Heh. I doubt many folks from S-M will be reading here, but thought it may be more realistic to ask for truly new features in PP 2010 than in a service release for P8.

So I'll begin with these:

1. Port the upgraded features of P8 to Poser Pro (e.g. IDL). Pretty self-evident, but we may as well state it. And yes, I want the upgraded library. :) (With the forthcoming upgrades/improvements etc, of course.)

2. Native 64 bit application.

3. Subsurface Scattering.

4. Object-specific lighting. (If this can already be done, I'd like to know how. One use: It would be nice to set a shadow map light specifically for hair, so that there are still shadows if you exclude it from raytracing.)

5. Context-sensitive image import and export: App returns to last directory imported from (i.e. for textures) when importing, and last directory exported to when exporting (for saving renders).

6. PSD alpha channel support.

7. Exclude object from camera. Still cast shadows and shows up in reflections. This is possible in other apps; easy solution to accidentally rendering with a wall in the way (at the very least: upgrade preview to match render, so that if the wall isn't in the way in preview, it doesn't show up in the render).

8. Import .obj as full body morph.

9. Additional morphing tools. I'm not expecting another ZBrush inside of Poser, but some basic tools would be nice, especially in Poser Pro. E.g. Rotate, Move.

10. Ability to maneuver camera rotations and placement within the posing screen (e.g. right-click, move left = rotate left).

11. Ability to save Morphing Tool morphs with a simple right click from the interface with the new morph selected (or better yet, use the existing save to Pose dialogue to allow the option to save a custom morph to a pose file). Should be able to create dials for the figure Body and the affected body parts.

12. Selective undo. There are many uses for this. E.g. Sometimes you've made a change and then nicely set up a camera or whatever and notice that your change doesn't look so good from the new angle. You want to be able to undo your change without undoing your work since.

I don't know if I dare ask for it, but multiple background renders would be nice. Although admittedly, Poser Pro's ability to render in queue alleviates this somewhat, sometimes one wants to see multiple renders while in progress. Another option, though I don't know if it would be possible, is if Queue could be toggled to display periodic progressive rendering. I'd think multiple bg rendering would be easier, as the technology and display system is already there for bg rendering.

Here's my list for Santa.  :-) Any or all of the following...

1)  Zbrush-style paint-on-surface abilities (begging for this one)

1. "Maya muscle" style muscles (yeah, that's a major stretch but this is a wish list)

2. Better/more redistributable content/figures (better than those in Poser Pro 7)

3. Embedded PhilC applications including Hair Designer, Shoe Designer and the Clothing Designer Suite

4. Embedded Python scripts that are sorely needed (license from Semidieu at RDNA his Advanced Render settings as well as some of Ockham's glorious scripts)

5. Cross-body part morphing (like in Poser 8)

6. A physical manual available for purchase (for those who have said they wanted one)

7. 3D Morph brushes: Advanced morphing capabilities (like adding wrinkles, etc. without using bump maps)

8. Significant render engine improvement

9. Better dynamic hair engine (specifically, more realistic looking hair like Maya/3DS - kind of a long-term goal)

10. More built-in animated poses (like cleaned up Carnegie Mellon BVH poses; see ShareCG)

12) Re-addition of Poser 4 render engine option (and/or improved TOON render option--can something be borrowed from AnimeStudio Pro for this?)

13) Particle system

1. Some environment like the new TerraDome at RDNA

2. UV mapping/unwrapping capabilities

3. More advanced 3D modeling capabilities (like Hexagon or Blender or Carrara or Wings)

4. Plenty of additional good content from CP vendors that isn't in other versions of Poser and isn't just sci-fi .... consider including Miki 2, Olivia G2, TY2 and NearMe (I have them but others might be happy to get them)

5. Ability to click on a texture (image map) in the Material Room and it automatically open your default image editor for that extension (e.g. Photoshop)

6. Tons of redistributable primitives (and not so primitives) with tutorials

7. Limited (or robust) 2D/3D Postwork Capabilities straight into your environment (with brushes for things like fog, etc.)

8. Easy and fast 360-degree render ability (without creating frames)

9. Ability to choose which figures you want to render

Direct Sketchup Skp import. that would be a killer addon.

