Did I miss a memo or something?

[Miss B]

it's only been about 4 years and counting since the last update for it

I think it's been even longer for Bryce. ~shakes head~

 

[AllenArt]

I'm not sure that Poser's being sold is "the worst", but no matter what happens, I'll keep an eye on Poser in case I want to start using it again . But you're right....maybe speculating isn't the best thing.

In the meantime, check out CG Cookie for Blender tutorials. They're also more structured now so they take you from easy to hard with quizes and exercises too. Good stuff .

Laurie

 

[Lyne]

Lyne, I do respect your opinion, but I have to disagree about P11. First, my Superfly renders take no more time than a PP14 render with SSS and good lighting.

well, I know it's just a matter of taste, or preferences... to ME (only, again IMHO) nearly all Superfly renders I've seen seem to be a bit dull... not photo-real... hard to explain... more softly pixelated... just my feelings...

I was really unhappy that P11 (read everything I could about what was 'new' to learn about it) just did not have the needed fixes, added USEFUL tools, etc.

I'm only upset that SM seems to be having trouble with ANY poser... as I do NOT want to see Poser's good qualities lost.... sigh.

 

[Lyne]

I respect your opinion as well Lyne. I still have Poser 9 installed, and sometimes use it. The only reason I've been rendering in PP11 more often lately, is I'm trying to learn how to use the SuperFly render engine, mostly because it's based on Blender's Cycles render engine, which I have used.

As far as PP11 being "new" as opposed to PP2014, every new version has something new. PP11 just happens to have a second render engine, just as they did years ago when they had the very old P4 render engine, as well as the then new FireFly render engine. Would you have preferred it if they had deleted the old render engine so you "had" to use the new render engine? I certainly wouldn't have. FireFly is still there, and is still good.

Actually me too= I still have Poser 9 installed... and of course I'm GLAD they didn't delete firefly from P11 ..... I do see the reason for that naming convention... Poser 10 was actually next after 9, but Poser 2014's biggest draw was it was the FIRST to finally have 64 bit coding, allowing Poser to USE all the ram one wanted... and then came Poser 11... so that all makes sense to me.

I have not seen any FIREFLY renders OUT OF P11.... that would be interesting to see.

 

[phdubrov]

What I'd really like to do is learn how to rig, move and pose Dusk and Dawn in Blender. If I could pose everything in Poser and then transfer everything to Blender, well, that'd be it then.

Export/import utility Poser->Blender is doable, even with the SF shaders transfer. I even started it about a year ago, but then SF mostly catched up with Cycles, so droped it.

Interesting... most of you may not like MY opinion...but I really feel SM shot themselves in the foot with poser 11- creating a whole NEW poser...

Well... IMHO SM had little choice here. Most packages switched partially or totally to pathtracers in the last 2-3 years. Some renders kept the names but switched/added engines.

About the whole situalion.
SM stated that the graphic software part of the business is low priority now. And fired the dev team. The worst part for now: probably support will suffer and no bugs will be fixed for a while. And probably no adaptive subdivision/microdisplacment in the P11.
Poser itself will work, and wouldn't get obsolete for a while. If we will not see some kind of a 3D revolution in a couple of years.

 

[Glitterati3D]

I have not seen any FIREFLY renders OUT OF P11.... that would be interesting to see.

You have, you just didn't realize it.

 

[Satira Capriccio]

Here is the same scene rendered in firefly in PP2014 and PP11

Poser Pro 2014 - Poser Pro 11.
Same render settings.

 

[Hornet3d]

well, I know it's just a matter of taste, or preferences... to ME (only, again IMHO) nearly all Superfly renders I've seen seem to be a bit dull... not photo-real... hard to explain... more softly pixelated... just my feelings...

I was really unhappy that P11 (read everything I could about what was 'new' to learn about it) just did not have the needed fixes, added USEFUL tools, etc.

I'm only upset that SM seems to be having trouble with ANY poser... as I do NOT want to see Poser's good qualities lost.... sigh.

