Attached Link: About Poser 8 vs 7

''These are my first impressions of the new Poser 8 based on my little hands on experience with it.

First of all, the new interface doesn't feel too new at all. The only visible difference is that the floating modules are now dockable. Some people were screaming desperately at the forums claiming that Poser 8 was trying to copy the interface from DAZ Studio, but that is completely absurd - things are still the same but now with an option to dock things if you so prefer.

Even though things still look pretty familiar, the program itself is much more responsive than it was in any earlier versions. Faster interface means you will be more productive. OpenGL support now FINALLY works! I have been using Poser since the very first version and OpenGL hardware acceleration never actually worked, even on the quite overpriced Poser 7 Pro. But now it works, and you have the option to manually select which lights to include on the previews. Frankly, I have never seen Poser previews this fast and responsive before. Hats off to Smith Micro for this little miracle - they have fixed something that NEVER worked in Poser before. At least not for me.

The new content browser has significant improvements. Until now, the only way to navigate through your Poser runtime was a one-way ticket - once you select what you want, Poser forgets how it got there and you have to start navigating through the library all over again to pick something else. Well, now the library tree view stays open the whole time, so your navigation through it stays in place instead of vanishing like in all the previous versions of Poser. Not only that, but Poser 8 now switches between different runtimes instantly - no more delays!

For those in the forums screaming desperately that the new content navigation was copied from DAZ Studio, that is equally absurd - the Poser libraries were ALWAYS navigated using a tree view pull down menu. The only difference now is that the tree view stays open instead of collapsing every time you pick something.

My Poser runtime is currently over 120Gb large, and because of that Poser 7 freezes for about 3 to 4 minutes whenever I start Poser or switch runtimes back to the main one. Now those days are over. Poser 8 does NOT slow down the slightest, no matter how large your runtime may be. Contents are displayed in tree view with reduced thumbnails that expand as your click them for a better preview. This means you can now preview more items at once from each of your content groups. The old navigation menu is still available if you prefer the old collapsing pull down menu.

One notorious addition is that the materials library can now be accessed directly from the Pose Room, so you no longer need to switch to the Materials Room just to apply figure MAT poses anymore. This is a huge time-saver because switching between rooms used to take a while in older versions of Poser because the interface was quite unresponsive - which is no longer the case with Poser 8.

The favorites library is still there and it's one of the things that I used a lot before, but to make things even faster, Poser 8 now comes with a library search tab, where you can search contents by typing keywords and even filtering by content type. Each search returns a tree view containing everything you have that matches your keywords and filters, and it works fairly fast. Search results are persistent, so you can come back to it later to keep picking items from the results to populate your scene.

The lights in Poser 8 now include an option to produce realistic intensity attenuation using either linear or exponential curves. This was something I used to simulate in postwork using gradient masks, but now the lights can do all the work directly in 3D, producing much more realistic lighting and shadow effects on their own. And what's most, the improved OpenGL previews can show you the lighting results even before you render - really awesome.

And when it comes to lighting, there are a couple of new additions to toolset: Global Illumination (GI) and Tone Mapping correction. GI expands the ability to use HDRI and AO (ambient occlusion) with much more realism, and it even shows you the sampled areas directly on the models during the GI calculation pass in render time. Using GI in your renders will produce the much desired color bleeding effect from the surrounding materials, producing even more realistic renders. GI can be combined with HDRI and AO to push the envelope of the kind of realism Poser 8 can achieve with Firefly.

Tone Mapping color correction is something that evolved from Poser 7 Pro into a much more powerful feature. It comes with two presets based on exponential curves, where one will try to equalize the light intensity for better contrast, while the other will do the same but affecting the HSV colors instead of the lights. This helps solving a very old lighting dilemma in Poser: materials that appear overblown with light saturation after rendered. Also imported from Poser 7 Pro, there is an exposure control that expands the usability of tone mapping quite nicely.

Now lets talk about the improved Firefly renderer that ships with Poser 8. In my preliminary tests, the improved Firefly produced superior results even at low settings that in older versions would always produce plenty of rendering artifacts in your final renders. With Poser 7, I always had to disable raytracing for any materials that contained transparencies because the render time would be too long, and the final render would be ruined with a lot of "dirty" artifacts.

