(This is not meant to be a "bash" post, so please don't turn it into one- I'm counting on you :)

This is for you early adopters that have spent the day playing with it-

Assuming I don't render from within Poser, and so Firefly/Superfly (and really the material room) aren't concerns of mine...what else does Poser 12 bring to the table? Any changes to the hierarchy or joints windows (at least a scroll bar instead of the semi-janky "up and down" arrows?) Does it seem faster than 11, or is the library better in some way? Everyone's talking about the render engine(s) but if I take that out of the equation, what is it offering me over Poser 11?

You can try it yourself. There's a 21 day free trial.

Since I have mainly tested the rendering engine, I really cannot answer that. There should be a better support for FBX-Files, but I did not test this up to now. Also, the change of the Python version breaks all of the scripts I used to work with, I won't delete P11 in the forseeable future.

If you don't use Poser to render your pictures, why do you use it anyway? I did this for a while and it was not a decent workflow, even with Poserfusion for C4D. I transferred the scene into C4D and converted the textures to Vray. This made the rendering quicker and the results were better, but it took forever to get all the bits and pieces together. And to adding a prop you decided to have in the scene afterwards comes close to heart surgery. That's why Poser as a whole makes the most sense to me. The thing is, the render engine Firefly was in my eyes the perfect fit in case of speed, quality and integration with the material room. Cycles is a different animal and it will take time to get things done like they did before in Firefly. So, to answering your question, without using the render engine in Poser, Poser makes no sense at all, at last in my opinion. You can take the obj file of a G8 out of DS and put it in Blender, rigg, texture and pose it there and render it with the Blender cycles engine. From my perspective this is to much work for a little benefit.

@cabled accoring to the release announcment. Poser 12 has Almebic export.

Not sure if that would matter to you ,as you did not mention where you render nor how you are getting you poser figures over to that external environment.

So, to answering your question, without using the render engine in Poser, Poser >makes no sense at all,

For the majority of poser users rendering still images ,I would agree

However there are some people, for whom neither Poser, Iclone or Daz studio is their primary creative 3D software and they tend to be Animators & VFX artists

However Poser, Iclone & Daz studio all offer easy to use premade humanoid figures but may fall short in the other major areas like advanced rendering,particle/ VFX systems etc.

I made a 93 minute feature length animated film exporting Daz Genesis figures to C4D via .obj/MDD export because there was no way I could achieve this level of VFX in Daz Studio.

The final release trailer here:

https://youtu.be/oHFE7dbIOd4

I have dumped Daz and C4D for Iclone/CC3 pipeline and Blender 2.9:

https://youtu.be/igv--GMiUq4

at last in my opinion. You can take the obj file of a G8 out of DS and put it in >Blender, rigg, texture and pose it there and render it with the Blender cycles >engine. From my perspective this is to much work for a little benefit.

In late 2020 ,no person, who has been paying attention,would actually use that method to get a Daz figure into Blender. they would use the the free "Diffeomorphic" plugin by Thomas Larson

or perhaps the free Daz to Blender exporter that Daz has released recently.

I render in Octane. I find the Poser plugin to work great for 90% of the things I need, and if it doesn't it's not a big deal to jump into the stand alone. I understand Octane's material system, and 20 years of experience with Poser (and a library 20 years deep) make it an easy workflow for me. But this wasn't about why I render things a certain way.

I know there's a 21 day free trial, but after reading around the boards it seems there are several features maybe not quite ready for prime time and I'd prefer to not eat up my trial time waiting for early day patches.

Thanks for the replies.

I doubt that the Octane plugin will work at the moment.

There are programs like E-On Software's Vue that are far better renderers than any version of Poser but are not designed with character manipulation in mind. The combination of the two is better than either program by itself.

blackbonner posted at 11:03AM Tue, 03 November 2020 - #4402983

If you don't use Poser to render your pictures, why do you use it anyway? I did this for a while and it was not a decent workflow, even with Poserfusion for C4D. I transferred the scene into C4D and converted the textures to Vray. This made the rendering quicker and the results were better, but it took forever to get all the bits and pieces together. And to adding a prop you decided to have in the scene afterwards comes close to heart surgery. That's why Poser as a whole makes the most sense to me. The thing is, the render engine Firefly was in my eyes the perfect fit in case of speed, quality and integration with the material room. Cycles is a different animal and it will take time to get things done like they did before in Firefly. So, to answering your question, without using the render engine in Poser, Poser makes no sense at all, at last in my opinion. You can take the obj file of a G8 out of DS and put it in Blender, rigg, texture and pose it there and render it with the Blender cycles engine. From my perspective this is to much work for a little benefit.

blackbonner posted at 11:41PM Tue, 03 November 2020 - #4402983

If you don't use Poser to render your pictures, why do you use it anyway?

I use Octane Standalone and have used it since it came out as it's the fastest render out there. And Poser is great for posing characters and setting up scenes. I have a 1 button export so it is very fast to get content out of Poser. This of course require a workflow that works fast. For that I use Advance Figure Manager 2 with Layers. I setup the scenes and characters in layers so I can export only those layers where there are changes - like a character pose. That's 1 click in Poser and 1 click in Octane to refresh.

