I'm a current user of Poser 11, but with the macOS Sonoma update, the UI in Poser 11 has gotten insanely janky. So I decided to give Poser 13 a whirl. I'm so glad there is a 21-day free trial available.

I opened a lot of my older scenes just to ensure that nothing got lost. They all opened just fine (after adding my Poser 11 Content library), and the UI is no longer janky. At first, Poser 13 seemed to work. I then proceeded to try out the "make movie" animation feature, and that's where things went off the rails.

The first thing I noticed was that Poser no longer spools the images directly into movie files. Instead it prefers to generate a ton of individual image files and then merge them afterwards. I'm guessing this allows movie generation to use the Queue Manager. At least that's what I'm hoping since the Queue Manager does not function in the free trial. Using the queue manager to generate movies would be an awesome benefit instead of tying up the main UI, so I'm okay with this change.

After a number of movies, the application kept getting slower and slower, even with the same scenes that worked really fine at first. Even the previews now operate at turtle speed and the application barely functions. The other thing I noticed was that, after a few movie creations, the main UI thread completely locks up — all I have available to me is the dreaded Spinning Beachball of Patience™. I still see image files being generated, but the main UI is bricked. Even after the movie generation has finished, the main UI thread never recovers. The only recourse is to force-quit the application and start over. (As a seasoned threads programmer, this is behaving as if the main UI thread ended up going down the code path that should have been done by a background thread. And when it finished it had no way to recover. Either that or the UI thread is blocked on a mutex that is never released.)

Many other bugs that have been in Poser for generations have not been addressed. For example, the Play Range control at the bottom of the animation pallet still gets confused with longish (700 frames) animations. (By the way, it would be nice if the play range control had a way to be locked. Having it sit just above a tiny scrollbar just waiting to be accidentally clicked is a poor design choice.)

Poser 13 crashes a lot more than Poser 11 does. Each of the crash reports has been sent to your developers by way of the crash reporter, so these should not be a surprise to the developers who have the ability to view them. Overall, I'm going sit out upgrading to Poser 13. At least on macOS, it is not ready for prime time. With Poser 11 on Sonoma, the UI is janky, but the core functionality basically works. With Poser 13, the UI is no longer janky, but the core functionality (specifically animation) no longer works.