The good news is that the new Firefly no longer seems to be affected by raytracing over transparencies, and the amount of "dirty" artifacts was greatly reduced. Render times also seem faster even with raytraced shadows over transparency, which is something that plagued Poser since version 6. Hats off to Smith Micro again for solving yet another very old Poser problem! Although the new render times seem quite fast and efficient, the absence of a 64-bits version of Firefly comes as a huge disappointment when you consider all the other features that were inherited from Poser 7 Pro. In addition, this is the first version of Poser that does not ship with the old P4 renderer. Firefly, Sketch and Preview are the only options now. I won't miss P4, but I know some people who will.
  One nice thing about the new Firefly renderer is that it now supports up to 32 processors instead of only 4. The new multi-core optimizations are also noticeable when running multi-pass renders, because now Firefly will always try to use all your processor cores in each of the rendering stages. Two of the things Poser 7 would go single-thread was when performing area rendering and also when rendering animations. With Poser 8, all of those things are now indeed making full use of multi-threading. As a matter of fact, Poser 7 quite so often would even fail to produce area renders, but the new Firefly not only succeeds, but it is now multi-threaded and finishes the task faster.

Indeed, multi-threading seems to have optimized Poser 8 as a whole. Even with my mammoth 120Gb runtime, Poser 8 starts and closes in just a few seconds (instead of minutes). Switching between runtimes happens instantly and using HDRI + AO with raytraced shadows only takes a little longer to render. This is something some people were worried about, if GI would take absurd amounts of time to calculate its pass, but that was [so far] not the case in my tests (depending on what parameters you use). Poser 8 has so far been an all around efficient program, well worth the upgrade - especially when Poser 7 stopped working when my runtime got larger than 100Gb.

All in all, Poser 8 makes me feel like never using Poser 7 again because of all of the multi-treaded optimizations I can't go without if I want to be productive with this tool. In older versions of Poser, two of the most serious show-stopping issues were slow previews and a ridiculously inefficient library browser. Switching between rooms also used to take long, and the whole program performance was affected by how large your runtime was. The older Firefly was also tricky to configure and suffered from terrible slow-downs when dealing with raytracing over transparencies. It also required very high rendering settings to produce cleaner images, or otherwise it would introduce lots of rendering artifacts that would end up ruining your renders. With Poser 8, those are all things of the past.

The inclusion of Wardrobe Wizard doesn't make a difference to me because I've purchased it from PhilC long ago, and I was already using it with Poser 6 and 7. It only supports the default Poser figures, so you will have to purchase licenses for the actual figures you use separately - which are most probably NOT the figures that ship with Poser.

Another question people were worried about in Poser 8 was if their Poser 7 Python scripts would still work with it. So far all of my scripts worked nicely. Even Poser Physics simulator that stopped working when I switched from Poser 6 to 7 worked nicely with Poser 8 without any changes. I assume most other Python scripts you may have for Poser 7 will work fine with version 8, though I only tested the ones I have.

One nice Poser 8 optimization is when you load and save your project files. In Poser 7 and older, saving your scenes could take a long time depending on how many models and morphs were involved, but now things seem to happen much faster than before. This means I am not afraid of saving my scenes more often because it will no longer take ages like before. The more responsive interface, easier to use content browser, faster rendering, truly working OpenGL acceleration and faster scene saving times all contribute to a much more productive time with Poser.

Another VERY important optimization not explicitly mentioned at the list of new features is the way the new Firefly multi-threaded rendering works. Most of you will remember that Firefly was already multi-threaded in Poser 7, but it was not making use of multi-core processors in any efficient way. The way it worked before was to divide the scene into the same number of equal-sized areas as processors you have installed, and then render each area independently of the others.

The problem with that approach is that Poser is used to render characters, and those always have the highest poly counts at the figure's heads - either because heads have more polys and because hair is usually high poly as well. So Poser 7 would quickly finish rendering the other areas, but then take most of the remainder time to render the figure's head on a single thread - leaving all other threads iddle. The new Firefly renderer will render the image top to bottom, left to right by dividing the scene in "bucket" areas you can configure at the rendering parameters, so ALL the cores with be in use for most of the time, which means finishing the render much sooner than Poser 7 would do with its inneficient use of multi-threading.

This is probably not very relevant, but Poser 8 for the first time comes out with SIX new figures instead of the usual pair. They may look pretty ordinary, but each one comes in a different ethnicity, making 3 sets of male and female versions, where they all work with the Face Room, Walk Designer and Talk Designer. Come to think of it, that makes them ideal as starting points for creating avatars of people from different genders and ethnicities using the Face Room. It is also important to note that all those figures come rigged with the new multi sphere system that makes troublesome joints such as hips and shoulders bend more naturally.
 

I keep claiming that Poser 7 was the best version ever released because it has introduced vital functionality we were all asking for years, but Poser 8 goes a step ahead and comes with a much more productive environment optimized for speed. Most of this is already listed on the Smith Micro web site, but I wanted to test things myself to form an opinion based on reality - not marketing.

