I don’t want to install Big Sur unless Poser runs properly. Thanks!

Well, DAZ Studio won't run in Big Sur. I don't know about Poser.

Woah! That's actually a problem. I export tons of stuff from DS to Poser.

You probably need to ask Bondware if they intent to port Poser to Apple Silicone.

I suspect that 36 months from now, the only place you will be able to purchase Apple Applications will be out of Apple's App store.

Not an issue at present, and Rosetta 2 seems to run Intel code as fast as Intel processors.

I’m afraid I can’t advise directly yet, but my other half was saying she was going to uodate one of her imacs to Big Sur, so if she does I will give it a test and let you know.

I’m thinking of buying one of these new Apple Silicon Macs to test Poser in too... but the fact that Poser 12 breaks lots of things over Poser 11 (new superfly cycles issues and snarly’s scripts not working) I might not upgrade to Mac Poser 12 when it comes out.

Actaully I guess I could install Big Sur on an external drive, boot from that and test...

I went ahead and installed Big Sur on a drive to give it a whirl.

Unfortunately, my 2014 iMac seems to crash after about half an hour on Big Sur even with no applications running.

I did manage to give Poser 11.3.818 a cursory few tests, including scene creation and rendering with no issues except the crashes which I don't think are anything to do with Poser itself.

Thank you! That’s good news. Now it will hinge on whether DS becomes compatible, since that’s my DAZ ridiculous sale export platform.

FWIW, there's a thread in the Daz Commons about Studio being able to run on Big Sur in mid-2021. Until then they suggest you use an older version of Studio.

EClark1894 posted at 11:38PM Thu, 26 November 2020 - #4405800

FWIW, there's a thread in the Daz Commons about Studio being able to run on Big Sur in mid-2021. Until then they suggest you use an older version of Studio.

Sorry - even older versions of Studio won't run on Big Sur ... it has something to do with QTwhatever, that is not available on Big Sur anymore. Updating DazStudio will break a lot of plugins, some from creators that left the business or are dead.

Actually ,in the thread mentioned By EClark, the official reccomendation by Daz is to not update your Mac to "Big Sur" until Daz can cobble a functioning Mac version of Daz studio by "Mid 2021".?

I left the Mac OS many years ago to use the, Windows only, Iclone Character animation software and never looked back.?

It has long been known that Apple has long ago ceased to be a platform for the professional 3D/CG/VFX industry and now even the hobbyists at the Poser/Daz level may soon have to acknowledge that Apple has become a luxury brand phone company for afluent consumers.?

Oops, Wolf, you're right. I misread where it said to Downgrade the OS to Downgrade DS. My bad.

Thought I would post the following info about Big Sur on a Mac. I got the info directly from Apple.com.

General Requirements

OS X 10.9 or later

4GB of memory

35.5GB available storage on macOS Sierra or later*

Some features require an Apple ID; terms apply.

Some features require a compatible internet service provider; fees may apply.

Mac Hardware Requirements For details about your Mac model, click the Apple icon at the top left of your screen and choose About This Mac. These Mac models are compatible with macOS Big Sur:

MacBook (2015 or later)

MacBook Air (2013 or later)

MacBook Pro (Late 2013 or later)

Mac mini (2014 or later)

iMac (2014 or later)

iMac Pro (2017 or later)

Mac Pro (2013 or later)

If You don't have one of the above mention Macs by year or name, it cannot run BIG SUR.

I've installed Big Sur on my late 2015 iMac and have had no problems with Poser 11 or anything else yet. I don't really use Studio, so not concerned with it yet.

Supposedly, any Mac from 2013 on can run Big Sur.

Considering I do all my Superfly rendering with CPU, and this iMac's Geekbench score for its CPU is 841 for Single-Core Score and 2885 Multi-Core Score compared to 1705 and 7390 for the new Mac Mini, I'm making the switch. So great to know this shouldn't be an issue. Thanks for trying Poser out on Big Sur. Hopefully in the not too distant future Poser will be optimised for Apple Silicon too rather than emulating it through Rosetta 2.