When it first came out I was interested in what Superfly could do, but like you I was not impressed with the renders that were produced and I felt the same with iRay. At the time I thought it is too new and users need to get their head around how to use the new engines. Recently I feel this belief has been confirmed as the renders from both engines are now beginning to show real promise and I think they will continue to improve. That from someone who has never used either and has no dying need to produce photo realistic renders.

For me it was very different in earlier versions I wanted Sub Surface Scattering the moment I saw the renders using it. One of the best improvements to my mind is the morph brush, which I never upgraded for but would sadly miss today. While Poser 11 was not a must have upgrade for me but it was clearly progress and held out the promise that the next lot of improvements would be the sort I wanted. That is why I was glad there was another version of Poser and I would be sad if it were to end.

I upgraded Poser every time from Poser 5 to Game Dev and only stopped upgrading at Poser 11. That is not a bad run at all in comparison to other software I use, I think is skipped four upgrades between Paint Shop Pro 11 and X9, while I stopped Vue at version 8 for many years before starting again at Vue 2014. Unless you are very rich, keeping all the software up to date is not possible but at least upgrades allow users to hop on and off at points they feel match their pocket, or in my case, credit card limit.

 

[Hornet3d]

Here is the same scene rendered in firefly in PP2014 and PP11

Poser Pro 2014 - Poser Pro 11.
Same render settings.
View attachment 24338 View attachment 24339

Good comparison and I fully support SM giving users the choice of renders engines in Poser 11. If nothing else it allows the artist to continue rendering with the old while getting their skills up to speed on the new.

 

[Hornet3d]

I'll just keep rendering on with Carrara... it's only been about 4 years and counting since the last update for it

It is a nice program and it is really sad it appears to be unloved/forgotten and that would be my view no matter who owned it, the same can be said for Bryce. I am not speculating just voicing and opinion but that would be the saddest outcome for Poser, someone buying it just so they can leave it to slowly die.

 

[eclark1894]

Just for the record, as I said, I did a little googling and read SM's quarterly reports. I don't think Poser's in any significant danger of being sold off any time soon.


ALISO VIEJO, CA, March 9, 2017 – Smith Micro Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMSI), today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2016.

“During the fourth quarter and continuing into the current quarter, we implemented a significant restructure across our entire organization, reducing costs, creating better utilization of resources, and streamlining our processes,” said William W. Smith Jr., President and CEO of Smith Micro Software. “We head into our fiscal 2017 a much leaner and better positioned company and remain confident and excited about the opportunities ahead of us this year, particularly with our SafePath and NetWise IoT Services Platforms.”

 

[McGyver]

Damn it... And I was waiting for a good sale on PP 11.

I don't want to sound doomy and gloomy, but news like this is never really positive for long time users of anything...
Sure, the company will spin it like "Hey, boys and girls, we just reorganized our staff and relocated our facilities in a major restructuring to provide you with the finest, most exciting and most up to date state of the art products imaginable"...
And inevitably everything goes to hell...
Sure, it being sold to another company might be good... If that happens...
But usually the sale comes before the firing...
You wake up one morning to find "ZandorCorp purchased Spanky3D for 10.0009567 million dollars"... "And everything is just fine, nobody is getting laid off and ZandorCorp is gonna infuse the product with new life and new vitality!"...
And then six month later everyone but two main staffers are fired, the headquarters are moved to a former monastery in Tibet and all future versions are indistinguishable from the last except for minor bug fixes...
The new owners usually have no idea what the significance or specialty of the product is, just that it's an investment and if you treat it like all your investments, stripping it down to its bares bones, hiring ultra minimal cheap new staff with zero experience with the product, adding nothing to its development or maintenance and milking the corpse of every last molecule of worth... In their vision of "a bright future" for the product, it will all work out just long enough make back what they paid for it and then keep its bones in their portfolio of assets until they actually start losing money on it.
Granted, it might not go that way...
It's just that usually when the firing comes before the selling off... That's not good...
I can't even think of an instance where that had a happy ending.
I might be ill informed, pessimistic or just old fashioned stupid, but this is really bumming me out.