Quote - Direct Sketchup Skp import. that would be a killer addon.

I'll second that motion.

Some things I'd love to see:

Borrowing from Max: A two-click positioning system for lights and cameras, first click to set origin, second click to set the target.  And when you look in the camera view have it so that you can see the camera adjust in real time as you adjust either the origin or the target.

I second the request for Import OBJ as full body morph.

"Zoom to Selected" and "Zoom Extents" camera views.

Ability to select multiple items and perform similar functions ... like changing all lights to white, or rotating a group of items

A "Scene" library category to store PZ3 files.

Allow CR2's to be put in the Hair category, so that you don't have to remember whether hair was PP2 or CR2.

Similarly, maybe a Clothing library category would be a nice addition ... likewise because you won't have to remember to look in Figures or Props.

A menu that pops up when loading a figure with IK, that asks you if you want IK on or off, and if you want to zero the figure. 9 times out of 10 that is the first thing I do when I load a character.

Some new default lights, preferably white/gray

Some of those would be kind of easy, others maybe not. But they've been on my mental wish list for so long!

One more: Ability to save delta-injection (INJ/REM) poses of spawned morphs as pz2 files within Poser

.mdd import/export
better collada import/export

I forgot:

1. Solo Light: automatically shuts all other lights off; toggling will turn them back on.

2. Solo figure/object: automatically makes all other figures/objects invisible.

3. Blend with previous render. This is for all the times you find one thing wrong in your image. So without moving the camera, you alter it and do an area render. (I know, this can be done in Photoshop, but everyone knows we're all lazy.) :)

1. Set preferences not only for opening scene, but adding new figures/objects/lights. E.g. I want to have all my lights set to raytracing and a certain shadow softness and minimum bias by default. I want all my figures with IK turned off. Etc.

Since we're wishing:

. Official support and plugin for export to kerkythea.

. Official support for GoZ so that all us people who do poser morphs can finally have a proper hassle free route to ZBrush.

. Support for RSL and custom shaders. Poser/Firefly is about the only renderman clone that doesn't do RSL (yes D|S adv supports it)

. Multithreaded cloth and hair rooms.

. Give us a goddamn up-vector already. It's shameful that in 2009 poser pro is the only animation app which still struggles with IK flipping.

. Support for hand editing/painting of generated weights in the setup room (AKA weight maps)

. Support for custom Cg (or other shading language) shaders.

. Better support for COLLADA, including import of rigs and animations.

There, that's a poser release that can call itself 'pro' without being embarrassed.

1)Rebuild the core application as 64bit.
Make the supplied content an option to selectivly install if the users want to (some of it is ok).
2)Instead of the Library use folders & directories just as per the OS you are using, its what people are familiare with after all.
3)NO relative addressing.
4)Hold off on the luxuries like simulated cloth, hair and other affects until the core system is stable. If features are added before the core app is done its going to be the same old mess.

Be up front and admit that this takes time and money, ie set real targets that are achievable and achieve them.

My feature RequestS would be...

1. An Ubuntu Linux version.  m(_ _)m
2. Volumetrics that can be used to create clouds.
3. Infinite plane
4. A sky system
5. Weight mapping for joints

Important for animations and imported BVH files:Get rid of the foot-sliding effect. Nail feet to the ground . The Poser IK is not useful enough here.

Quote - 6) PSD alpha channel support.

In renders, or the material room's image maps?

• New color picker.
• Make the ground impossible to select in the viewport, as opposed to the way it is now where it always wants to be selected. It virtually screams for attention.
• For that matter, add the ability to make anything un-selectable at will, not just visible or not visible.
• An actual selection tool, like an arrow, a pointer, hell a Calvin pissing on something for all I care - just something that doesn't want to jerk your model around when you try to select with it.
• Area lights.
• Option for double-sided materials in the display.
• The ability to exclude objects from being acted upon by lights, not just the ability to turn shadows off for an object.
• GPU rendering.
• CUDA
• Mental Ray and Interactive Preview Renderer (IPR)

Now that I've settled on a 64bit OS I would like to add my support for a native 64bit version of Poser.

