aeilkema opened this issue on May 01, 2008 · 36 posts
aeilkema posted Thu, 01 May 2008 at 6:47 PM
I had no intention of buying it at all, but after looking it all over and reading some of the initial testers comments I discussed it with my wife (as I do with most of my purchases) and she told me to get it. so I went ahead and got Poser Pro Base. I'm not interacting with higher end 3D applications, don't have lots of computers at home and never use Collada, so base is sufficient for me. I'm upgrading from P6, don't have P7 at home. PC Specs: AMD Athon64 3500+ (2.2Ghz), 2Gb RAM, ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512Mb, WinXP Home (32bits).
The purchase went smoothly..... CP is never slow for me, but once my purchase was done, I was able to download PP without a problem in 50 mins or so. Not bad for almost 1Gb. It's kind of worrying that I was able to download so fast from CP, seems like people are holding off their purchase, normally servers are slow with major releases.
The installation went smoothly, no problems, everything straight forward.
Starting up..... started PP for the first time and went WOW, this opens fast, very fast, even after installing all of my runtimes. Poser 6 takes minutes, PP 20-30 secs. Next thing I noticed was scene opening and saving is a lot faster. Scenes that take 5-10 minutes to open in P6 (yes I'm creating huge scenes at times) only take 2 minutes at the most in PP. Again a huge improvement!
Interface.... still pretty much the same. OpenGL preview compared to P6 is much better. PP reacts quicker and smoother then P6 does. Even when working on larger scenes, PP still reacts well, much better then P6 which tends to get slow.
The new figures.... much has been said about them and most people completely ignore or have no clue what they're meant to be. These new figures are for game engines & visualization applications and such, so need to be low poly and using as little textures as possible. They're not created with the regular Poser user in mind, but with a completely different purpose. They also have a different distribution agreement, not the one for regular poser models. Good move from SM, but a bit too late for me, I wished they would have done this 1-2 years ago.
Stabilty.... unlike previous releases this one is pretty stable, suprisingly stable. Not a single crash after creating, loading, editing & rendering a lot of scenes. The only problem I've come across so far is a problem with finding the location of a few textures. After saving a scene (previously created in P6) in the PP folder, using save as, I'm getting I get a message: Texture could not be loaded and so on. Enough memory, seems like PP can't find some of the texture correctly. I recall people having the same problem with P7 also, so perhaps anyone knows a solution for it?
Rendering..... I'm not using a 64bit system but still I do see a difference. First of all the renders look smoother then they did in P6 (even when using the same settings), I like the way the renders look now. The gamma option is pretty cool also, gets rid of the too dark scenes. Be careful with it though if you use fog, rain and such, if the gamma setting is too high it will overlight them and you cannot see them well anymore. If you set the gamma real low it darkens the scene and that looks pretty cool also. My wife looked at some comparisment renders I did and she thought that the PP renders had a more proffesional look to them then the P6 renders, even when same settings were used.
Rendering speed.... hasn't changed much for 32bit. With smaller scenes I do notice a slight increase in time 20-30 secs on 4 minutes, but larger scenes render a bit faster. The scene shown in the image attached took just over 20 minutes to render and that is about 5 mins faster then in Poser 6.
Memory usage.... has changed a lot though. The image attached is the max I can render in Poser 6 as long as I do use the P4 rendering engine, which takes up less memory the FF. when I using FF P6 will crash. When trying to render the scene in P7 it will crash even if the P4 rendering engine is used. The scene refused to render in P7. For me when rendering in PP a big suprise occurerd, it uses a lot less memory for rendering then P6 & 7 do. I was able to render this scene in PP using FF with final settings and still have enough memory left over, something I couldn't do with P6, let alone P7. The big change in memory usage is during rendering. From the start PP uses a little less memory then P6 & P7, but for rendering it uses a lot less memory. With some scenes rendering with FF in P6 I had 280Mb of physical RAM left, in PP I had 700-800Mb Left. I'm very impressed by that and finaly I can render my scenes completely with FF instead of having to fall back to P4. Great improvement, this means larger scenes or higher image resolution!
Still many things to explore but upgrading from P6 to PP Base sure is worth it and PP has sure found some ways to impress me, more then I expected it to do.
Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722
Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(
Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk