Im a boxed perchaser so I wont see my poser 7 for a while yet.  I badly want to see some renders and hear all about what you think of poser.  Post here please when  you  have time to check it out.

I'd love to see people render scenes they couldn't in P6. Show us that new render power. :biggrin:

Finished downloading.
Couple niggles:

Custom Installation option is "Current Content" and "Legacy Content" with no way to drill down or see what is what - or to deselect. Gonna be a lot of stripping out done by me. /sigh

Library Content Palette is still not width adjustable when docked. Something that annoys the crap out of me every day because people use looooooong descriptions and you CAN'T SEE the ending.
i.e. V3_Body_Transmap_Blue_REMOVE - Well all I would see is V3_Body_Transmap with maybe blue but definitely not the Remove part of it.
(Is it hackable? I dunno but if there is a way to make it expand wider, cool. And I don't mean the undock option, I want the docked strip wider.)

Sydney has... no eyebrow material.

Sydney bends better but is nowhere near perfect. Unfortunately.

Im just hoping that poser 7 takes the rendering that bit closer to photo realistic rendering like found in modo.  The HDRi shoud help alot.  I ahvent seen any decent SSS done in poser as of yet so hope you guys get to see what im after,

An amusing fact, Sydney comes with no nipples as standard. lol Just like V4. The Special Edition Superduperhyper content is imo not perfect. The car looks very good but a Secret Agent Theme and not even one pistol for the agents? I am just rendering at the moment the car in Firefly but i can't see any speed improvement (and i have 2GB DDR2 Ram and an Intel Conroe 6600) But i think i will first read through the manual before i really start working in Poser 7.

Sydney also has no morphs beyond expression morphs.  She's cute, rather like Miki is cute, but I want to be able to change her.  For all of you who were complaining about the lack of morphs for V4, you should just loooooove that about Sydney :lol:  If there are hidden morphs for her somewhere I'm just not seeing yet, then I will eat my hat but, I haven't found anything just yet.

My test render of V4 looks really nice.  The specularity that was almost TOO shiny in Poser 6 seems just about right to me in Poser 7.  All in all, though, it's too soon for me to make any rash judgements.  At least the learning curve for me going from Poser 6 to 7 won't be steep.  Some new features that will take some getting used to.  I don't think I'm going to hate it anyway :)

f sydney is like the other e-F models, they'll sell the morphs on RuntimeDna.

Got P7 last night and have been playing around a bit with it. The most jarring thing is that the interface has not changed AT ALL. I don't mind, as I'm very used to this, but I actually shut it down the first time it loaded because I thought I loaded P6 by mistake, LOL.

The good  news is, the rendering engine does indeed seemed to be much improved. The quality of a FireFly render is a bit better in the fine details from what I can can tell, but the big thing is that is doesn't die on large render scene...P6 would choke up and die like clockwork with anything more than 3 figures in a scene at once (out of memory errors, and my machine has 2GB of memory!); I've been pushing P7 to try to find it's limits and so far haven't found it! This is a very good thing, and that alone makes it worth the purchase.

I haven't messed around much with the new content, but is it just me, or is Sydney even weirder looking than Jessie? When I saw the thumbnail, I thought she was an Asian male figure!

Isn't she face room compatible? I'm only asking because I'm sure when P5 came out the new figures had nothing in the way of morphs in the head apart from expressions & mimic phonemes.

Quote - am just rendering at the moment the car in Firefly but i can't see any speed improvement (and i have 2GB DDR2 Ram and an Intel Conroe 6600) But i think i will first read through the manual before i really start working in Poser 7.

Go to General Preferences -> Render and push Renderer Threads greater than 1 (I maxed it at 4).  I see it hitting both cores at 100%, vast improvement, although preloading textures and whatnot to prep for render is still apparently only on one thread (50% CPU while that is going on).

YAY CLOTH SIMULATION IS MULTITHREADED!!!

One very subtle but welcome change ... if you expand the library palette into two columns (circled button), you can switch between runtimes above the left column (menu expanded), and select the library in the right column. No more drilling up and down between runtimes. YAY!

another subtle but very welcome change :

the Hierarchy window has had a make over... and the mouse wheel now works to scroll the list....

that to me is worth a good 25% of the upgrade price right there...

oh gods... at last. the Hierarchy window now responds to 'Set Preffered state' ! it's there when I reopen P7!

does the Sanddance round his office chanting na na na nananan na na naaaaa

How's hang time going in and out of folders in the library?

