In answer to the OP for me the most" fun" version of poser was ,and remains, the venerable POSER 6!

This ,for me,is due to a confluence of multiple external factors.
After buying the P4 "propack" to use its hosting plugins with Maxon Cinema4D 7

I was ecstatic!! ....for an extremely brief period until I realized that
Curios labs had no intention of updating the propack plugins at the same pace as the targeted host Apps( C4D,LW, MAX etc)
so a slight "bug fix "update to C4D or LW would permanently Break My propack plugin connectivity

So I languished skipping  the largely disastrous poser 5 entirely.

Then came Poser 6!!
soon followed by Paul K's Poser physics Plugin along with the KDZ "interposer pro"plugin for C4D.
I now had a way to create Amazing animated Character& prop physics simulations and a dedicated programmer supporting his poser content import C4D plugin with regular updates.

The beauty of the "interposer pro" plugin is that is is NOT actually a poser plugin per say but a POSER/DAZ CONTENT plugin for Maxon
Cinema4D.

This means one can load pose'Daz content(figures props,pose files mat file etc)
from any standard poser runtime directories without actually having the poser or Daz studio application even installed

This workflow made all subsequent releases of poser/DAz studio Moot for me.
as posers subsequent owner chose to ignore the Core animation tools (save for a few "new" gimmicks)
And final rendering in poser is not something to even be considered as I have access to Way more advanced rendering engines not the least of which is Vray from Chaos group.

"If you want realism, then what you want are high-level nodes that do all the work - there is no reason to avoid adding such nodes. SM tried to offer this with the composite node, which would allow me to put together everything you need in a single box. However, they didn't do it right, and so the effort was wasted. That could be remedied. I'd like to see that remedied.

But one of the coolest things about the Poser material system is that realism is not the only thing you can do with it. Trying to judge which of those should be kept and which blocked is impossible.

Also, when people assemble "wrong" shaders, it's not usually because they plug things into displacement. It's because they don't understand physics at all."

BB your knowledge in this area is unequivocally VAST!! and Appreciated by poser users for certain

I have spent many years in various so called "High end" program specific discussion forums:
Newtek, Maxon,nextlimit and Luxology and I have never encountered such **
eye glazing discussion of the mathematics of Shaders**
not even in the Blender forums which have a truly WORLD CLASS node based Shader& internal Compositing system.

this is Not a criticism of you BB as you are effectively an Engineer in this area

But I think there is a reason why even the so called "pros"
have HUGE & ever growing online community repositories of Shader presets for Maxwell, Modo,Vray and the like.

Just My opinion but I suspect that Alot of poser users  here simply do not care to know the physics of a shader they just want to get on with rendering.

 

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