say is huge - under 4 GB.)

What do you mean scan the figures folder first?

Each folder in the tree is a real folder on your disk. Whatever you selected for scanning it started there and worked its way down.

There are actually nine trees in the GUI. There is one for each category. Within it, there is one folder for that category from each runtime.

Yes, I know that. What I said above was that I started at the runtime level. My question is if when you refresh the whole runtime, does it start scanning the figures category first, or does it scan all of them simultaneously?

It doesn't scan a whole runtime, ever, except at startup or when you add a new runtime.

Refresh happens on a folder.

Say you have 3 runtimes added to Poser: Poser 8, V4, and M4

In each of those runtimes there are 9 library folders:

Poser 8/Runtime/Libraries/Character
Poser 8/Runtime/Libraries/Props
...
Poser 8/Runtime/Libraries/Materials
etc.

V4/Runtime/Libraries/Character
V4/Runtime/Libarries/Props
...
etc.

M4/Runtime/Libraries/Character
M4/Runtime/Libraries/Props
etc.

Now when you look at the GUI, and you are viewing the Figures category, you see 3 top-level items in that tree.

Poser 8
V4
M4

Each of those is just one of the 9 folders in a runtime, but it is listing all 3 runtimes. Those do not repesent the entire library, just that one category folder.

Poser 8 = Poser 8/Runtime/Libraries/Character
V4 = V4/Runtime/Libraries/Character
M4 = M4/Runtime/Libraries/Character

Similarly, if you're viewing the Props category, you see 3 top-laval folders, which are the Props folder from each of your runtimes.

Poser 8 = Poser 8/Runtime/Libraries/Props
V4 = V4/Runtime/Libraries/Props
M4 = M4/Runtime/Libraries/Props

If you hover the mouse over any of those, it will show you the exact folder it represents.

When you refresh one of those top-level items, you are not refreshing the entire runtime. You are only refreshing one category in one runtime.  Specifically, you are refreshing that particular folder, and anything under it.

If you have 10 runtimes, there are 90 top-level folders presented to you, grouped by category. No single tree represents any entire runtime, i.e. no tree has all 90 top-level folders in it.

Each category tree shows you 10 of the 90. You select one of those 10 and refresh it. No other categories are refreshed when you do that. To refresh an entire runtime, in all nine categories, you'd have to select all nine of the top-level folders in that runtime, and refresh them one-by-one.

Ah yes, I recognized that before... I have to admit that I'm not used to the new system yet, so confusion still reigns.

Thanks for the explanation.

"Flash BB", I think you might want to rethink this. As an example say I purchase some clothing content for V4 and install it, it could include clothes as figures, mat pose or even poses for the cloth and or materials, and maybe some shoes or a necklace as props. It would be much simpler, faster and more intuitive if a person could click in the their V4 runtime and refresh it in total vs having to refresh their V4/runtime/libraries/figures, V4/runtime/libraries/pose, V4/runtime/libraries/materials, V4/runtime/libraries/props as four separate steps. Some buildings include, figures, pose, cameras, lights, props and materials. Under poserPro-P7 you just selected the whole runtime and it reloaded all the content in a runtime and all you new content would show up across all categories of that specific runtime.

Currently have a huge render running in P8, that has several hours to go so I can't check what I think you are saying vs trying to refresh a complete runtime until morning.

Plus after that render want to test a script I am creating that removes all the <folder id= lines in the LibraryState.xml file to see if it closes all open library folders and does not crash poser in the process :)

Well the refresh folder is the only refresh in the GUI. SM did not ask for any other, so that's what they got. I didn't get too creative during implementation. But I can see the need as you describe. Maybe I can squeeze a Refresh button next to the "Showing Library", that would refresh an entire runtime, or all runtimes.

We'd need a new button to refresh an entire runtime, because there are times where you do not want to wait while it scans an entire runtime. Sometimes you just want it to scan one folder, and that is what the folder Refresh does. Or maybe it is OK to automatically refresh all categories for a runtime when you refresh any category for a runtime.

Oh, and the reason the old library seemed to refresh everything was not because it refreshed everything. It was because it hit the disk every time you changed the current folder or category you were looking at. That was how I used to refresh my materials when I use a script to generate new ones. I would switch from Materials to Lights and then back to Materials, causing Poser to re-scan the Materials folder.

The Poser 8 GUI does not scan the disk as you switch between runtimes or between categories. That is part of the reason it is so much faster to switch. It has everything in memory. Previous Poser versions were constantly hitting the disk, re-scanning stuff it already knew.

That's why I used to switch to lights. There was usually nothing in there, or very little, so it was a quicker switch away.