For create original series and animations, I think I'll stay with Daz Studio 4.10, it's professional, fast, lightweight, free and much more than Poser, I'll stay with Daz Studio probably.
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What is the best Poser version ?
- Thread starter RobhG
- Start date
Certainly, free is a consideration, and if you're comfortable in DAZ Studio, it makes sense to stay with it.
Interesting that you mention RWBY. Rooster Teeth used Poser Pro 2014 to create RWBY Season 1. Season 2 and 3 were also animated with Poser. Season 4 is being animated with Maya.
The 3D secrets behind hip anime series RBWY
Interesting that you mention RWBY. Rooster Teeth used Poser Pro 2014 to create RWBY Season 1. Season 2 and 3 were also animated with Poser. Season 4 is being animated with Maya.
The 3D secrets behind hip anime series RBWY
D
Deleted member 325
Guest
I believe it was.
Nod
Adventurous
I use 9 and 11. I'm also running them at lower than the recommended resolution, as my laptop doesn't go that high.
quietrob
Extraordinary
Poser 7 just worked. It was extremely stable and gave me great results. 9 was just as good but Poser 11 is something new. With it's PBR I can do very realistic scenes or switch to a tight comic mode that is ALMOST on grade with filters and surpasses some due to shadows that I otherwise would have to ink in. The morph brush seems more stable and gives me great results when address poke through. I don't do animation well and other's can speak to it's dynamics. I do recommend Poser Pro 11.
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I have used Poser 3, 5 and 7 for many years. They were stable, but lacked even the basic memory management that caused crashes whenever we ran out of memory. Considering those versions were all 32-bits, they cannot use more than about 1.5GB of RAM, even if you have 8 or 16GB installed. This makes them even more prone to running out of memory and crashing. If I remember this right, those versions also lacked the ability to UNDO actions, which is rather vital in any workflow.
Versions 8, 9 and 10 started to bring all that to the table, but they are still broken for content creation. Version 10 was my favorite, but the rigging tools are utterly bugged and unusable. SMS has fixed that in Poser 11, so I guess it is now my "favorite", because now things work as they should, and the older versions will never be fixed. I admit the new HTML5 content library in P11 is still not fully functional, where some features are malfunctioning, and others are missing. It can be annoying, but I guess I've got used to it because I have no choice.
Some claim that Poser 10 was FASTER than 11, and they are correct. Poser 11 is indeed slower, and the old Flash library is still better than the new HTML5 one. SMS has admitted defeat by not being able to fix the problems with the new HTML5 library, or even add the missing features we used to have in Flash versions. They just couldn't do it. With this new HTML5 library, we are expected to accept as normal when, for example, the vertical divider shows at random places when we first open the library, or when the keyboard navigation doesn't work on the tree view. Not to mention when the HTML5 library simply stops responding altogether, or the 3rd party library that makes it communicate with Poser starts using too much memory or use too much CPU for no apparent reason.
The Flash library from Poser 10 is fully working and has none of these bugs, but we cannot use it because Apple and Google decided to demonize Flash, while claiming that HTML5 is "superior", even if Google couldn't make it work in their own office, and SMS was unable to make it work in Poser 11. Google tried to use HTML5 in their own apps for about a year before they lost enough money and gave up. It wasn't good for them, but they still claim HTML5 is great for us. That's how we ended up with a broken HTML5 library in Poser 11. They just can't fix it or add the features we already had with the old Flash library.
Therefore it's not so much which version is my favorite, but instead that SMS has only fixed content creation tools in Poser 11. That makes it the only version I can use. So I guess it's my "favorite".
Versions 8, 9 and 10 started to bring all that to the table, but they are still broken for content creation. Version 10 was my favorite, but the rigging tools are utterly bugged and unusable. SMS has fixed that in Poser 11, so I guess it is now my "favorite", because now things work as they should, and the older versions will never be fixed. I admit the new HTML5 content library in P11 is still not fully functional, where some features are malfunctioning, and others are missing. It can be annoying, but I guess I've got used to it because I have no choice.
Some claim that Poser 10 was FASTER than 11, and they are correct. Poser 11 is indeed slower, and the old Flash library is still better than the new HTML5 one. SMS has admitted defeat by not being able to fix the problems with the new HTML5 library, or even add the missing features we used to have in Flash versions. They just couldn't do it. With this new HTML5 library, we are expected to accept as normal when, for example, the vertical divider shows at random places when we first open the library, or when the keyboard navigation doesn't work on the tree view. Not to mention when the HTML5 library simply stops responding altogether, or the 3rd party library that makes it communicate with Poser starts using too much memory or use too much CPU for no apparent reason.
