Thx hornet3d& Richard60, I guess I'll have to give it a whirl and see what I think for myself when they release a native Mac version. 

That's for the bit of clarification folks, I still don't see how this new no-buckets thing is different to the old progressive mode, but maybe there was some core wastage in progressive mode they got rid of?

In p12 sometimes I use bucket renders and sometimes I use progressive, and saw no time difference in render time with them previously. I did however a few times see a visual difference in the render when the same exact scene was rendered in progressive mode versus not in progressive mode - this may have been a bug that has been fixed?

I still think it seems disingenuous to try and compare render times of P12 with P13 if the render settings (pixel samples and adaptive sampling thresholds) are different. Comparing apples to oranges basically. Are the render times different with CPU renders or is it just GPU renders that have benefited?

So I take it Poser13 doesn't render faster after all, it just has lower quality presets resulting in shorter render times?

If you set pixel samples to 2 it will be even faster lol.

i.e. if the pixel samples, bucket size and adaptive sampling threshold etc. settings are exactly the same the render time difference is what exactly?

I might have to fire up Poser13 in a virtual machine to see for myself. 

That texture thing sounds like the same sort of sheet show we have with Poser 12 when using products we have previously purchased.

My guess is they upgraded cycles without caring that it breaks older content. Again. It should check the materials when they are loaded and provide the option to fix/change them to ensure backwards compatibility imho. 

I've not tried the trial yet, and as a second-class citizen (Mac user) I won't be until they release not only a Mac version, but a Mac version that is native Apple Silicon and supports GoZ for ZBrush 2023.

On that subject, the new posing features (proxy posing) in ZBrush 2023.1 mean that where I have been taking sculpts back to Poser for rendering I am more likely to just ditch Poser now. In ZBrush I can quickly and easily pose and animate figures that have millions of polygons. 

Well we do seem to have somewhat of a consensus that most Poser users want an easy life, an easy to use program - so we come back to the fact that most users content was made for FireFly and frankly works best with FireFly unless you are a major tinkerer - if SuperFly is the future it has to be backwards compatible and so far it isn't - users need to be able to just load a FireFly mat and have it work in SuperFly with no tinkering.

Yeah, it's good that Ken is filling gaps in the Poser feature list, but there shouldn't really be these gaps:

https://www.renderosity.com/marketplace/products/157979/runtime-organizer-for-poser-12

ssgbryan posted at 2:06 PM Sun, 26 February 2023 - #4457012

Until there is a 1-click firefly-superfly conversion process for ALL materials, superfly is irrelevant for a lot of users.

From my perspective - This isn't Poser 13. 

It is Poser 12.1.

Poser depends upon external content and so much of it was shipped before SuperFly existed.

Users tried rendering their pre-existing content in SuperFly and were met with "demon eyes", "skin like coal" or at best a figure that looked like she was wrapped in cling-film.

Yes the very technical users could manually fix these things but it is a tedious job with so many materials and so many character sets, and the material room is an un-useable nightmare for most. So they don't bother, they stick to FireFly.

Some top vendors like SV7 released characters with SuperFly materials included - but these invariably looked worse than the SSS materials they shipped that worked in both FireFly and SuperFly.

I find that SV7 SSS materials render even nicer in SuperFly than Firefly, but that's partly as I like a good but not excessive degree of specularity on skin to give extra depth to renders.

For other vendors like Tempesta3D I find their SSS materials look far worse in SuperFly as the Specularity is so high, so have to manually amend these if I want to use SuperFly - and it's very painful. 

Poser will never compete with the big players for the most technical of users so they should focus on its users needs - ease of use. 

SuperFly is a powerful disaster to date.

I suspect the only reason people use FireFly is ease of use (old products just work) and speed of render. Personally I only use SuperFly in Poser12 as I find the results more pleasing. 

There are lots of infuriating things in Poser that need addressing like switching from Material  room and back again resets the material that is open, so you have to re-open it every single time, I guess all the old threads of wish lists and bugs still get ignored. I don't think the people who code Poser actually use it or they would experience the frustrations and address them. 

Preview window needs to have the postFX for example and needs to be a configurable size with separate render presets assigned to it. 

On Mac working with Poser in fullscreen is impossible if you have multiple monitors, because so often dialogs get randomly placed outside of the visible screen real estate - meaning one has to move the main Poser window to get the popup dialog on screen and then move Poser back to a sensible position.

One can't even purge the Texture Cache from inside Poser - it has to be done manually in the OS filesystem.

We should be able to add notes or at least names to renders inside Poser to help us in comparing renders made with different settings. 

I was a programmer for a few decades so I know how many of these and many more are things you would have expected to be fixed in a Poser 12 update.

Thanks, I know there not seams per se as they can't be fixed by texture editing despite the issue existing for some textures and not others. 

I use this option for SubD too - but good to hear these textures will still work okay. 

Can anyone clarify something for me?

I have dozens of texture sets that do not work with SuperFly due to showing seams, unless Is use the Poser option: Poser Skinning Method : Poser Unimesh

Are we saying that this workaround will go away in Poser 13? If so that will be a big deal for many folks I suspect.

Thx, as I thought : useless for most folk. 

ader posted at 4:42 PM Mon, 23 January 2023 - #4454512

https://www.posersoftware.com/article/565/poser-13-release-on-track-for-march-23 

states: "In addition, we have enhanced Poser’s remote rendering tool Queue Manager (for network-based render farms) to support GPU rendering and PostFX processing. In practice, this means a customer can render a large Poser animated sequence across a network of older CPU-only computers, high-end GPU-equipped computers, or a mixture of both. "

I take it this means we still don't get network rendering for single still images :(

You can render still images to the Queue Manager. Just choose the Render > Render in Queue command and there you go. 8-)

I'm talking about having 4 computers and rendering a single still image with it being split across the 4 computers so it renders in a quarter of the time, I don't think Poser Queue does that... like CrowdRender for Blender does

https://www.posersoftware.com/article/565/poser-13-release-on-track-for-march-23 

states: "In addition, we have enhanced Poser’s remote rendering tool Queue Manager (for network-based render farms) to support GPU rendering and PostFX processing. In practice, this means a customer can render a large Poser animated sequence across a network of older CPU-only computers, high-end GPU-equipped computers, or a mixture of both. "

I take it this means we still don't get network rendering for single still images :(

Cheers, I’ll check that out, will be useful being able to just render once, especially on some hologram animations I’m trying out for my Looking Glass Portrait :) 

@nerd, just done that, thanks.

I had already emailed the files in reply to your email but maybe you don't get the replies.