I have poser 6. I'd like to upgrade. now the dilema... poser pro or poser 8.
I'd like some opinions. pros and cons.

For Me,   Poser Pro,  or wait until Sr2 for P8 ..

Well, only since you asked....

I have Poser Pro, don't have Poser 8, but I have a girlfriend who I talked into buying it a month or so ago. (and I feel really bad about that now...)

So having had a few chances now to check out Poser 8, IMHO, the only thing I see better about it over P-Pro is better optimization of the way the CPU is used during rendering. All cores at all times.. although IIRC, shadow maps are only calculated on one core.

Aside from that...
The new library is problematic, to put it politely, even with SR1. It's especially a PITA if the machine you want to install it on isn't connected to teh interwebs, so you can easily and quickly download the latest Flash plugin for Internet Explorer. There's a lot more I could say about it, but I'm not going to. Suffice it to say I don't like it and I think it was wholly unnecessary. If you're used to the traditional Poser runtime scheme, you won't miss not having the new and... err... improved Poser 8 Runtime Debloatifier.

Also, there's a definite performance hit on the OpenGL response in the viewports. And before anyone suggests use a better video card and update drivers, I built that PC for her and it has a GTX 260 in it, and yes, the drivers are fully updated. Compared to Poser Pro, the OpenGL definitely seems slower and less responsive. On large scenes, that is. The OpenGL seems to bog down more, the more complex a scene gets. Yes, that's normal, but it seems Poser Pro overall is able to handle more stuff in a scene and keep it moving along.
Of course it's also worth mentioning that Poser Pro has 64 bit rendering, which Poser 8 does not.

Now, Poser 8 has IDL - a form of Final Gather GI. Which would be good if they had optimized it better and implemented more controls over the settings, but unless you want to spend hours to get minimal quality GI and even more hours to get slightly better quality GI... well, you know. ;-)

It does have better light falloff, now that you can use inverse square on the lights. That's a major improvement which was a long time coming, so kudos to them for doing that.

I'm assuming that Poser Pro 2010 will have all the features that Poser 8 has, plus some, so I'm waiting to see what that's all about. And so if you're considering either Poser Pro or Poser 8, personally I'd recommend just waiting to see what Poser Pro 2010 has to offer. I think it's supposed to be out either late this year or early next year.
Then again, the current Poser Pro is a really nice program, IMO, the best Poser yet.
Hopefully they'll do something about the library in Poser Pro 2010. A "pro" app, after all, doesn't really need a built-in runtime debloatifier, being that "pros" probably already know how to manage their runtimes and don't need the extra...err... "help"...
And hopefully the GI in Poser Pro 2010 will have a handful of new settings in it to be able to optimize GI better for quicker renders.

Bear in mind that Poser Pro and Poser 8 are different product lines, as well as different generations of Poser.

The current Poser Pro is of the Poser 7 generation, with the added Pro features such as gamma correction, 64-bit render engine, background and network rendering, interfaces to other pro 3D apps, et al. It's a mature and (generally) stable application.

Poser 8 is the next generation, with IDL, light fall-off options, tone mapping, the new library, and all the other lovely features listed on the SM product pages. It's a new application and there are quite a few bugs yet to be sorted out.

My recommendation would always be to go for the latest generation of software, as long as you are patient enough to handle the bugs without resorting to axe or mace. If you really need some of the Pro features, then I would suggest you wait for Poser Pro 2010, which will be based on Poser 8.

I have both products and I hardly ever use P Pro these days. The results from Poser 8 are just so much better.

Unlike a few folks here I've had only minor problems with P8 - in the same way that I have minor problems with Photoshop CS4 and almost every other program I use. If your system and drivers are up to date (read the pre-installation instructions) and is not riddled with crapware your experience should be a very positive one.

I'm running on fairly beefy hardware under Windows 7 x64. I can't wait for Poser Pro 2010 as I do miss networked rendering, render in the background etc.

Yup agree with cspear. I have both and hardly ever use PoserPro. I haven't had all of the difficulties that some have posted about in P8, mine runs just fine over here.

"but I have a girlfriend"

Wait you have a girlfriend?

Sorry I couldn't resist.

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I have both products and I hardly ever use P Pro these days. The results from Poser 8 are just so much better.

Unlike a few folks here I've had only minor problems with P8 - in the same way that I have minor problems with Photoshop CS4 and almost every other program I use. If your system and drivers are up to date (read the pre-installation instructions) and is not riddled with crapware your experience should be a very positive one.