The ability to abort a render immediately, not after 5 minutes of texture loading and shadow map calculations.

@ MikiJ: GPU rendering is a great idea.

"Import .obj as full body morph. "

Yes, that would save a lot of work....

Wishes, eh?

1 Improved animation controls all around:

a. 'Sticky' IK (being able to pin a joint or bone that is not at the end of the chain in place, and release it at any time during the animation process without things going insane)

b. Enhanced dopesheet and graph editor (On the graph editor, expand it and have perhaps a multi colored set of tracks, so that one graph shows the XYZ values of the selected part simultaneously. That would allow the addition of more industry standard gizmos for adjustment, which would help with both workflow and perception. Linkage between the graph and the dopesheet; if you have a graph open and one body part selected, then the dopesheet likewise expands that one selected item, showing the keyframes in more detail. A greater variety of interpolations would be nice, too)

2 Multi-threading the cloth and hair rooms. These would benefit the most from the multiple core systems.

3 Either getting together with E-on and beating all the interconnect bugs between Poser and Vue to death once and for all, or expand the Collada interconnectivity and use that route for workflow.

4 Provide sets of low poly proxies for the SM figures, to get people used to the idea that using proxies really can speed up hair and cloth sims

5 Continued improvements in the distributed rendering system

6 'Zoned' soft body dynamics (I know the odds of getting full softbody is next to nilo, but what about limited sbd on the breasts and buttocks, the two major deformation zones). If not that, then the addition of the ability to attach metadata to the meshes, so that those who do program can assign values to body parts that a 3rd party plugin can use in some way

I'm not sure exactly what people expect of a 64-Bit native app, and question whether those expectations are realistic.

Most 64-Bit benefits will come from RAM and CPU intensive tasks such as rendering. If you think that it's going let you smoothly handle scenes with several dozen Victoria 4s (all fully clothed, of course), you're going to be disappointed.

For example, it is not difficult for me to push my full 64-Bit native version of Vue 7 to the point where everything slows right down or crashes.

So my wish / hope / expectation would be for a really well implemented 64-Bit FireFly engine, that runs in 64-Bit at all times (i.e in the Queue, in the Background, in the Foreground). It would great if I could specify how many cores get used in each of these modes.

Many things on others' wishlists would be nice, but I'd sacrifice all of them for the renderer to be at the top of its game.

Quote -
I'm not sure exactly what people expect of a 64-Bit native app, and question whether those expectations are realistic.

Most 64-Bit benefits will come from RAM and CPU intensive tasks such as rendering. If you think that it's going let you smoothly handle scenes with several dozen Victoria 4s (all fully clothed, of course), you're going to be disappointed.
For example, it is not difficult for me to push my full 64-Bit native version of Vue 7 to the point where everything slows right down or crashes.

If you say so. I have Lightwave scenes using up to 7+ GB of RAM at render time - with 64 bit Lightwave, of course and nothing slows down. That would be impossible in a 32 bit app.
What are your system specs? RAM, RAM speed, motherboard model, CPU?

I also have one Poser scene that uses 5 GB of RAM, using Poser Pro and rendering with 64 bit Firefly. IMO, they did a pretty good job with it.
And I routinely ran my RAM up into the 6 GB range when using the Mudbox 64 bit demo.

Quote -
It would great if I could specify how many cores get used in each of these modes.

You can, in Windows at least. Task Manager>Processes - right click on process and choose "Set Affinity". A dialog which lists all your cores pops up and you can select which core does what. The settings don't stick after you close the program though.

I'm seeing totally unrealistic high end app requests, rather then practical "what they could most likely do" requests here.

There's no way with the pricepoint and developement budget that you'll see maya or zbrush functionality in poser pro. Buy those applications if you really want it.

I want to see P8 as the base, the 64 bit background renderer, que renderer, and better zbrush support. Philc already has a full obj to fbm application in his poser toolbox, so that can be had for a pittance. (I think it was a buck in one of the CP first friday deals.)

I'd have to think what else I'd really want that make sense in poser... maybe opengl preview od the displacement and normal map material functions? (If games can do it, poser might be able to pull it off.)