The Flash library from Poser 10 is fully working and has none of these bugs, but we cannot use it because Apple and Google decided to demonize Flash, while claiming that HTML5 is "superior", even if Google couldn't make it work in their own office, and SMS was unable to make it work in Poser 11. Google tried to use HTML5 in their own apps for about a year before they lost enough money and gave up. It wasn't good for them, but they still claim HTML5 is great for us. That's how we ended up with a broken HTML5 library in Poser 11. They just can't fix it or add the features we already had with the old Flash library.
Therefore it's not so much which version is my favorite, but instead that SMS has only fixed content creation tools in Poser 11. That makes it the only version I can use. So I guess it's my "favorite".
DS isn't lightweight. It requires a database running in the background, of which it runs multiple instances last I checked (I want to say I found 4 Postgresql instances last I used DS). I find DS significantly less stable and more resource intensive than Poser. Also, I don't think Iray an easy choice for animation, just to warn. DS's main advantage for making movies, IMHO, is the easy to learn interface, the free content, and the library. Pretty much the same is true for Poser, though the free DS base figures are much better than the free Poser ones. I'd definitely throw in Iray if you were talking about stills, but in terms of movies, I'd say that 3Delight, Firefly, and Cycles/Superfly were all more optimized for animation than Iray is, but I could be wrong.
That said, Blender is a much, much better choice for making movies. Orders of magnitude better. You have as much free content, if not more. You have professional level animation tools. You have professional level compositing tools. And you're about to get real-time rendering so good that has people posting movies right and left of works rendered with the unstable, no-guarantees nightly build version of Eevee (the new real-time renderer). And that's on top of being able to use multiple forms of mesh editing and creation. You have weight mapped dynamics and the ability to make meshes follow dynamic cloth and bezier curves. You have fluid dynamics and all kinds of force fields. You have particle systems and soft and rigid body physics. You have powerful texture painting tools that allow you to paint on several UV maps and textures at once, and doesn't force you to stitch all of your figure maps onto one image. You have the ability to burn normal and displacement maps from your sculpts, and you can paint bump, displacement, and specular maps. You have sculpting tools that let you work like Zbrush/Sculptris. With the free ManuelBastioni Lab, you have both realistic and anime base figures, auto fitting, and auto morphing based on rough mesh edits. You have _way_ easier to create and edit hair than Poser's (don't know about LAMH), and it's free. You have free add-ons for generating buildings (inside and out), cities, and all kinds of useful scenery. You can import all kinds of content, including vector files. Really, the only thing Poser or DS has over Blender is ease of use for making stills of purchased content, a great interface for dialing morphs and poses, and a very convenient and usable library.
Oh, and Blender 2.8 is due out this year some time. People are working on huge improvements and updates in terms of interface, workflow, rendering, cloth dynamics, and fluid dynamics. And they want to make interfaces distributable files, so that people can share interfaces they find easiest to use.
Of course, C4D is a really powerful tool, too. I think it goes without saying that if you have C4D, you should definitely use it. But AFAIK, it doesn't have figure generation tools equivalent to ManuelBastioni Lab.
IIRC, someone in the DS community has made some nice tools for going from DS to Blender. If I were starting from scratch, wanted to make movies, _and_ decided I absolutely had to use the DS figures, I'd probably go the DS/Blender route. That said, I'd be much more likely to just go the pure Blender route. Bastioni's work is just _so_ much more flexible than anything DAZ can provide because you can edit vertices. And in a movie, well, I'd have a set cast of characters, and I wouldn't need one figure to be everyone in the world. Even if I started with a Bastioni figure, I'd probably convert it to a regular figure and then do some custom topological editing to fit my characters.
But that's just me. You should use whatever tools feel most comfortable to you _and_ have you producing the kind of work you want to make. Just avoid tools that are comfortable but cripple your ability to create what you want.
That said, Blender is a much, much better choice for making movies. Orders of magnitude better. You have as much free content, if not more. You have professional level animation tools. You have professional level compositing tools. And you're about to get real-time rendering so good that has people posting movies right and left of works rendered with the unstable, no-guarantees nightly build version of Eevee (the new real-time renderer). And that's on top of being able to use multiple forms of mesh editing and creation. You have weight mapped dynamics and the ability to make meshes follow dynamic cloth and bezier curves. You have fluid dynamics and all kinds of force fields. You have particle systems and soft and rigid body physics. You have powerful texture painting tools that allow you to paint on several UV maps and textures at once, and doesn't force you to stitch all of your figure maps onto one image. You have the ability to burn normal and displacement maps from your sculpts, and you can paint bump, displacement, and specular maps. You have sculpting tools that let you work like Zbrush/Sculptris. With the free ManuelBastioni Lab, you have both realistic and anime base figures, auto fitting, and auto morphing based on rough mesh edits. You have _way_ easier to create and edit hair than Poser's (don't know about LAMH), and it's free. You have free add-ons for generating buildings (inside and out), cities, and all kinds of useful scenery. You can import all kinds of content, including vector files. Really, the only thing Poser or DS has over Blender is ease of use for making stills of purchased content, a great interface for dialing morphs and poses, and a very convenient and usable library.
