I'm a current user of Poser 11, but with the macOS Sonoma update, the UI in Poser 11 has gotten insanely janky. So I decided to give Poser 13 a whirl. I'm so glad there is a 21-day free trial available.

I opened a lot of my older scenes just to ensure that nothing got lost. They all opened just fine (after adding my Poser 11 Content library), and the UI is no longer janky. At first, Poser 13 seemed to work. I then proceeded to try out the "make movie" animation feature, and that's where things went off the rails.

The first thing I noticed was that Poser no longer spools the images directly into movie files. Instead it prefers to generate a ton of individual image files and then merge them afterwards. I'm guessing this allows movie generation to use the Queue Manager. At least that's what I'm hoping since the Queue Manager does not function in the free trial. Using the queue manager to generate movies would be an awesome benefit instead of tying up the main UI, so I'm okay with this change.

After a number of movies, the application kept getting slower and slower, even with the same scenes that worked really fine at first. Even the previews now operate at turtle speed and the application barely functions. The other thing I noticed was that, after a few movie creations, the main UI thread completely locks up — all I have available to me is the dreaded Spinning Beachball of Patience™. I still see image files being generated, but the main UI is bricked. Even after the movie generation has finished, the main UI thread never recovers. The only recourse is to force-quit the application and start over. (As a seasoned threads programmer, this is behaving as if the main UI thread ended up going down the code path that should have been done by a background thread. And when it finished it had no way to recover. Either that or the UI thread is blocked on a mutex that is never released.)

Many other bugs that have been in Poser for generations have not been addressed. For example, the Play Range control at the bottom of the animation pallet still gets confused with longish (700 frames) animations. (By the way, it would be nice if the play range control had a way to be locked. Having it sit just above a tiny scrollbar just waiting to be accidentally clicked is a poor design choice.)

Poser 13 crashes a lot more than Poser 11 does. Each of the crash reports has been sent to your developers by way of the crash reporter, so these should not be a surprise to the developers who have the ability to view them. Overall, I'm going sit out upgrading to Poser 13. At least on macOS, it is not ready for prime time. With Poser 11 on Sonoma, the UI is janky, but the core functionality basically works. With Poser 13, the UI is no longer janky, but the core functionality (specifically animation) no longer works.

The make movie rendering images for each frame was for recovery. If you render directly to video and it crashes at 90% done, you lose all that time. Rendering to images, you still have that work. This is something I thought was standard practice in the 3d world. I was taught to do it when learning other software.

If you want you can set it to turn those frames into a video and delete the stills

While the movie is being rendered, the UI will become unresponsive unless you're rendering in the background. The background rendering might be using up a lot of memory that is causing the slow down

I really like the change for that reason. What I don't like is that when you open an old scene, all those checkboxes are checked so you have kind of destruction settings that you might not notice.

I have not noticed the progressive slowdown you're reporting (I'm not using a Mac though, maybe that's relevant?), even when I do multiple animations in the same scene. My #1 issue with animation is that I don't have a good way to insert frames between existing frames. Select and drag does not work right for all figures, some morphs do not carry over properly. Copy-paste does not work right if you have clothing that is set to auto scale to a figure that is not 100%, and in any case it's tedious if you just want to insert one frame in the middle. There might be a solution I'm overlooking but I haven't stumbled across it yet.

I know what you mean about inserting and deleting frames, not just the contents of the frames but to be able to insert time slices and have everything slide to the right would be nice. I tried using the "retime" to simulate that but it didn't go well.

The main reason I'm staying off 13 at this point is the threading problem when making a movie. It will work correctly exactly once; after that, I need to restart.

I can't produce the run away thread scenario. After an image sequence Poser idles down to less than 0.1% cpu usage. And, the UI remains responsive as normal. However there's a known issue with dynamic hair getting all ... explodey ... and that absolutely does drag the UI down to it's knees. That's a known issue and has proven to be more elusive than expected and only seems to affect Mac. Do your scenes have dynamic hair?