I just spent the past several days working on an "artsy" project (a physical object) akin to stuff I used to do more often a few years back... and I've been waffling back and forth between anger and depression because more than half the materials I would have used on a project like this, are either gone or zombicrapified useless vestiges of the great item they once were...
All for the above same reason...
Some jackwad company bought out a company that made a good or great product, and the new owners who had no idea, nor interest in understanding or maintaining the product either killed it or watered it down to nothing...
Being creative and being a mad inventor is actually harder today then it was in the 80s...
Yeah, I can find anything and everything I don't want on Amazon and have it shipped overnight...
Good luck finding anything that's not a copy or homogenized variant of that item, product or supply I already don't want...
I try my best to support brick and mortar shops, but even they are becoming shells of what they were...
Once upon a time I had ninety gazillion paper catalogs for virtually any supplier you could imagine... I could make practically anything your mad mind could come up with... You want it made out of iron wood... I got ya... You want it cast in aluminum... We can do that... Red glass... Yeah... Brass... Have tiny gears... Sure... Ultrasonic vaporizer... What size?...
Then the Internet made paper pointless, and it seemed like things would be better and easier...
And for a while it was...
One by one these companies disappeared, one by one the stores that carried them closed, one by one the products disappeared...
At this point it's literally getting to be that you have to purchase raw materials and base chemicals and make what you need from scratch...
This might seem very gloomy and specific to physical objects... And well that may be, but hearing this news about Poser is not giving me a lot of smiles...

You know, this all started with me spilling a tiny bottle of high tech solvent... Which is/was apparently the last of its kind... Then every other item I went to buy is no longer available or not the same product it used to be... Just a four day long cascade of frustration and disappointment ending in me reading this about Poser.

And whatever this ultimately means to us users and or fans of Poser, I can't help but also feel really bad for the crew who have worked on this product for years...

I really wish them well and thank them for the work they've done over the years and for making a great tool I really liked using.

Grrr... Sorry, for this pissy post and my gloomy view... I'm gonna go outside and vent my annoyance and frustrations now by throwing shurikens at the dead tree out back until I get bored or lose them all in the woods...

What a crappy week.

 

[Glitterati3D]

Hey, McGyver, think about this.........

Your examples fail on the same situation when it happened to DAZ.

Heck, the guy they put in place even understood the hobbyist craft industry - on foam cutting appliances, anyway.

My point is simply that your scenario is not always the same.

 

[Darryl]

I had sent a PM to Nerd a couple of weeks ago. He said that the entire US team was laid off and Larry Weinberg, Poser's creater ended up leaving as well. SM's entire US graphics software team was let go and they're moving operations to Portugal. This reminds me of when Quark XPress moved it's development to India. You know how that went. Too much knowledge and experience tossed aside even if it were to be sold at this point. Wouldn't be surprised if Adobe picked it up for parts and retrofitted it into Photoshop. I'm assuming the worst and attempting to prepare for it.

That said I'll continue to use Poser but like many others I'm looking at Blender. Tired of the corporate BS from the likes of Adobe, SM, Daz, Apple and the rest. Open source has it's issues but pleasing the shareholders isn't one of them. Blender is difficult to learn but in many ways much easier than Poser. My challenge is to use Blender as much like Poser as possible. I've identified a number of tools and addons to make it more Poser like:

Manual Bastioni Lab: The most robust figure creator you're liable to find in any software, it's simply incredible and it's free.

ANT Landscape Generator and Archimesh addons: Create landscapes and room interiors and exteriors. Easy to use with plenty of options, also free.

Asset Manager: Create Poser like libraries of content. $32

Scene City, Scene Terrains, Scene Skies: A bundle for automating city and landscape creation. Looks good, haven't tried it. $80.

Leverage your knowledge of Superfly with Cycles, or vice versa.

Import props from your huge Poser libraries to Blender. Free and cheap content is all over the net.


The list goes on and Blender is in active development and trending up. I'm hopeful that some space will appear to assist Poser refugees and Daz refuseniks in integrating Blender into their workflow.

