Over the years after having used every version of Poser since it came on floppy discs I have a rather large library built up. I'm looking for some insight, for props sets that come with version for different versions of Poser which ones are the best to start with for Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010. I'm not really sure what the difference between a set made for Poser 5 and the same set made for Poser 6 is. I probably did at the time I bought them but that was quite a while ago. Anyone have a rule of thumb which one would produce the best results as a starting place in Poser  Pro 2010.  Also anyone know the best version to use if you plan on exporting to Vue 8.

Thanks,

Thorgrim

For the most part, there is no difference in the props themselves between Poser 5, 6, 7, 8, Pro, or Pro 2010.

The differences usually have to do with materials and any light sets that may be included.

A few small additions have occured since Poser 5 with regard to materials, but really nothing substantial. The node-based material system introduced in Poser 5 was a big change over Poser 4. So you want to use P5+ versions of materials. But since P5, nothing important has changed and for the most part materials that worked then work now pretty much the same. One thing to watch out for, though, is that as the lighting system has improved with each version, some of the hackery that went into materials to compensate for the earlier, weaker lighting capabilities should not be used. A prominent example is that early materials often had some "ambient" (self-lit) stuff going on, because Poser 5 was very poor at dealing with ambient lighting. So people just shoved some into the material.

Which brings us to lighting. P6 introduced image based lights (IBL) and point lights, and began the transition towards reliance on ray-traced effects, particularly how shadows are dealt with. IBL is a nice and fast technique for encapsulating the 360-degree lighting coming from all around the virtual scene. Typical P5 attempts to deal with ambient lighting led to light sets with 20, 30, even 50+ lights in them. Those are rubbish and you want to just delete those from your collection. Point lights give us the ability to simulate open light sources, like flames, light bulbs, etc. But point lights cannot use depth-mapped shadows. Ray-traced shadows are required with those. Ambient lighting provided by IBL needs another type of shadowing called ambient occlusion, often abbreviated AO. We talk of IBL+AO all the time. So lighting got a lot better in P6.

P7 introduced the ability to use High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) in our Image Based Lights (IBL). This does not invalidate the earlier Low Dynamic Range Image lights (LDRI) but HDRI works better because it captures more accurately the incredibly wide range of luminance that comes from sun, sky, cloud, trees, and dirt - all the stuff around your scene. So when looking at light sets, you want to try to find HDR IBL+AO sets. AO requires raytracing and is slower, but worth it for realism. While the new lighting techniques are slower, you often need fewer lights. Typical IBL+AO light sets will have only 2 to 4 lights in them.

P8 introduced a global illumination system for diffuse light, called Indirect Difffuse Lighting, or IDL, whereby instead of IBL+AO to simulate ambient bounced or secondary light (not directly from a light source) it actually bounces the light around. Real bounced light is way more realistic than the fakery offered by IBL. But it is also slower than IBL. However, you can now legit light a scene with one light and it looks like a real scene with one light. So outdoors, you set up one infinite light for the sun, turn on IDL, and you're good to go.

If you're outdoors and using IDL, you also want to use an environment sphere to hold a 360-degree photo of the world around your subject. This will provide realistic ambient lighting for the world. Mounting HDR images on such a sphere is very effective, both as lighting, and as a full 360 background. No matter where you point the camera, there is something to see. I provide a free one in my web site. (See my signature below).

Poser Pro is pretty much Poser 7 with regard to lighting, but also adds gamma correction, often called GC. Similarly, Poser Pro 2010 is pretty much Poser 8 with GC. (The Pro products have other goodies, but they don't impact choices about which content items to use, which is what you're asking about.)

GC is really important because computer screens don't display luminance linearly, but renderers do calculate images linearly. Any incoming material (images you use as input, such as texture maps, or environment sphere photos) are already gamma corrected and the true values must be recovered by anti-gamma correction first. This sounds complicated, but basically you turn it on and you're done. A lot of artists fear GC or don't understand it, and avoid it because some props/materials/lights that worked fine in Poser 7 and previous look wrong with GC enabled. This is because many of the earlier content items were trying to deal with the GC problem before GC was available. So they are already "compensated". Then when GC does its job, which was already sort of done by the hackery, it is "over compensated". The most common complaint is that everything looks washed out. The problem usually is that there is just too much light, and the true lighting is being revealed by IDL and GC. Just turn down the lights. Many older light sets will still work - you just have to decrease the intensities. Also, many character sets suck big time with GC and IDL, even when the textures (image files) are quite good. Don't worry about that. Get my free VSS. With one click it will put state-of-the-art skin and eye shaders on any figure, while making use of the texture sets that are already on it.

Thanks bagginsbill for taking the time to provide such a detailed answer. This was the information I was looking for in order to cleanup up my runtime folder some.

Thanks,

Thorgrim

I'm sure I saw a thread on here recently saying the cube has been remapped for PP2010, apologies in advance if I'm mistaken.

LTD - that's true, but what I what I meant was not that all the props are the same that come with Poser, but rather they all work the same no matter which version of Poser a prop was made for. As far as being a prop.