ChromeStar posted at 10:23 PM Tue, 11 April 2023 - #4461866

AcePyx posted at 9:21 PM Tue, 11 April 2023 - #4461856

ChromeStar posted at 7:39 PM Tue, 11 April 2023 - #4461836

Poser 12 felt like a pretty significant upgrade to me. The speed improvements alone were worth the price of admission. Improvements in material assignment. The addition of PrincipledBsdf. Those are things I take advantage of every time I use the software. It's also been pretty interesting to see functionality added over the course of the release cycle. That increased visibility about what the team is actually working on is what does not match up with the comments above.

The speed was a game changer, but a hugely belated one.

So...  the updates to that point were not sufficient, and Poser 12 was the one that delivered the important thing? That's the opposite of the claim above.

Principled came in 70% through 12's lifecycle. It was welcome, but simplified the technology that already existed.

I never felt like Superfly was accessible to me before Poser 12. Yeah, it was there, yeah, I tried it, but it was too complicated to pick up easily and too slow to be worth spending that effort. Both of those things changed in 12. Maybe I could have done everything in 11, but maybe I could also have invested in a nice set of colored pencils and learned to draw.

But a commenter on my vid made the observation that the underlying technology has been stagnant for a decade, and by and large, I don't much disagree with that notwithstand superfly in 2015. Innovations rather than streamlines have been awfully thin on the ground wouldn't you say?

It has been stagnant, that's absolutely true. And Poser 12 is when that started to change. Cycles was updated, and then updated again in 13. Python was updated (for all the good and bad).

The claim above was:

Only those, who are still on Poser 10 and lower really benfit from going up to Poser 13.

Anything starting with Poser 11 feels just like Service updates.

And that's just the opposite of my experience. I went from 11 to 12 and it was a huge step forward. It was the earlier updates that felt slow and incremental. There is plenty left to do, and there is a limit to how quickly they can iterate based on the available budget, but I feel like the progress they are making is a big deal.

I had great concerns when I first heard Bondware had purchased Poser, considering the income that must come from marketing content for a rival product I had fears that it was being purchased just to let it freeze to death.  Not that this was just a Bondware thing in that I would have had the same fears no matter who purchased it, I had seen some very good and useful programs die from lack of interest and upgrades over the years so I felt the fears were valid.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see the purchase was the opposite,  the devolvement team have breathed new life into a program that was struggling to survive.  Even the initial signs were good, doing away with the pro version was long over due, and offering the Poser 11 free to many current version users a nice touch.   I purchase Poser 12 as soon as it was available knowing full well I was buying early access and just a promise of progress and updates in the future.  It was a purchase I never regretted and, from my point of view, the development team delivered on their promises.  Which explains why I was so keen to the continue the process with Poser 13 at the earliest opportunity, what I have at my fingertips today justifies the price of the upgrade alone and there is still the promise of more.  

I have been playing with Poser for over twenties years and reading it would be dead in the near future for every one of those years.  While I knew it was struggling I never gave up hope and the last few years have proved I was right to hope.  Poser's future is brighter now that it has been for most of those twenty years and it has delivered so much fun to me since Bondware purchased it.  I have so much respect for the team and what they have done.

 

 

I use Poser 13 on Windows 11 - For Scene set up I use a Geekcom A5 -  Ryzen 9 5900HX, with 64 gig ram and 3 TB  storage, mini PC with final rendering done on normal sized desktop using an AMD Ryzen Threadipper 1950X CPU, Corsair Hydro H100i CPU cooler, 3XS EVGA GTX 1080i SC with 11g Ram, 4 X 16gig Corsair DDR4 Ram and a Corsair RM 100 PSU .   The desktop is in a remote location with rendering done via Queue Manager which gives me a clearer desktop and quieter computer room.