 

[eclark1894]

Darryl, where can I find the links to the list you wrote?

 

[Darryl]

@eclark1894 pasted from my evernote page

Edit: don't know why the vid popped up.

Manuel Bastioni Lab
Gallery

Asset Manager: Asset Management Manage materials, objects and more
$32.00

Asset Sketcher: Blender Market

Save assets and draw them directly on surfaces
$29

Scene City: SceneCity Create city architecture. Includes Scene Skies and Scene Terrain add ons.
$79

The Grove: 3D Tree Growing Software - The Grove
Tree growing software
$109

Scene Terrain*: SceneTerrain | SceneCity Bundled with Scene City.

Scene Skies*: SceneSkies | SceneCity Auto Create 360 degree skies for Cycles and BI. Also bundled with Scene City
Free

Archimesh
Comes with blender 2.8
ANT Landscape Generator: Add on included in Blender

Dynamic Sky: Dynamic Sky(add-on) Automatic sky creator for Cycles
Free

Image to Plane: Included add on. Import images directly to planes

Sketchup Importer*: Release Sketchup Importer 0.15 · martijnberger/pyslapi · GitHub

 

[Hornet3d]

Damn it... And I was waiting for a good sale on PP 11.

I don't want to sound doomy and gloomy, but news like this is never really positive for long time users of anything...
Sure, the company will spin it like "Hey, boys and girls, we just reorganized our staff and relocated our facilities in a major restructuring to provide you with the finest, most exciting and most up to date state of the art products imaginable"...
And inevitably everything goes to hell...
Sure, it being sold to another company might be good... If that happens...
But usually the sale comes before the firing...
You wake up one morning to find "ZandorCorp purchased Spanky3D for 10.0009567 million dollars"... "And everything is just fine, nobody is getting laid off and ZandorCorp is gonna infuse the product with new life and new vitality!"...
And then six month later everyone but two main staffers are fired, the headquarters are moved to a former monastery in Tibet and all future versions are indistinguishable from the last except for minor bug fixes...
The new owners usually have no idea what the significance or specialty of the product is, just that it's an investment and if you treat it like all your investments, stripping it down to its bares bones, hiring ultra minimal cheap new staff with zero experience with the product, adding nothing to its development or maintenance and milking the corpse of every last molecule of worth... In their vision of "a bright future" for the product, it will all work out just long enough make back what they paid for it and then keep its bones in their portfolio of assets until they actually start losing money on it.
Granted, it might not go that way...
It's just that usually when the firing comes before the selling off... That's not good...
I can't even think of an instance where that had a happy ending.
I might be ill informed, pessimistic or just old fashioned stupid, but this is really bumming me out.

I just spent the past several days working on an "artsy" project (a physical object) akin to stuff I used to do more often a few years back... and I've been waffling back and forth between anger and depression because more than half the materials I would have used on a project like this, are either gone or zombicrapified useless vestiges of the great item they once were...
All for the above same reason...
Some jackwad company bought out a company that made a good or great product, and the new owners who had no idea, nor interest in understanding or maintaining the product either killed it or watered it down to nothing...
Being creative and being a mad inventor is actually harder today then it was in the 80s...
Yeah, I can find anything and everything I don't want on Amazon and have it shipped overnight...
Good luck finding anything that's not a copy or homogenized variant of that item, product or supply I already don't want...
I try my best to support brick and mortar shops, but even they are becoming shells of what they were...
Once upon a time I had ninety gazillion paper catalogs for virtually any supplier you could imagine... I could make practically anything your mad mind could come up with... You want it made out of iron wood... I got ya... You want it cast in aluminum... We can do that... Red glass... Yeah... Brass... Have tiny gears... Sure... Ultrasonic vaporizer... What size?...
Then the Internet made paper pointless, and it seemed like things would be better and easier...
And for a while it was...
One by one these companies disappeared, one by one the stores that carried them closed, one by one the products disappeared...
At this point it's literally getting to be that you have to purchase raw materials and base chemicals and make what you need from scratch...
This might seem very gloomy and specific to physical objects... And well that may be, but hearing this news about Poser is not giving me a lot of smiles...