Quote - How's hang time going in and out of folders in the library?

Pretty much the same as P6.
Swapping to a big Runtime still takes time, but the new Runtime selector really helps, as you don't have to go all the to the top level to switch.

I had a feeling hang time couldn't be changed but that runtime selector looks like the fix. Sweet! Thanks for the info.
:biggrin:

Sounds cool so far but much like a new revision that a new version if you know what I mean. Im sure more things will become aparent as time goes on.  

I would realy apreciate it if somone could do a render in poser 6 and 7 of the same scene so we all can compare visualy and maybe time it as well.  I remember there being some distortion when using smooth in poser 6 thats worth checking out also.

Thanks guys keep the info coming.

There is a setting in Preferences that looks like it would reduce a lot of that hang time, "Search Depth" I think it's called.  My runtime is not very big compared to some people so I can't test it too much.

One thing I'm seeing (I can finally say it) is amazingly faster render times on my new dual core system. If I run P6 with the same scene as P7, I'm seeing fully about 1/2 the render times!

Now I'm finding I just always render with everything on, because, well, I can.

Before I hardly ever rendered with ray trace on at all.

Quote -
The good  news is, the rendering engine does indeed seemed to be much improved. The quality of a FireFly render is a bit better in the fine details from what I can can tell, but the big thing is that is doesn't die on large render scene...P6 would choke up and die like clockwork with anything more than 3 figures in a scene at once (out of memory errors, and my machine has 2GB of memory!); I've been pushing P7 to try to find it's limits and so far haven't found it! This is a very good thing, and that alone makes it worth the purchase.

Oddly I am having a hard time at the render issue. 

I am no expert at render setting by a long way.

Just a quick test render at default firefly that would be done in about 30 seconds in P6 chokes and freezes. Reduce it to draft quality....It does it but it chugs...

For the record Athlon64 2 Gig with 2 Gig Ram and 128Meg GeForce Graphics.

Bit puzzled actually...

Klutz. :0/

Before complaining about lack of traditional morphs, perhaps people should try the new morphing tools....

::Waits for hers to download::

"Just a quick test render at default firefly that would be done in about 30 seconds in P6 chokes and freezes. Reduce it to draft quality....It does it but it chugs..."

Klutz: you might want to try to build the test scene in P7 instead of opening an old P6 scene. I recall having some problems like that when I upgraded to P6 from P4; the errors were actually in some of the figure Cr2s (there was some extra garbage in them that P6 didn't like) and not in the render engine; you might be running into something like that.

Anyone compared render quality poser 6 to 7 yet?  Can some please post a render on the car maybe?

A few days ago, I got Vicky4, and this morning my link for Poser 7.  I loaded it up, linked my runtimes, and opened an existing file.  I never could get the AO lighting to look very well in P6, but P7 gave me some very nice results on my first render, right out of the gate -

**Tempus Fugit
**Thanks for that image. Finally, someone throws some good lighting on V4. Sheesh. I went over to Daz and paged down through many posts of V4 and no one put any good light on her. It hurt my brain to go through that thread. Carodan is the only one on any forum who took the time to light her properly.

Could you give us some shots of Sydney in good light?

::::: Opera :::::

Quote - "Just a quick test render at default firefly that would be done in about 30 seconds in P6 chokes and freezes. Reduce it to draft quality....It does it but it chugs..."

Klutz: you might want to try to build the test scene in P7 instead of opening an old P6 scene. I recall having some problems like that when I upgraded to P6 from P4; the errors were actually in some of the figure Cr2s (there was some extra garbage in them that P6 didn't like) and not in the render engine; you might be running into something like that.

It is even more basic than that, BC

I am talking about loading a single figure, no props, posing and rendering from scratch.

Klutz :0/

Love the V4 render, got to link my runtimes and play :-)

"I am talking about loading a single figure, no props, posing and rendering from scratch."