A good collada exporter, which could then be used by all major high end apps.

You know, there are apps that have many of those features already. Maybe you've outgrown Poser, but can't part with the content. Achilles Heel.

Garee, yes, seeing displacement & material effects in preview would be nice. More system load again, I suspect... all the more reason to have 64 bit native.

Quote -
I'm seeing totally unrealistic high end app requests, rather then practical "what they could most likely do" requests here.

I was only kidding with half of my suggestions.
I'm actually expecting Poser Pro 2010 to only have the Super Extra Ultimate Pro Library , and 8 new humanoids. ;-)

Thing about a request list.. if they see outrageous requests, odds are they skip that post, and most on to the next. I know I would, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Quote - Thing about a request list.. if they see outrageous requests, odds are they skip that post, and most on to the next. I know I would, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

I agree.
I'd imagine that many of their ideas and new features will come from the Poser Pro 2010 beta.
They may also put out a new public survey like they did for Poser 8. Hopefully the next one will have a "suggestions" field though, unlike the last. They could limit it to a certain number of typed characters to avoid having too much chaff to sift through.

Some of these so-called high-end features are in Carrara.  So, I think it's plausible to think some of it could be incorporated into Poser, especially since Poser arguably hasn't had any truly major feature changes in many years. (even IDL isn't that major by some standards)

I don't see any issue in "aiming high" in our wishlists.  If they don't know that their users would like certain features, they'll definitely never stretch to provide anything more.  Most people (perhaps even SM) assume that Poser users are elementary users /  hobbyists anyway.

Like a wishlist to Santa, I don't expect to get every toy... even one thing on my list would be nice.  I especially would like at least some basic yet decent paint-on-surface capabilities (watered-down Zbrush) which Carrara does have.

Besides, I think it would be good for Smith Micro to have a long-term, big picture plan for Poser.  "This is where we are now and this is where we'd like to be in 10 years with the application...and here's the timeline of development."  I'm not sure that they need to make Maya/3DS the 10-year end goal, but there should be a calculated plan for improvement.  If Poser is where Poser is today in another 10 years (with only a few minor improvements), I think they will have lost the elementary-intermediate users to DAZ Studio and the advanced users to the big boys (3DS, C4D, Maya, etc.)  In that regard, they can go through our wishlists and say, "We'll do this now; we'll do this in the next release; we'll do this in 5 years; we'll do this in 10 years; or we'll never do this...or we'll do this as a separate application"  That would be the logical way to handle this.  I would hope that they wouldn't be so short-sighted as to overlook any request without seeing if it should go on their long-term timeline.

And the same "high end" features were requested in poser 6 and 7.. and were not added.

Common sense plays a lot in what features are possible or not.

Carrara also used the be a LOT more expensive, until Daz bought them out as well.

You say poser hasn;t had any truly major features added in years.

I guess a whole gui makeover isn't "major"?

A whole library makeover...

New rigging enhancements requested for years

Morph brush ability right in the application...

Displacement and normal mapping support...

64 bit background renderer, and que renderer...

Multiple undos....

Cloth room and dynamic hair room...

All the various rendering and lighting enhancements...

Sorry, but those ARE all major application enhancements. I think you are just taking them all either for granted, or jumped into poser after they were all already added.

Maybe you should look at poser 4 again, and see how many thing it is missing compared to what we have today.. then tell me there have been no major changes...

Based on their main competitor choosing to use a 3rd party vendor for Dynamic Cloth that only works on windows, or the fact that nobody else can create dynamic cloth but the 3rd party with expensive tools...

Plus users are looking to create more realistic renders...

A speed improvement in the cloth room would be a major advantage and selling point.

Not an unrealistic request :)

They just did a improvement in the cloth room in poser 8.

Try dynamic cloth even in a high end application.. in lightwave or max, is still takes time, and is not instant by any means.

"Sorry, but those ARE all major application enhancements. I think you are just taking them all either for granted, or jumped into poser after they were all already added."

Garee, why don't we just leave it up to Smith Micro?  If I continue this, I'll be ripping apart Poser, which I'd rather not do, since I love Poser but do see some significant room for improvement now or in the future.  I don't think arguing with or criticizing each other is going to help the cause, so I'm bailing out.

