"Photography is the art of the tangible, of reality. It is a moment in time. The very nature of photography is based on three things performed against a pre-existing tangible subject or event found within the scope of reality to produce art: composition, lighting, and color. In photography, you are taking something that exists and committing it to either film or pixel, in the hopes that the story you tell with it will last orders of magnitude longer than the short moment in which it was composed. Sometimes it is distorted (e.g. fashion photography), but is still grounded in either manipulating or fixing the fleeting reality into the permanent."

Yeah, photographers love to make it sound all arty like that ;)  I still don't see the difference.  Modeling is like sculpting, rendering is like photography.  If I download someone's models and render them, I've essentially photographed them with a virtual camera.  There's no guarantee it'll be good or interesting, nor is it necessarily art any more so than a photo of a thumb taken by accident.  It's the aforementioned elements of composition, lighting, and colour that seperate a good, interesting,  rendered image from a poor, boring, one.  Whether the elements rendered were created by the "artist" concerns me much less than how much of the scene composition was their choice.  I'm not defending those people who click load, click render then click save.  I'm just unable to see any appreciable distinction between paying someone to pose for a photo and buying a figure from a vendor with regard to "artiness".  Of course I generally prefer real models to virtual ones but then again a photographer can't really claim credit for any of his model's natural qualities but rather only how they are captured by the photograph.

What kierab said! ;)

My thoughts on this haven't really ever changed.  Only when the bulk of the modeling is original should the work be posted in a modeling forum.  Otherwise,  renders should be judged by the same standards as a photograph; on their composition, lighting, "exposure" etc.  It seems ridiculous to me that I can take a photo of someone in a public place and call it art, but I can't render an image of a stock figure without being criticised for not modeling the subject.  I guess it probably depends on whether it is an art forum or a CG forum, but hopefully someday the art of rendering will get recognition apart from the modeling and rigging (whether or not done by the same artist) involved.

As long as the program is called "Poser" people will just assume that it's for posers. :( 

Yeah, weight maps.  Preferably weight maps that double as soft body maps.  Some of the above things have been addressed already.  I think the 3 level search will make library management easier, or less important.  I'm not sure about the subdivision thing though, but I thought the displacement mapping+smoothing was how people used Poser with zBrush.  Not sure about improving the poly response (preview or render?) as the previews work well on my athlon 1900+, and the improvements to rendering time have been mentioned already.  So, yeah, better joints/rigging is my top choice. 

Export your figure's head to Wings.  Load your morph into Wings.  If your morph doesn't line up, then adjust it and export out.  If it does line up, then reload the unmodified head into Poser as a morph and see if the translation problem still occurs.  If you still have the problem, then it really is confusing!  Either way, you shouldn't have to redo the morph to fix this problem.

I finally did it yesterday.  I knew I was going to order it during the presale (because I want the free content even if I don't ever use it) but I wasn't sure which reason would do it for me.  That little blurb at the bottom of reason 6, the one about using the GPU to see your shaders in preview, was just what I wanted to hear. ( Well, actually I wanted to hear shaders AND shadows in the preview, but maybe that'll still be in there...)  As of now I haven't heard reason 7 yet.  I sure hope it's something to do with better joint bending, weight mapping, or softbodies.  It would almost have to be something like that to top the previous 6 reasons, wouldn't it? 

How is this not displacement?  I know that it's not creating subdivision levels like zBrush, or tesellating like blender, but I thought that using a brush to push and pull a mesh was a form of displacement.  I guess there's no "map" controlling the effect?  (I should watch the demo!)

I keep my shader trees pretty simple, mainly using textures to modify the various channels.  That means I rarely use more than one node per channel.  I've compared renders with and wihtout disabling shader nodes and the results were as I expected.  Turning off the nodes I had no bump maps, and the transparencies seemed different.  Turning them back on gave the results I wanted.  I assume it was because I'm using textures and not procedurals.

I've never thought of rendering anything that high until a few days ago.  It must take ages!

Quote - i'd rather say:" How many times will the Poser community buy USELESS promises?" as we all know, poser's archaic joint-system bends geometries like sticks. when you bend a stick, it breaks. the announcement promises that now you can render your broken sticks even faster. does that really make you happy?

What are the useless promises?  The last two reasons they gave will greatly benefit anyone currently using Poser.  Of course, they won't be doing anything new, just doing it faster and with less hassle.  I gather that's your point; that broken figures will still be broken and wonky deforms will still be wonky.  AFAIK, that's all true.  Still, there are figures that do work really well in Poser, and now we'll be able to render them quicker, which many of us will be happy with.

I'm hoping that there will be improvements made to the bending and deforms, but I don't see the concern some people have with this.  I don't see why traditional figures couldn't coexist with an improved figure type, nor why it would need to be difficult to convert the current figures to a new type of rigging should one become available.  I don't think the problem is the skeletons, but rather just the weighting of the joints is imprecise compared to what could be achieved with weight mapping.  If a new system could be devised in which traditional joint parameters could be converted to weightmaps and improved further, then I think that'd be very good.  I don't really have a problem with having to weld seams or not having more than 2 pieces meeting in the same place.  I was looking at soft body simulations in blender and noticed that the softness can be controlled by the weight map (makes sense IMHO).  I hope we get that someday, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that a version 7 that doesn't include this is "USELESS". 

I use Firefly for more than just rendering figures, so my opinion may seem unusually biased.

Well, they could always say "but I don't use Poser for renders, so where's my new feature?"  But now they'll know we're onto 'em!  (I, for one, absolutely can't wait to get this baby installed!)

Go into the group editor and select the piece you want to make a prop and it should turn red.  There is a button to make a new prop and you will be asked to name it.  Do this for each piece you want to make into a prop.  You may want to conform the skeleton to the V3 and make sure everything lines up properly before making the props, but it shouldn't be a problem if you don't.  Also, you can export parts of an object and reimport them. 

Quote - When using shadow maps of any resoution (especially small), remember that Poser calculates the map based on the total area of shadow casting objects.  So if you have two figures standing on the "ground", your render will look better if you turn shadows off for the "ground".

I could have written this better.  What I meant to say is do not have your ground object cast a shadow.  If your two figures are in the middle of the ground your shadow map will only be calculated for the bounding box around them, so even a low res shadowmap will look OK.  However, if you turn the shadow casting on for the ground, then the bounding box has to include the figures and the ground.  So, even a high res shadow map would then look blocky.

I should point out that, in a case where you had for example a figure walking away from another, that your shadow map's bounding box will change as the figures become farther apart.  This will cause the shadow to become less sharp as the distance increases, and may cause a shimmering effect in your renders.  Still, I recommend a low res shadow map over no map in most cases.

I'd convert the parts of the skeleton to props and parent them to their respective V3 parts.  Then you'd only have one set of bones to worry about.  Err...  I mean one less set ;)