I'm thinking there is something wrong with your P7 copy; I've been doing some testing between P6 and P7 on both my desktop (Athlon 64 x2 4600) and laptop (Turion MT-40) and I've been finding P7 is always faster. Just to rule out the obvious, are you sure it's not stopped because there is a missing path or geometry file? Sometimes the prompt is hidden, but it seems to freeze up the whole program. Also, what kind of video card is it (what Geforce series?) Do you have all updated drivers?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1343683

Firefly, high quality (not all the way though for it crashes, just at the third bar)... No problems... Rendering is fast and, what is more important, if the rendering engine crashes (the full bar option) you hit "cancel" and the program resumes as if nothing happened!
First impression is good, however it is too early to formulate an accurate opinion.

Panos

some things i like but didnt see advertised:

Texture filtering removed from render settings and put into the node for image_map with 3 settings.

Heirarchy looks like it belongs in the program now.
collapsed hierarchy stays collapsed the next time you open it.

the scripts pull down is very cool. just put your scripts into the subdirectories and they load into the menu, add sub directories for sub menus.

Quote -
some things i like but didnt see advertised:

Texture filtering removed from render settings and put into the node for image_map with 3 settings.

Heirarchy looks like it belongs in the program now.
collapsed hierarchy stays collapsed the next time you open it.

the scripts pull down is very cool. just put your scripts into the subdirectories and they load into the menu, add sub directories for sub menus.

Does this mean you have to set texture filtering separately on every texture in a scene one at a time in the material room now if you need texture filtering on the scene?

:blink:

I withdraw what I said about dynamics being multithreaded, I'm really not sure.  It seems to be kind of hit and miss, sometimes it runs at 100% cpu for a long time and sometimes it sits at 50% (hitting 1 core).  It had my hopes up for a little bit anyway.

Bittersweet experience. The Aston Martin Roadster crashed.  (The car crashed the program unfortunately, instead of the other way round)

Sydney and  Simon have great shapes, but not so good materials. Esp the eyes look funny. I need to do some experimentation.  No problem, its boring if it is perfect out of the box.
It doesn't feel faster and it makes me want to get a Quadcore :-)

Morphing tool seems nice, but I need to practice.

No changes in Hair and Cloth rooms!!!!! Argh. Strand hair still renders a hair at a time. And you still have to rip it out a strand at a time. Uselessly slow.
Still have the same weird effects of P6 where it won't remember some render settings.

No way the extra content pack is worth 80 bucks.

I have a problem. the "delete" key does not work in the preview window, only in the param window Anyone else has this? Looks like a bug.

It couldn't find the texture of Sydney Style 2 on shallow search. Must have been stored with the wrong path.

Like P7 and I am glad I have it, but the improvements are much gentler than I expected.

Quote -
I have a problem. the "delete" key does not work in the preview window, only in the param window Anyone else has this? Looks like a bug.

WEE! It's not just me, then!

Yes I have that problem as well and I would indeed call it a bug.

On the plus side: Poser 7 is right now happily rendering a scene I just COULD NOT render in Poser 6, even at draft settings. It started fine, said "rendering" but even if I let it sit overnight, it got nowhere. Poser 7 took one look at the scene, munched on it for a few seconds and started rendering it :thumbupboth:

I've had some weird results with the Universal Poses (I posted about that on CP's forum) but it MAY have been the result of me replacing the figure a few times (Default Simon with Alternate with regular - that also effectively locked the character so I had to parent it to a ball to move it at all. But again, that may have been a fluke. Poser has always had some odd weirdnesses that couldn't be reproduced. Part of the charm I guess :lol:

Let me guess they nurfed the ui interface a little threw in a few new poser figures and called it poser 7 and charged 200 plus dollars for the box, Is this what they did?

no, they made it multi-processor and core aware so you can render tremendously faster, put a good morph brush tool in your hand, gave you animation layers and much more.

xen's post is temperate and real. It is going to be bittersweet.

You know, over at Animation Master, they ask you simply to pay $100 every year to be a user of the program, even when they don't change it. It is your support of the overall concept.

My invoice total for the black box upgrade was US $158.90

::::: Opera :::::

First render with P7 and V4. I was trying out the HDRVFX lighting. As you can see I haven't a clue as to what in the hell I'm doing...LOL!