Well, I;' only a tester of the last 3 versions and poser pro, so I guess I have no idea what might be probable, possible, or impractical.

I can only give advise based on what I've learned in working with them in 5 years or so.

Maybe you know better though.

I don't think that any of us ever said that we knew "better" than you, Gareee, but simply that we had some ideas for improvement which SM can evaluate, laugh at or incorporate. 

PS: I really do like your products over at DAZ (and your tagline in your sig ). I certainly don't question your knowledge of the Poserverse.

Thanks. I'd just prefer to see some realistic expecations of smith micro, and some real thought put into enhancement requests, instead of pie in the sky requests for high end application features that just won't even be considered.

Then again, sooner or later they're going to have to put in some high end features, because someone else will.
As technology improves, people expect the software to improve with it. In spite of its recent leaps and bounds,  Poser is still lagging way behind. True, relative to itself, 5 years ago, it's a huge improvement, but meanwhile the rest of the 3D world has advanced far, far more.

DAZ Studio is becoming a contender. They're incorporating high end features now. Sooner or later Poser will have other competition too, and it won't be good if they suddenly find themselves replaced by other apps by other developer who were willing to take the leap.

Having said that, as long as they keep the price low, they can count on the budget hobbyist market, probably, and probably continue to get away with being at the bottom of the 3D heap.

But "pros" or people wanting pro features may not keep spending 500 bucks on it once other apps offer more high end features.

The Poser development team is made up of big girls and boys. They can take care of their own time and attention spans without being nannied. They probably can use a few moments of wishful thinking like the rest of us or at least a good laugh. They’re professionals and know that even in the wildest most far-fetched wishlist can be the germ of a usable idea. If they are serious about development of the product they would be fools to waste a resource like this wishlist.

I find a wishlist thread, no matter how unrealistic, to be far more positive than a bitch/moan/gripe/doom thread. Everyone knows that the features wished for are extravagant fantasies. The Poser developers are not a greedy stingy cabal of misers refusing to allow wanted features to escape their clutches and be included in the released products. We all know that only a reasonable number of changes will make it into a new version.

If one must have a thread of only minimally possible features to propose (that the least competent and creative programmers would find completely unchallenging) then start the "Completely Realistic and Most Likely To Happen Anyway Suggestion Thread", and enjoy reading and moderating the posts. But, come on, even the most realistically dreary Poser fans can find at least one sugar plum to dance in their dreams.

As long as I am sitting on Santa Claus' knee:

1. I would like to see two or three channels on the Root node in the Advanced Materials room to be programmable with Python scripts, wxPython, and maybe even be able to call external libraries and executables.

2. I would like to see a programmable (like #1) node with perhaps 12 programmable input and 12 output channels.

3. I would like to see an orientation node (rotate, flip).

4. I would like to see a lensing/distortion node that used a map to stretch or compress portions of an image. This could be used to compensate for texture stretch on very morphed figures, and adding lensing effects without changing the surface or shadows.

5. I wouldn’t mind a node that allows RGB, HSV, bright, contrast, sharp/blurr, negative, convert to grayscale, Gamma, etc. to be applied to a specific texture.

6. I think more of the internal variables, procedures, and functions need to be exposed to Python and wxPython to allow for more complex plugins. I think that the scripts should be able to link to external libraries and call external executables. Poser has needed a real SDK for a long time.

7. Apparently no one on the Poser development team is as color-blind as I am. Why do we still not have any control over the colors of the user interface? I don’t care about skins, but I could use some extra contrast to make some of the user interface more readable.

8. Seeing that Poser Pro can send render jobs to separate computers on a render farm, and seeing that this is of no real benefit for those who do not do animations, I suggest that Poser Pro be able to cut up a render into four, nine or sixteen parts, and distribute the work to other computers. If we can send buckets to 32 cores, why not have big buckest that can be sent to other computers?

9. Soft body physics that can at least be applied to specific areas of objects, or at least better ways to use the cloth room simulations to fake this.

10. It would be great if reflection, refraction, and transparency did not do a body slam to FireFly when Raytracing and/or IDL are used.