And, the make movie options default behavior is setup to match the P<13 behavior. They were originally defaulted off but then we got crucified because "Poser 13 couldn't make movies" Apparently the Auto Make option needed a flashing light or we needed to default it on.

If you're used to rendering image sequences and encoding in something like Davinci it's annoying. If you're used to Poser doing it it's perfect. Can't please every body.

One huge new benefit is that P13 allows you to encode existing sequences.In most cases it's one click but it can work for any properly numbered image sequence.

1) Click the [Change] button

2) choose the first file in the sequence and remove the underscore and frame numbers (filename.png)

3) OK

4} Poser will warn that you might be overwriting images (That's new in 13 too)

5) Click [Encode Existing Images]

Done

And if you're still in the scene that you just rendered the sequence just click the encode button and you're rescued. Literally one click to get back in your groove.

Once you change the setting they are saved with the scene.

I don't mind doing the image sequence encoding using ffmpeg. I have a workflow set up using 'make' so it's really easy. I did notice that generating a sequence of PNG files is slightly slower than generating a sequence of TIFF files. 

My scene doesn't have any dynamic hair, but it does have conforming hair. I'll disable that to see if anything changes.

The thread behavior is this:

1. After launch, immediate render an image sequence. This works perfectly. The progress dialog counts through the frames as it should and the UI returns when it's done.

2. Render an image sequence a second time. During this, the progress dialog does not count through the frames, the UI is frozen and I'm watching the spinning beachball. However, in the Finder, I can see the image files being generated. Once the last image file has been created, the application remains locked for about five minutes doing nothing but spinning the beachball. CPU is 100%, a symptom of a spin-lock gone wrong. (It's also curious that Poser only ever uses one core.) After about five minutes, the UI recovers and starts behavior normally.

3. Try to render another sequence. This one behaves as #2 above but never recovers. I've let the application sit for 15 minutes and it never comes back, necessitating a force-quit.

I'm pretty sure this is Mac specific as threading libraries are tightly linked to their underlying OS. Likely the programmers are not as familiar with posix threads as they should be. I noticed they use the "libpth" threading library which acts as another layer of abstraction, but the law of leaky abstractions always wins.

Found another serious defect. This one exists in both Poser 11 and Poser 13.

Create an animation with layers. In the second layer, set it to "add". Choose "Current layer only". This should zero the figure. Grab a body part like an arm and try to manipulate it using the parameter wheels. You'll find that the parameter dials are completely bugged and you cannot do any controlled manipulation using them. Only direct manipulation works. You can't even type values into the parameters and have them behave as you expect.

These are the types of bugs that I keep hoping get fixed with subsequent major versions but never do.

Layers has been broken since Poser 2014 and really should not be used unless you are doing something like a walk or talk design.  Then the layer is a total replacement and done for each frame and it is in replace mode.  Otherwise, best to ignore that feature.  I used it a lot in Poser 2012 and it had some small problems, but 2014 and later are broken and there have been a number of tickets put in about this issue.

ChromeStar posted at 7:04 PM Sun, 7 July 2024 - #4487131

Select and drag does not work right for all figures, some morphs do not carry over properly.

If it's not a bug it sounds like some objects might be locked and/or hidden.  For whatever you have that doesnt move, can you select it and check the Object menu to see if Lock is enabled?  I'm curious about that one.  Ive never had any issues with this myself and all I use Poser for is animation. 

At least for me its just that the Animation Palette is so frustratingly slow it makes editing keyframes a much bigger task than it should

jbruni@yahoo.com posted at 12:18 PM Sat, 6 July 2024 - #2988438

I then proceeded to try out the "make movie" animation feature, and that's where things went off the rails.

The first thing I noticed was that Poser no longer spools the images directly into movie files. Instead it prefers to generate a ton of individual image files and then merge them afterwards.

We always had the option export Image sequences.  I think it was only changed like this to accommodate the PostFX features, which I think needs pre-rendered images to work.  It's great, if that's something you use, but over-complicated the process for normal preview exporting, which used to be 1 click.  Hopefully it gets more love in the future.  Id really like them to add a Preview Render tab so we can get the simplified exporting features back in addition to the new tab.