So far I really like P7 and so does my dual core machine. The firefly render engine is a whole lot quicker than P6 and I've had no issues so far with it and I've done about a dozen renders with it. No problems linking my external runtimes and the drop down boxes are pretty cool. One thing that puzzles me though I noticed in the render options a tab marked P4? I thought they'd nix that by now.

Quote - > Quote -

some things i like but didnt see advertised:

Texture filtering removed from render settings and put into the node for image_map with 3 settings.

Does this mean you have to set texture filtering separately on every texture in a scene one at a time in the material room now if you need texture filtering on the scene?

:blink:

as far as i can tell so far, that is a true statement.

note: the texturs of the files i have been opening are defaulting to the "quality" setting (as opposed to None or Fast)

oh and Z-buffering rocks.
when you need to select something you put your mouse over the area. if it doesn't highlight the item you want just right click. the menu comes up with the camera options and such like P6 but it has "select" flyout on top and in that menu is a list of everything under your cursor. props are listed straight out and figures are listed as Bodypart (figurename)

I posted my first results w/ initial impressions to my gallery:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1344110

A few other things I have noticed this morning while doing some comparison tests between P7 and P6:

Memory usage definitely is down compared to Poser 6 which is a great thing when using highly texture intensive sets like Skorpio RIsing.

The render in progress (RIP) may show artifacts such as misaligned or out of place sections which will be fixed if the render is allowed to run to completion.  If the RIP is canceled, the artifacts will remain (a bad thing).

On my Pentium 4 w/ HyperThreading, render time is definitely decreased as compared to Poser 6.

Later tonight when I get home, I will be doing multi-figure tests to see how it handles multiple V3s w/ high quality textures.

Quote - Before complaining about lack of traditional morphs, perhaps people should try the new morphing tools....

::Waits for hers to download::

A significant number who complained about the lack of V4 morphs won't have the patience to learn the new tools.  Personally, I'd have liked to have seen just a tad more flexibility with 'pre-made' morphs out of the box even though the new morphing tools look better at first glance.  I also would have liked to have seen a bit better starting wardrobe for Sydney.  Hers sucks.  Even Jesse came with a better wardrobe out of the box.  I'd like to voice my "No way did the casino pack cost $80" complaint too.

Thanks to everyone that has inputing some info on poser 7.  Im sure many you hasnt had the chance to get their hands on P7 are also please to receive feedback.

Keep the images coming and info.

Oh are there any changes to the rigging side of things?

Some people are complaining about the fact that they haven't changed the interface: Well, They're are very right!!! The first Impression I had when I opened it was that we had been fooled, besides a new flashscreen and a logo everything lookes the same. All the new highly praised features are hidden behind existing buttons and menus. I have to admit the rendering engine is faster although I don't have dual core processor, the morphing tool works fine I think (have to get used to it) but it's hidden behind the old morphing tool hand, I LOOOOVE the undo tool; that's a real improvement. I used the universal poses only on the new G2-figures, and I haven't used the new Talk-designer. I'm sure there will be some bugs, but that will be  no surprise, we'll get our updates.
But concerning the interface it's a real disappointment to me: compare it with buying a new car, You've read the specs: it will be faster, saver, have some extra gadgets like airco and side air bags, but at least you want that it looks and smell like it's new; this is the same old brown interface with the same buttons, windows and dials like we have for years now.  So my advice to the guys and girls of E-frontier: You've done a great job, but just pimp the whole thing a little bit up next time.
DAZ at least changed the color of the new Bryce6 interface.

My car sure runs better and faster after I wash it!

Quote -
A significant number who complained about the lack of V4 morphs won't have the patience to learn the new tools. 

Sucks to be them...really. 

Okay, now that we have the first round of snarfing and high-fiving out of the way.... Anyone taken the talk designer and non linear animation for a test spin yet?

OH MY GOD PEOPLE!

I cant believe im the first one to mention this...

MULTIPLE UNDO LEVELS !

Quote -
Texture filtering removed from render settings and put into the node for image_map with 3 settings.

Good.  I rarely need to use it on anything but hair, anyway.  The old method (globally affecting everything in the scene) was incredibly inefficient.

Quote - OH MY GOD PEOPLE!

I cant believe im the first one to mention this...

MULTIPLE UNDO LEVELS !

If you clicked on the link to my first P7 image in my previous post, you'd see that I went crazy about the multiple undo levels in that image's description =D