Super. It's great that you love Poser 8, but the way I read it, the OP wanted comparisons between Poser 8 and Poser Pro from people who have used both, not just more "Poser 8 is Super-Woo-Hoo and anybody who doesn't like it has a crapware PC"

and I thought other ppl could give their opinions.

guess that was wrong.

Sure other people can give their opinions.
But aside from myself and IsaoShi, who so far actually gave any relevant opinions to the OP's question?
The question of course was "Poser pro vs. Poser 8, pros and cons?"

I really don't think something like "The results from Poser 8 are just so much better." is exactly a comparison, and if it's a "pro" it's seriously lacking in informative elaboration.

I have both Poser Pro and Poser 8 concurrently installed on both Galadriel and pixie.  I generally try to render in P8 because of it's speed and IDL option. I tend toward complicated scenes, use complex materials, and often render at large pixel dimensions.  This often runs P8 out of memory, so in those cases I find myself using Poser Pro to do the "heavy lifting", since Pro can use all of a 64bit machine's RAM.

Overall, I would say that P8 has several quirks which need to be de-bugged (hopefully SR2 will do it), but it is a clean slate rebuild, and has considerable potential since it is relatively unburdened by "legacy luggage".

How much tolerance do you have for dealing with development (teething trouble) flaws?  Pro is fully worked up;  P8 still has some quirks (SM is working on them).

What about your usage habits - how memory hungry are your scenes?  If you tend toward the complex, remember that Pro has much greater capacity if you have a 64bit system with lots of RAM.

If render speed is important, or you want the benfits of the new IDL, only P8 has it.

Though choice.... Poser Pro rocks and is rock stable, but you may not use all of the features it offers, if that's the case, then you can always get Poser Pro base. Shortcoming is that it will not use your multi-cores optimal.

Poser 8 is pretty interesting, lighting has been improved a good deal and rendering is improved a lot. It uses a multi-core completely when rendering and that saves a lot of time. IDL is pretty cool, it's new and needs improvement, but that will come over time. The UI and the library have been changed a lot, but personally I wouldn't call it an improvement, but other love it. Good thing is that Dimension3D's eXtendent Library is a great alternative. For some P8 is unstable, personally most of my problems stopped when getting rid of the new library and leaving the UI alone.  But I guess in future service releases these problems will be ironed out.

Poser comes with a 30 day money back guarentee and I suggest trying Poser 8 first, unless you work a lot with higher end 3D apps and need importing & exporting to those. If for some reason P8 doesn't work out for you, then you can return it and go for Poser Pro instead.

Quote - and I thought other ppl could give their opinions.

guess that was wrong.

But you haven't even given your opinion.... you've only complained and added nothing to the topic at all, as usual.

sorry Ben, but coming from the man that complains constantly at the drop of a hat about everything..... I take you complaning about me as a compliment :)

as to poser 8.. I'm in the had no problems with it camp.

the way I look at it, Pro's main strength is the network rendering and 64bit render engine.

8's the new library and the improved render engine.

depends on what you want to do with it.

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Super. It's great that you love Poser 8, but the way I read it, the OP wanted comparisons between Poser 8 and Poser Pro from people who have used both, not just more "Poser 8 is Super-Woo-Hoo and anybody who doesn't like it has a crapware PC"

Thanks for putting words into my mouth, but that's not what I said. I voiced my opinion that P8 produces better renders than P Pro. I also suggested that to run P8 smoothly an up to date system, not riddled with all the junk ('crapware') I see on many 'broken' systems, is a good idea.

I don't know what aspect of this advice has prompted such a juvenile response.

cspear: > Quote - ...P8 produces better renders than P Pro.

I agree.  Because I have a habit of making heavily loaded scenes and rendering big wallpapers, I will sometimes run P8 out of memory, in which case I switch to Poser Pro.  Pro is slower, but has that great 64bit RAM capacity.

But as long as I don't exceed 32bit RAM limits, P8 renders much faster and the results are noticeably better looking.

And I would also be in the category of not having had trouble with P8.  I have P8 on five machines (two 32bit XP, one 32bit Vista, two 64bit Vista) and P8 is running well on five out of five.