All in all I am very satisfied with the money I have spent upgrading to Poser 8. I don't regret it a bit, and ever since I started using it, the less I feel like ever using Poser 7 again.

Hope this helps you deciding if you want to upgrade or not, or even switch to DS3A (DAZ Studio 3 Advanced). I didn't buy or intend to buy DS3A, but I did buy some it's major plugins from DAZ3D, and they clearly lack functionality. My Poser 8 upgrade costs the same thing but at least the included features work - that is the least I expect from something you have paid for.''

The change in the way rendering is split amongst the threads is a good thing.

The real changes in the GUI are ones that are "behind the scenes" and most people won't appreciate them until interesting scripts start making use of them.

Westcat, I took the liberty of saving your comments to my computer and  I need to digest  your comments.  However from my quick scan, that is some good valuable stuff you took the time and trouble to type out.  Thank you.  Jan

I've read this before, it's very similar to a review in one of the magazines, I'm pretty sure it's the same as the guy did who wrote on of the "Poser 8 how to books". If you read through it, you get the impression it's a bit (perhaps a lot) biased..... it also contains some errors.

Quote - Now lets talk about the improved Firefly renderer that ships with Poser 8. In my preliminary tests, the improved Firefly produced superior results even at low settings that in older versions would always produce plenty of rendering artifacts in your final renders. With Poser 7, I always had to disable raytracing for any materials that contained transparencies because the render time would be too long, and the final render would be ruined with a lot of "dirty" artifacts.

The good news is that the new Firefly no longer seems to be affected by raytracing over transparencies, and the amount of "dirty" artifacts was greatly reduced. Render times also seem faster even with raytraced shadows over transparency, which is something that plagued Poser since version 6. Hats off to Smith Micro again for solving yet another very old Poser problem!

We all know that the renders compared to P7 or Poser Pro aren't superior at all and the artifacts are still there, even confirmed by SM tech support.

Secondly, Firefly is still very much affected by raytracing over transparencies,confirmed by various users and again by SM tech support.

Quote - OpenGL support now FINALLY works! I have been using Poser since the very first version and OpenGL hardware acceleration never actually worked, even on the quite overpriced Poser 7 Pro. But now it works, and you have the option to manually select which lights to include on the previews. Frankly, I have never seen Poser previews this fast and responsive before. Hats off to Smith Micro for this little miracle

OpenGL works better, but it still doesn't work as it should and could. My Poser Pro preview is very fast and responsive, until you start crowding the scene more and more and then things start to slow down. That's the way it was and that's still the way it is. No miracle has happened there at all. The preview looks a bit better (but not even as good as on most other 3D apps I have that use OpenGL) and it's still sluggish...... for quite a number of people.

Quote - Hope this helps you deciding if you want to upgrade or not, or even switch to DS3A (DAZ Studio 3 Advanced). I didn't buy or intend to buy DS3A, but I did buy some it's major plugins from DAZ3D, and they clearly lack functionality. My Poser 8 upgrade costs the same thing but at least the included features work - that is the least I expect from something you have paid for.''

I noted the date on this review...... Wed Aug 5, 2009.... that's pre SR1. By then it was confirmed that a number of included features did not work, so I do find this comment quite amusing.

It's an extensive review, containing some excellent points, but also painting a picture that isn't totally accurate.

It also must be stated that the writter never used DS3 at all, not only didn't he use D/S 3A as he writes, but he didn't use the regular DS3 as well.

Somehow this person has links with Smith Micro, contrary to his claims about that. Poser 8 was released on August 4th and less then 24 hours later this very extensive review was released....... pretty much impossible to make the claims he did, within 24 hours of release.

I wish...  Oh how I wish that this were true..
Maybe this will happen with SR2..  #;O)

Oh but it is true NoelCan, at least for most of us it's true, there are a few unlucky people who have trouble but is that the fault of Poser or their machine?

Hmmmm  I guess I'd like t hear too on someone who has used new Windows 7
I hear that Apple snowOS  http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/  can be used with XP PRO easily for the best portable render machine on the planet ? 

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=309619

There is a saying..  "A poor tradesman always blames his tools"..
That is something I have never done..  Nor ever will do..

Quote - > Quote - Oh but it is true NoelCan, at least for most of us it's true, there are a few unlucky people who have trouble but is that the fault of Poser or their machine?

There is a saying..  "A poor tradesman always blames his tools"..
That is something I have never done..  Nor ever will do..

Very Nice Gallery,  I'm more into Poses myself, hope to have my next pose set out soon :)