Good call Cobra, I’m thinking about buying a new M1 Mac to play around with.

But I keep hoping they’ll release a larger screen laptop around March with an even faster M1X (hoping for approaching twice the speed for 12 cores compared to 8 cores in the M1 - due to double the performance cores). If I had more free time I’d get me an M1 Mac Mini as a stop-gap. It’s ironic how the GPU is somewhat irrelevant to us Poser Mac users as we have to CPU render.

I think when Apple start bringing out their professional level SOCs a lot of people will be migrating from comparatively slow Windows machines. This new M1 is the slowest Mac Apple Silicon that will ever exist and beats Intel i9

If you get the Mac Mini soon, I’d be interested in the rendering speeds you get.

I think when Apple start bringing out their professional level SOCs a >lot of people will be migrating from comparatively slow Windows >machines

Doubtful.... unless Apple makes thier hardware more affordable at the low to medium end of the performance spectrum.?

Yeah I know you can spec an HP up the $50,000 USD range of the top Mac pro's. However the exponential growth in the game dev industry has not been from users who can afford $50,000 on hardware but those indie users who can only spend a few thousand and in that price category Apple's hardware can not match the price/performance of a self built PC.

Mac based poser users may be willing to render their still portraits on their CPU's, however the age of REALTIME GPU animation rendering& veiwport display is upon us and any platform or software that forces it's users to stay stuck in the past ,rendering offline on their CPU's ,will remain a marginalized minority no matter how pretty their over priced hardware.?

Updating DazStudio will break a lot of plugins, some from creators that left the business or are dead.

OMG , how will they ever create, that means they will actually have to do.....artist thing's and... creative things ? all on their own ?

wow, cant imagine something like that happening to poser users ....oh wait.

CHK2033 posted at 4:12PM Mon, 30 November 2020 - #4406076

Updating DazStudio will break a lot of plugins, some from creators that left the business or are dead.

OMG , how will they ever create, that means they will actually have to do.....artist thing's and... creative things ? all on their own ?

wow, cant imagine something like that happening >to poser users ....oh wait.

During My 12 years ,as a Maxon C4D user, I learned the bitter lesson of allowing third party plugins to become the single point of failure in my entire creative process.

Sure it is nice to have a really powerful workflow enhancer or two such as some powerful Blender add-ons I use.

However IMHO, if the loss of such third party add-ons/plugins stops ones creative process entirely one needs to seriously re-evaluate if the core software remains a good choice for a creative tool.

wolf359 posted at 5:10PM Mon, 30 November 2020 - #4406080

CHK2033 posted at 4:12PM Mon, 30 November 2020 - #4406076

Updating DazStudio will break a lot of plugins, some from creators that left the business or are dead.

OMG , how will they ever create, that means they will actually have to do.....artist thing's and... creative things ? all on their own ?

wow, cant imagine something like that happening >to poser users ....oh wait.

During My 12 years ,as a Maxon C4D user, I learned the bitter lesson of allowing third party plugins to become the single point of failure in my entire creative process.

Sure it is nice to have a really powerful workflow enhancer or two such as some powerful Blender add-ons I use.

However IMHO, if the loss of such third party add-ons/plugins stops ones creative process entirely one needs to seriously re-evaluate if the core software remains a good choice for a creative tool.

Ah off topic, C4D was the first 3D program I ever loaded up in 93 (for some strange reason they had it on one of the PC @ Headquarters in Mannheim Germany ) tried to figure out how to load a cube, (Not draw/pull one out) after 2 days still didn't figure it out and moved on to Softimage and PLE Maya... anyway..... yes agree with everything you said 100% plugins are ok...but not to the point where without them you cant continue.

Nothing Mac related to add ,sorry RobZhena for the Off topic...Oh ! I like the way they look (Macs) So that counts :0)

Not quite sure why wolf359 is dropping into a post about running Poser on a MacOS only to bash both Poser and Apple, but anyway, moving on.