An idea for improvement occurs to me.  Since I often use the same scene in P7, PPro, and P8, I think that the IDL subroutine should adapt to the standard use of 100% diffuse value, rather than require the user to adjust all the materials to (about 80% diffuse) to suit it.  A thought for P8 SR2 and Poser Pro 2010.

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Thanks for putting words into my mouth, but that's not what I said. I voiced my opinion that P8 produces better renders than P Pro. I also suggested that to run P8 smoothly an up to date system, not riddled with all the junk ('crapware') I see on many 'broken' systems, is a good idea.

I don't know what aspect of this advice has prompted such a juvenile response.

I didn't have to put the words into your mouth, you did it all yourself.
You didn't voice your "opinion that P8 produces better renders than P Pro". What you actually said was "The results from Poser 8 are just so much better." Results from what? The new rigging? Render speed? IDL or regular renders? OpenGL performance? Library results are better? Distributed rendering?
There's an awful lot that can fall under the category of "it's just better".

And as to what "prompted such a juvenile response", you seem to have taken it upon yourself to decide for everyone that  if they have a decent machine Poser 8 will run fine unless they have bad drivers or are "riddled with crapware".
So, conversely, the conclusion one might draw from your statement is that if one's experience with Poser 8 is not  "a very positive one", therefore your machine must be weak, your drivers bad, and your machine riddled with crapware.
Tell that to the Mac people, for one, but for another it's not really very realistic (or fair) to imply that Poser 8 is all hunky dory for everyone with a half decent machine. The numerous posts about it seem to prove that Poser 8 does in fact have a myriad of problems.

But just for the sake of saying it, the machine I used it on is very capable and up-to-date. i7 950, 16 GB of RAM, GTX 260, Vista Ultimate x64, Veliciraptor HDD's in RAID 0. It's a professional workstation running 3 versions of Max and Maya, not to mention all the other stuff like Photoshop and it does just fine with all those apps.
The library is a nuisance, plain and simple, IMO, and seems to prefer being crashed as opposed to operating. There is no crapware on that machine. it's not even connected to the internet except for when it has to be. Such as for downloading Flash to run Poser for some ungodly ridiculous reason.

Actually, I think my response was the less juvenile, if we're going to be assigning labels and making post comparisons.
And my post was the more informative and more realistic. You just couldn't help but chiming in from the defensive angle. No real explanation other than that, since you chose not to actually add to the discussion, but rather seemed to just want to counter my statements.

P8 works great, I haven't touched PoserPro since I installed P8.
PoserPro renders larger scenes, but P8 comes a long way in that direction too - much larger as Poser 6.
Indirect lighting makes it much easier to set up lighting a scene - especially with outdoor scenery. Often 1 or 2 lights are enough to get great results. PoserPro does not have that yet.
The new UI is a matter of taste. For me the library is working much faster as the old one since you can directly access the folders and items you want without going up and down through the runtime hierarchy, The improvements in SR1 makes the icons larger and easier to use. New improvements are promised for later releases.

For me - and many others - Poser 8 is stable and and is a great improvement over Poser 7 and - depending on your needs - over Poser Pro.

I'm sticking with Poser Pro for now because of the multi-thread rendering. I can build massive scenes Poser 6 couldn't handle. Then PPro with 4 cores renders lightning fast. But I do comics and time-saving is a big consideration for me.

Poser 8 has more realistic rendering capabilities.

It probably depends on what your needs are for which version to choose now.

I'll definitely grab Poser 8 Pro if it also has multi-thread rendering like Poser 7 Pro.

it does. up to 24 cores (32bit only tho)

wow. I'd like to thank everyone who replied to my question. you've all given me lots to think about. lots of pros and cons. I like the wealth of knowledge this forum provides.
I have to add this question. can scenes and saved figures done in poser 6 be rendered / imported into poser pro or poser 8?

Quote - wow. I'd like to thank everyone who replied to my question. you've all given me lots to think about. lots of pros and cons. I like the wealth of knowledge this forum provides.
I have to add this question. can scenes and saved figures done in poser 6 be rendered / imported into poser pro or poser 8?

Absolutely. I still use stuff made for Poser 3.

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I have to add this question. can scenes and saved figures done in poser 6 be rendered / imported into poser pro or poser 8?

From what I've seen, yeah. Poser Pro at least, although the new interface in Poser 8 will likely change your document size, being that the interface is all different.
I only did one test scene on that in Poser 8, and the document opened at a different size other than what it was saved out as in Poser Pro.
So if your old scenes use the document size as the render size, you'd have to manually change the document size in P8, or tell it to render at a specific size.

