Hey Everyone,

So, I'm a filmmaker and motion graphics artist and I've recently decided I wanted to start using either Poser or DAZ for story-boarding and potentially to help create a graphic novel in the future. I'm not super interested in doing much animation in either program at the moment. I used Poser YEARS ago (I'm talking like in the early 2000s) but I haven't touched it in over a decade.

In looking online, I've seen a lot of debate as to which program is more worthwhile so I recently tried out both. Poser felt a lot more intuitive and easier to use when it came to simple things like lighting and camera controls. DAZ has a million tutorials but everything seemed rather cumbersome (I'm not sure if that's because it's more geared towards animation). I also liked some of Poser's sketch render options along with their new comic book preview render as both would be good for more organic looking storyboards and comics (even if I plan to touch them up a lot, it's nice to have something that looks pretty good to start with).

One comparison I saw suggested DAZ was free largely because one needs to buy a lot of assets for it where as Poser comes with a good bit of content rights out of the box (The 5 gbs of downloads you get with purchase). This seemed like Poser might be a nice deal if it meant I wasn't having to constantly buy more models. However, after looking through some of the models that come with each program, it seemed like the standard Poser models lacked the detail of the DAZ ones. I did a quick render or two female models (Genis 8, I think, in Daz and Roxie in Poser). The DAZ model appeared a lot higher polygon with the Poser option feeling rather blocking in important areas like the eyes and other curved surfaces (see render below).

Because I'm pretty new to 3D rendering, I wasn't clear if DAZ just tends to use higher assets or if there's some kind of render setting that ups the polygon count on curved surfaces when you render which I'm not using in Poser. I also wasn't sure if I could just easily grab the DAZ models and take them into Poser (I'm using Poser 11). I saw some posts saying that DAZ was more compatible with models than Poser is but I was confused as other threads said that DAZ started as a resource for Poser models.

Another thing I noticed was that neither seems to be using my GPU during rendering. I've got a GTX970 and while I see that Poser has Open GL support, I didn't see my video card being utilized during a Firefly render.

Ultimately, I'm just looking for something that's simple to use and for which I won't need to keep shelling out more and more cash to get more assets.