That's a good idea ader, I should probably use a scene for a benchmark that I can use to see the render times for this iMac compared to the Mac Mini. Then use it again once Poser is optimised for the M1 to see the difference that makes too.

CobraBlade posted at 7:00PM Tue, 01 December 2020 - #4406156

Not quite sure why wolf359 is dropping into a post about running Poser on a MacOS only to bash both Poser and Apple, but anyway, moving on.

I think his point is that Macs are way too over priced and in his eyes, (underpowered) to work on animation. Of course, I've only been into animation once while I was on a Mac, and there are plenty of software buys you can make for a Mac that aren't hardware critical.

EClark1894 posted at 5:21AM Wed, 02 December 2020 - #4406166

CobraBlade posted at 7:00PM Tue, 01 December 2020 - #4406156

Not quite sure why wolf359 is dropping into a post about running Poser on a MacOS only to bash both Poser and Apple, but anyway, moving on.

I think his point is that Macs are way too over priced and in his eyes, (underpowered) to work on animation. Of course, I've only been into animation once while I was on a Mac, and there are plenty of software buys you can make for a Mac that aren't hardware critical.

@Eclark macs are not "underpowered for animation" I rendered this entire 93 minute Marvel fan film on a Mac https://drive.google.com/file/d/17J9NeEDWIXUmdt3bx9q5dWrR50poEA5d/view?usp=drivesdk

The first ten minutes of which, were created with only Poser and C4D..?

I now own 3 PC's and use Blender/EEVEE for near realtime rendering of my animations?

However the notion that people who own modern PC's with top end NVIDIA GPU will "Migrate to macs" for some new pro SOC's seems to ignore the price vs performance factor as well as the fact that there are many more hardware vendors supporting NVIDIA here in the Age of realtime rendering for both animation and stills at prices far below equivalent Mac hardware.?

So the benchmark scene I'll use is this very handy one found over on ShareCG

The two machines we are looking at are my Retina 5K, 27-inch late 2015 model iMac with its quad-core 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 and a M1 Mac Mini. Both are running Big Sur and both have 16GB of RAM.

Render settings are the default ones already set up for this scene upon loading it which you can see above.

The following render took 1 hour and 58 minutes on the iMac.

The same scene running Poser 11 through Intel emulation with Rosetta 2 rendered this scene in 1 hour and 38 minutes.

So I am looking forward to doing this benchmark again once Poser is a native app to see what difference that'll make.

Just for curiosity's sake, I did the benchmark again but with settings I'd typically use for my own renders.

The render looks different as you'd imagine with my setting as seen here.

This time the iMac took 3 hours and 34 minutes while the Mac Mini did this render through Rosetta 2 in 2 hours and 42 minutes.

Even the fastest CPU will never compare to a GPU. We're talking hours reduced to minutes for renders that are virtually equal quality. I don't think anyone who is rendering on a good GPU would ever go back to a CPU for any reason at this point. It's just not worth it, especially when the cost is nearly 3x what they paid for their PC with a high end GPU card.

The industry is going even deeper with GPU than ever before, so I think in the next 5 years, all rendering will be GPU based. Unless something crazy and unexpected comes up that changes the balance of speed, it's a no brainer. Even high end studios have started changing their render farms to GPU. Less time equals more profit.

I'm so far happy to report that my Poser 11.3.818 on Big Sur 11.2.3 on M1 chip renders, I don't think though I can toggle ambient lights from off to on in the Scripts, Partners, DimensionD, XLC though. Still working on it. It renders black if FF, only sketch sees anything.

So here we have Poser 12 now, using the default settings for the benchmark scene. Now we have adaptive sampling the following scene above rendered in 1 hour and 4 minutes on an M1 Mac mini. Would love to do this again once Poser is built for the M1 chip instead of going through Rosetta emulation.

As we are rendering using CPU, you want to use branched path tracing. So the next render I go back to my goto render settings below. This is where we see the real power of Poser 12 over 11. On my M1 Mac mini it took 2 hours and 42 minutes. This render now only takes 38 minutes thanks to adaptive sampling on the same M1 Mac mini.