I understand and know, that there is a ton of options and programs to work with and extend the Poser program. But I read the initial question as specifically related to the standalone program Poser, in this case version 12. The question was what additional benefits comes out of this new version if the new render engine is blanked out of the picture. And the answer for me is, that the new version with the better render engine closes the gap you have to put secondary software in to do a job, Poser is supposed to do on its own. The reason why we need plugins like poserfusion and blenderbrigde is that Poser and DS are limited in there capabilities and other programs offered the better, faster or cleaner way to get it done. Now, if the new render engine and the changes in the material room are as effective as it seems, why would you spend money and time to convert and ex-and import Poser files across different programs? I did this with C4D and the program was 3500 Euro and another 700 Euro for Vray for C4D, back in 2010. That's a whole lot of money, but back in these days Poser was not able to do what i wanted to do what it, so i searched for the better solution. The way i have understood the question is, if there is an additional benefit to the new version of Poser except for the update cycles render and my answer was no. I hope that clarifies my opinion on this issue. Sometimes i have difficultys to get a point across because english is not my first language. That's not meant for an excuse, i know that many of you folks are not native English speakers, so the changes are very good to get misunderstood.

From time to time, I used to render using Octane, especially the standalone, because of speed and other improvements, especially HDR LightStudio which is really fun to play with. But that was before: if I can use Poser to render, that's really great. And it'll cost me less each year, which is another great reason. And if my skin settings collection doesn't work anymore, I'll restart from scratch, as for me it's part of the fun. But I truly understand the use of external tools if it's part of your job, I can relate

Two questionS please: --where can i find the trial version? --is a file save from version 12 can be imported straight in Vue infinite 2016 like the file coming from version 11? Thanks

martial posted at 9:13PM Wed, 04 November 2020 - #4403275

Two questionS please: --where can i find the trial version? --is a file save from version 12 can be imported straight in Vue infinite 2016 like the file coming from version 11? Thanks

www.posersoftware.com

thanks ghostman

martial posted at 4:38PM Wed, 04 November 2020 - #4403275

Two questionS please: --where can i find the trial version? --is a file save from version 12 can be imported straight in Vue infinite 2016 like the file coming from version 11? Thanks I have found and installed the trial version Is it normal , using the trial version, that, after rendering a scene, the picture created don't stay on screen (erase) so i cannot save it and compare with same scene in version 11 ?

@martial This is a bit confusing at first. But after a few a few render and cancel I find out that you have to wait till Poser finish his first round rendering. Otherwise you have a grey background. Hope this is something which will get fixed.

@cabled My first impression on Poser 12 is really good. I was surprised how fast it is now. I do a few test render , portraits, close up with Bisquits hair on LF. I really love her hair a lot, but usually they need a bit time to render because of the high quality , so I want to see here how much faster Poser 12 goes on them. I hit the render button , go in the kitchen for to get some espresso, when I came back, my render was done. I was honestly impressed. Also the new shaders are a great improvement. For now I am happy with Poser 12.

In response to the OP's original question, and also to some of the replies, I use Poser to pose figures, then export them to Blender for the render. A scene that took over 8 hours to render in Poser 11 takes me 45 minutes in Blender (Superfly vs Cycles), so the time spent collecting the bits was more than made up by the improved render times. I can create whole scenes in Blender (for free) and use the instancing capabilities to make large and complex scenes that will crash Poser or DS.

I am very impressed with what Bondware have done for this release, far exceeding my expectations, but like the OP, unless they have improved the FBX export and the collection of textures for obj exports (which failed every time in Poser 11), I have no need to purchase Poser 12. If they have improved those such that they actually port to Blender, I would buy it as it would significantly improve my workflow.

Merci de cette précision Thanks The AnimaGemini

@martial This is a bit confusing at first. But after a few a few render and cancel I find out that you have to wait till Poser finish his first round rendering. Otherwise you have a grey background. Hope this is something which will get fixed.

Still not possible to see the render pictures after rendering in Poser 12 trial (just grey screen a second after render displayed ) and poser 12 trial crash very too often on my Windows 10 pro 64 bits , 32 gig Ram. I think i will wait before i buy it and continue to Poser 11

martial posted at 5:51PM Thu, 05 November 2020 - #4403454

Still not possible to see the render pictures after rendering in Poser 12 trial (just grey screen a second after render displayed ) and poser 12 trial crash very too often on my Windows 10 pro 64 bits , 32 gig Ram. I think i will wait before i buy it and continue to Poser 11

Try to uncheck "separate process" . This should do the trick. At last for me it does.

Had no trouble rendering in separate process.

New Material room tab looks useful.

No change to Hierarchy panel, which has been my major gripe since Poser 7.

I don't use Superfly, so I'm not seeing a reason to update at this point.

(edit) That was all I was going to say until I tried Superfly just to be fair. Tried the PostFx. Attempted to apply denoise. HARD REBOOT!

I finally found that my BitDefender total security don't allow Poser 12 to write the render cache So after i have add an exception to permit this in my antivirus settings ,Poser 12 render is now displayed and i can save it

Still not possible to see the render pictures after rendering in Poser 12 trial (just grey screen a second after render displayed ) and poser 12 trial crash very too often on my Windows 10 pro 64 bits , 32 gig Ram. I think i will wait before i buy it and continue to Poser 11

Try to uncheck "separate process" . This should do the trick. At last for me it does.

For TheAnimaGemini this first render with Poser 12 trial using sketch rendering (sharamuse3d product and one photo at back)

martial posted at 10:24PM Thu, 05 November 2020 - #4403503

For TheAnimaGemini this first render with Poser 12 trial using sketch rendering (sharamuse3d product and one photo at back)

Beautiful!