11. In the Material Room, I would like to be able to right click any of the little windows that display what is happening to the output of that node, and see the display in a larger window. In fact, I would like to be able to save that image to disk (to various sizes, pixel density, and file extensions). Well, you can kind of save the image with "Print Scr" but more control would be nice.

12. Gravity! I would like to be able to apply gravity to a selected group of actors, or a better way of doing this in the clothroom.

13. I could use the ability to pause and save the state of a current render so that I could return to it at some other time. Even with background rendering, long renders can stop workflow, and we become slaves to the process.

14. Some sort of subdivision for figures/props?

LMK

One more: When you open the material room, it would nice to have it go to the last material edited for the figure (rather than the first on the list).

Whoa here. 64 bit background renderer is not an "improvement" to the Poser application. It is a specific feature implemented in Poser Pro, which is not in the main stream of Poser development. Maybe some day it will be implemented in regular Poser, but that's obviously not the case now.

Keep in mind that we are NOT talking about feature requests for Poser 9 here. We are talking about feature requests for a supposedly Pro level app. Granted that it is very economical on the scale of pro apps, I don't think it is unreasonable to ask for at least a nod in the direction of some pro features. Granted that some of the requests above were perhaps overly ambitious. But let's not forget that feature enhancement that makes today's low-level app more feature-rich than yesterday's pro app is a longstanding technological reality. Even in the automotive industry (which is far slower moving than software), things that were strictly luxury items not so long ago are taken for granted in virtually every car on the market today.

Moreover, it's beside the point to compare Poser Pro 2010 to Poser 4 - a leap between a forthcoming self-proclaimed pro app and a consumer app four versions old. Even aside from the difference between Poser Pro and Poser, every piece of software that goes through four or five versions sees HUGE improvements. It's the nature of the beast. But nobody says, "Well, we had huge improvements the last few versions, so we don't need any this time around." That's a very quick way to get people off the upgrade path. Frankly, I don't have much motivation to buy Poser Pro 2010 if all they add is the new features in P8 to the existing Poser Pro. It's too much money to pay for functionality I already have, even with the $129 I'll get off for purchasing P8.

Of course, I agree with your core point. Realistically, we cannot expect Poser Pro to be everything. It cannot be ZBrush, 3DS Max, Bodypaint, and Vue all rolled into one. But it certainly can have considerably more robust features than it does. Hell, DAZ Studio Advanced is already ahead of Poser Pro in a lot of areas (IDL, GI, SSS, 64 bit native etc etc), and it's cheaper than regular Poser, never mind PP. Smith Micro needs to identify key areas where Poser Pro can be far superior to a non-pro app, and I think feature requests can help with that.

It seems to me that "pro" features are those that content developers and animators would benefit from. Or for those that have a need to create EXTREMELY high resolution renders for print.

Quote - But "pros" or people wanting pro features may not keep spending 500 bucks on it once other apps offer more high end features.

Good point...especially since Cinema 4D recently had a 50% off deal if you did a side-grade/cross-grade from another high-power 3D app (Maya, 3DS, Carrara Pro, etc. but not Poser Pro).  It's expired now but may not be the last deep discount we see if the economy continue in a slump.

Wow, wish I had seen that, as I do have Carrara Pro. (Not that I can really afford C4D even at 50% off, but I think I'd find a way to afford it....)

Yeah, my husband saw that in either 3D Artist or 3D World.  I think he said it expired on 7/31.  But, there could be other C4D offers floating out there somewhere.

Quote - They just did a improvement in the cloth room in poser 8.

Try dynamic cloth even in a high end application.. in lightwave or max, is still takes time, and is not instant by any means.

Maybe I should have added that it be done in background, like the PPro render engine, because it can take so much time. I do a lot of cloth room stuff and I think they have a distinct advantage over the other guys they could exploit further.

.mdd import/export already exists in this script. Not expensive and I was a beta tester -- it works definitely

http://www.vuescripts.com/_A/index.php?index

soft-body dynamics and fergodsake give me tangents on the splines.

