Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: One year later: what I learned about Poser

NanetteTredoux opened this issue on Dec 07, 2009 ยท 57 posts

Earthjade posted Tue, 08 December 2009 at 3:17 PM

Good topic. I have also been using Poser 7 for about 13 months for a comic book and in that time I have rendered about 2600 images. So my priority is to be able to crank out lots of decent action and dialog images rather than spending days trying to make that one beautiful image while mastering the mathematical puzzles behind it. While many will disagree with me, this is what I've learned for what I need out of Poser:

  1. Pose and Material tab only, everything else is inefficient or too time consuming.

  2. Some Python scripts are good like the skin shaders I avoid any of the internal Poser effects like motion blur and dynamic clothing. I find them poor and resource heavy.

  3. Lighting is the key - make things bright and the details come alive. Whoever invented the default Poser lighting needs to be reprimanded.

  4. I avoid shadows and raytracing. Yes, they do look beautiful but when you need to render a few dozen images over a weekend, I just cannot wait for Firefly to chug along for 10 minutes (I have a quad core). I save these additional effects for special layouts, atmospheric scenes and covers.

  5. Don't waste your time posing...buy a lot of pose packs and then tweak to suit you.

  6. Don't mess around with pokethroughs. It's often better just to make the offending body part invisible.

  7. Overlay, overlay, overlay. Saving poser images as background transparent png files is your friend. 4 figures should be the absolute limit for any Poser render and with textures being 4000x4000 these days, that may even drop to 2 or 3. If you're making busy scenes, you need to overlay composite images...Poser will die otherwise.

  8. Postwork is the key. Anything you get out of Poser needs to be reworked to give the "wow" effect. Buy some Photoshop actions or make them yourself. This is the difference to me between an average render and a great one.

  9. Best place to buy content is here. Another site beginning with D is generally too expensive for what you get and CP needs to pick up their game in terms of their website and the content they offer.