You know, this all started with me spilling a tiny bottle of high tech solvent... Which is/was apparently the last of its kind... Then every other item I went to buy is no longer available or not the same product it used to be... Just a four day long cascade of frustration and disappointment ending in me reading this about Poser.

And whatever this ultimately means to us users and or fans of Poser, I can't help but also feel really bad for the crew who have worked on this product for years...

I really wish them well and thank them for the work they've done over the years and for making a great tool I really liked using.

Grrr... Sorry, for this pissy post and my gloomy view... I'm gonna go outside and vent my annoyance and frustrations now by throwing shurikens at the dead tree out back until I get bored or lose them all in the woods...

What a crappy week.

Coo a fellow optimist, but I still not sure exactly how you feel about this.

 

[McGyver]

Hey, McGyver, think about this.........

Your examples fail on the same situation when it happened to DAZ.

Heck, the guy they put in place even understood the hobbyist craft industry - on foam cutting appliances, anyway.

My point is simply that your scenario is not always the same.

Yes... There are no absolutes... As I said, "I might be ill informed, pessimistic or just old fashioned stupid"...
I'm imagining stupid is high probability.
And pessimistic...
I'm probably ill informed too.
But it is a very, very common scenario, if not in software, at least in regular everyday life these days.

Sorry if I annoyed anyone... I'm in a big, long and dark funk that been going on for a few months... Lately it's be quite hard to be optimistic and everything that has a possibility for good outcome, just goes to poopsville...

To be honest, I kinda saw this coming from when DAZ assets no longer worked smoothly in Poser... But I was optimistic and hoped Poser's user base was enough to keep it going.

Who knows, maybe a Portuguese Poser team will work magic...

Anything is possible.

Still... People lost their jobs and that's never a great scenario... It's pretty sad really...
Families get moved around, friendships fall away... Things change... Sometimes for the better, sometimes not...
Who knows... Maybe they all hated each other and we're looking for a reason to quit and they'll get way better jobs elsewhere...

I've edited this like 500 times, so I should just end this with the apology that I'm sorry if I offended or depressed anyone.

 

[McGyver]

Tired of the corporate BS from the likes of Adobe, SM, Daz, Apple and the rest. Open source has it's issues but pleasing the shareholders isn't one of them.

+ 1,000,000 on that.

I never deny anyone a right to turn a profit. Make a good product and treat people like the commercials imply and I'm all for you... It's just the constant tidal waves of BS that wear me down to an angry nub.

I really love the open source community... It gives me hope for the future of mankind.

 

[Hornet3d]

Yes... There are no absolutes... As I said, "I might be ill informed, pessimistic or just old fashioned stupid"...
I'm imagining stupid is high probability.
And pessimistic...
I'm probably ill informed too.
But it is a very, very common scenario, if not in software, at least in regular everyday life these days.

Sorry if I annoyed anyone... I'm in a big, long and dark funk that been going on for a few months... Lately it's be quite hard to be optimistic and everything that has a possibility for good outcome, just goes to poopsville...

To be honest, I kinda saw this coming from when DAZ assets no longer worked smoothly in Poser... But I was optimistic and hoped Poser's user base was enough to keep it going.

Who knows, maybe a Portuguese Poser team will work magic...

Anything is possible.

Still... People lost their jobs and that's never a great scenario... It's pretty sad really...
Families get moved around, friendships fall away... Things change... Sometimes for the better, sometimes not...
Who knows... Maybe they all hated each other and we're looking for a reason to quit and they'll get way better jobs elsewhere...

I've edited this like 500 times, so I should just end this with the apology that I'm sorry if I offended or depressed anyone.

Joking aside, your description was so close a couple of restructuring procedures I lived through I thought you had found, and was quoting from some manual. I hope for better for Poser but as you say it is so hard to optimistic these days, I still mange it for the most part but I think that is down to me burying my head in the sand, or maybe I am just stark raving bonkers. Still keeps me smiling no matter what the reason is.