Quote - It seems to me that "pro" features are those that content developers and animators would benefit from. Or for those that have a need to create EXTREMELY high resolution renders for print.

Not necessarily.
I would just like to be able to use it for some high quality renders from time to time without it taking all day.
The Poser Pro Firefly 64 bit render engine is OK, can definitely handle a lot of polygons and textures and shadow maps and whatever else, and I see that the Poser 8 FF render engine is an improvement over that. Not 64 bit though, obviously.
Nevertheless, in spite of all its improvements, it is sloooowwww. Poser Pro, that is, not Poser 8. Slow for raytracing, slow even for just shadow maps, but if you want a good render, you need to use raytracing.

And since this has become something of a discussion of higher end app features, I'll point out that when you compare P-Pro's Firefly against, say, Mental Ray and Lightwave... well, there is no comparison. They both run circles around Firefly, while using soft area lighting and radiosity too. Even the Vue 4 raytrace engine 8 years ago on a single core was faster than Poser Pro FF on a quad core. Or so it seems, considering one would be likely to have far more transparent/reflective and refractive elements in a Vue render than in a Poser render.

But I'm sure that P-Pro 2010 will have the newer, faster FF in it like Poser 8 does, and probably with some more improvements. Although I'm still not betting it will be anywhere near the speed of the higher end apps.

And when I say fast, I mean F.A.S.T. Someone may say, "But this render only took an hour, have some patience!"
Well, I can do the same render in LW in a few minutes. Yes, it is that much faster.

And there's no reason why we should not expect P-Pro 2010 to be able to at least compete.

If nothing else, that would by my numero uno request for P-Pro 2010, that they bring the render engine up to the class of the high end apps, in terms of speed and quality, and add some area lights too.

One of the main features of Poser Pro is the ability to export animations to other apps, in order to take advantage of their better render engines and speed. I've tried it in both Maya and Lightwave, and, IMO, it's pretty much about useless, considering all the work you have to do to get good materials on the models then. They import using only the basic shaders and textures - might as well just use OBJ, since you have to fix everything anyway.

And before someone points it out, I'll say that yes, I am aware that Poser can't export its own shaders. No app can, but they could have found the closest equivalent in the target app. Maybe, maybe not. But that's not my point anyway.

And as for the animation, there is no way to adjust rigging or bending once you have your scene in the target app. You still have to use Poser for that, so that defeats the purpose too, IMO, since you can't use other app's superior tools on the rigging.

So in other words, one of the main features of Pro is pretty much useless, IMO, unless you're willing to do a whole lot of extra work on materials and settle for Poser's deformation tools. Again, might as well use OBJ export and rig the figures yourself.

It would be nice to see Poser Pro 2010 have a means of exporting the mesh and translate its rigging into the closest equivalent of the target app along the way.
Then again, it would also be nice if Poser Pro 2010 has a better and MUCH faster render engine, to make it less necessary to need to export anything.

 I just thought of another feature that might be cool to have ...

Right now, if you want to use a photo reference to morph a character, you load the picture in the background, and you have to work in outline or wireframe mode, or make the character transparent so you can see the photo in the background.

It would be REALLY cool if you could load a photo in as a semi-transparent overlay so that you can morph the figure behind it.

[]   P8's IDL

[]   Get the movie node working for the 64bit render engine

[]   Add the option to render animation frames in reverse order, to facilitate cooperative rendering without networking.  E.g., Valkyrie is set to begin rendering at frame 001 and step upward (begin 001, end 900), while Pixie is set to begin rendering at frame 900 and step downward (begin 900, end 001).  I stop both computers when they reach the same frame.

[]   Remember separate browse addresses for:
------------------------->  loading texture images to material room
------------------------->  open/save scene file
------------------------->  import/export raw mesh (obj)
------------------------->  rendered images

Regarding a greatly improved render engine (64bit), I would expect a considerable price increase for such, but I would choose that option if available.  I.e., I am willing to pay more to get it.

Quote -
Remember separate browse addresses for:

Add to that list to remember where to save rendered pictures.
It's pretty silly for them to think I want to save renders into the main Poser runtimetextures folder.

No matter what you're doing in Poser, it just always opens up the last folder opened.