Of course, Poser Pro has gamma correction, and Poser 8 has tone mapping, so neither will render your old scenes the same. Those are both actually huge improvements though, although might take a little getting used to.
Far as the materials go, I don't think anything has changed enough to make a difference.
Poser 8 also apparently has normal mapping that actually works, as opposed to Poser Pro's normal mapping that is supposed to work, but doesn't.

If you go for Poser 8 you will loose the ability to render with the P4 render engine. That is something you might use. PoserPro still has it, but the successor probably not.
Document viewport size in Poser 8 depends on the UI. If you have a docked preview window it takes it size from its surroundings. If you set it to floating it keeps the same size until you change it - it is now part of the UI settings. It does not take its size from the scene file anymore.

Gamma correction in PoserPro and Tone mapping in Poser 8 are both optional features. If you do not turn them on, older scenes will render the same as in previous versions.

I still use scenes from 2004 and update them with the new features to make them look better, so loading or importing is not a problem either.

so my poser 6 renders will still load and I'm guessing improve in poser pro or poser 8. 
Thanks to everyone for the help.  nice to know there are so many knowledgeable people out there willing to help.

Be carreful with idl, it's not an option like people think, it's a bad idea !

Dont buy P8 just for IDL without knowing how and why using it !

Too many people use this with bad lights sets, or with ibl etc etc etc ... the only result is a bad render !

If you dont want use poser for "realism" use PPro

I don't understand - Indirect Lighting (IDL) is an option in the Render settings. It is default off and you have to turn it on to use it.
 

It's not just an option it's another lightning system, nothing to do with ibl/ao ... You cant create a complete scene and when it's time to render and hop i activate idl ! That's stupid !

Search the net Indirect illumination or indirect lightning or global illumination etc etc the light setup is completely different than the "three point lights" !

But it's not the subject, for a simple upgrade the better for him is PPro IMHO

Yes, IDL is a very new thing for Poser. Frankly, it was a bit of a disaster when Poser 8 was first released, but most of the problems have been addressed in SR1. Now that it works, it's great - but you'll have to do some work with it.

IDL makes a reasonable attempt at replicating how light in the real world actually behaves (not a perfect one, but pretty good). That means that light sets for previous versions of Poser won't work too well with IDL, and you'll have to customize them or more likely start from scratch. If you're used to Poser 6, you may find some aspects counter-intuitive.

You may also need to modify shader nodes (e.g. deleting / disabling Ambient Occlusion nodes - IDL really doesn't play nicely with them). With IDL, you need to consider the whole environment around your scene, not just what's in your camera view, as the light bouncing off the surroundings affects the final image.

Poser 8 lets you control the falloff from spot and point lights (inverse square or linear) so they behave more realistically.

And so on. Everyone has an opinion about whether Poser 8 is any good or not, but in the end, it's your judgement that counts. There should be enough information in this and the many other threads on Poser 8 for you to reach a decision. The only thing I'll add is that there's a lot of criticism of Poser 8 here, much of it undoubtedly deserved, but bear in mind that there are hundreds of satisfied users out there who won't have posted anything because, to borrow a phrase, 'it just works'.

Don't forget to mention that half the IDL settings are buried away in an undocumented python script.

They did it that way because apparently the developers felt that the controls therein are too complicated for your average point'n'click Poser user who just wants results without having to think.

Not that that's my opinion, but apparently the PTB at S-M felt that way.

Reminds me of Jack Nicholsen in the movie A Few Good Men: ...you can't handle the truth...

The python settings for IDL are documented in the Python reference manual and the settings them selves can be set with a python script delivered with Poser 8 and available from the scripts menu.

This is true.
However, would one think to look in the Python Reference Manual for information on how to use the IDL?
Seems that most people wouldn't as there were many questions about it at first, until Bagginsbill told people about the additional settings and where to find them.

I had Poser 8 for a while but occasionally it would POOFgo away! Just DISSAPPEAR! Everything else would be fine...just no P8! Tried service pack too.Went back to Pro and all is hunky-dory!

what of Runtime DNA's terra dome? does that solve the IDL question?
I am curious about the program. I do want realism in my renders.
this debate is actually exiting. so much information. thanks.

Wow, reading this thread i learned A LOT!!
A good amount of information in understandable terms.
I agree with bowiefan above. Thanks