Oh, and Blender 2.8 is due out this year some time. People are working on huge improvements and updates in terms of interface, workflow, rendering, cloth dynamics, and fluid dynamics. And they want to make interfaces distributable files, so that people can share interfaces they find easiest to use.
Of course, C4D is a really powerful tool, too. I think it goes without saying that if you have C4D, you should definitely use it. But AFAIK, it doesn't have figure generation tools equivalent to ManuelBastioni Lab.
IIRC, someone in the DS community has made some nice tools for going from DS to Blender. If I were starting from scratch, wanted to make movies, _and_ decided I absolutely had to use the DS figures, I'd probably go the DS/Blender route. That said, I'd be much more likely to just go the pure Blender route. Bastioni's work is just _so_ much more flexible than anything DAZ can provide because you can edit vertices. And in a movie, well, I'd have a set cast of characters, and I wouldn't need one figure to be everyone in the world. Even if I started with a Bastioni figure, I'd probably convert it to a regular figure and then do some custom topological editing to fit my characters.
But that's just me. You should use whatever tools feel most comfortable to you _and_ have you producing the kind of work you want to make. Just avoid tools that are comfortable but cripple your ability to create what you want.
Robynsveil
Admirable
Some time ago, I ran Poser Pro 2014... that was my main 3D software for ages. Whilst I did upgrade to PP11, something about it didn't feel altogether right. Perhaps it was because I was sort-of backing away from Windows software altogether (Win10 had a lot to do with that) in favour of running Linux and in it, Blender. Of late, the amount of scripts / addons / features in Blender have been accumulating at an unprecedented rate. True, Poser Pro 11 did get a version of Cycles. But Cycles has moved on since Poser 11's release, features not included in that snapshot have emerged, such as filmic and hdri environment lighting and now the Principled Ubershader... sort-of can't keep up with it all.
So, I dropped Windows, dropped PP11 and have been messing with Blender 2.7x for the past years. Even wrote an addon (needs 2.79 because of the Principled Shader) to paint V4, Dawn, Antonia and Mariko figures with shaders - only because I'm lazy and hated the tedium of copying and pasting over, what, 19? mat zones... too boring. Got some work happening on the script currently to allow writing to those .csv files from within the script, and more stuff as well... but I digress.
One area that I haven't nutted out yet is posing figures in Blender. I did study the Rigify addon and even purchased Auto Rig Pro with the intent to create my own rigged figures (or even rig Antonia) but not being the brightest spark or sharpest tool in the shed have failed to get it working properly. For now: it's on my to-do list, to be sure. In any event, I *DID* get Poser Pro 2014 working in Linux (running in WINE) and it runs like a champion! I'm using Dimension3D's XL library, but I'm pretty sure I bought Semidieu's Library Manager 2 back in the day from DNA, so I'll try to install that.
So, for now, PP2014 is my favourite Poser version, only because it runs in WINE.
So, I dropped Windows, dropped PP11 and have been messing with Blender 2.7x for the past years. Even wrote an addon (needs 2.79 because of the Principled Shader) to paint V4, Dawn, Antonia and Mariko figures with shaders - only because I'm lazy and hated the tedium of copying and pasting over, what, 19? mat zones... too boring. Got some work happening on the script currently to allow writing to those .csv files from within the script, and more stuff as well... but I digress.
One area that I haven't nutted out yet is posing figures in Blender. I did study the Rigify addon and even purchased Auto Rig Pro with the intent to create my own rigged figures (or even rig Antonia) but not being the brightest spark or sharpest tool in the shed have failed to get it working properly. For now: it's on my to-do list, to be sure. In any event, I *DID* get Poser Pro 2014 working in Linux (running in WINE) and it runs like a champion! I'm using Dimension3D's XL library, but I'm pretty sure I bought Semidieu's Library Manager 2 back in the day from DNA, so I'll try to install that.
So, for now, PP2014 is my favourite Poser version, only because it runs in WINE.
Robynsveil
Admirable
Oh, and I agree with kobaltkween about movie-making in Blender. I was using it primarily for that reason for almost a year, until I got this used Mac for a good deal, and then went to FinalCut Pro for video editing. Blender's interface has, I think, an undeserved reputation for being arcane / difficult to use. Try Lightworks... industrial strength video editing software (there is a free version) but wow, the learning curve is practically straight up for, like, forever! So much so that despite having an actual subscription to Lwks, I found myself using Blender more and more because it was easier!
Also, the Bastioni's figures are really coming along amazing well. Totally worth a look, and well, they're free, so that's a plus. They leave MakeHuman totally in the dust.
Also, the Bastioni's figures are really coming along amazing well. Totally worth a look, and well, they're free, so that's a plus. They leave MakeHuman totally in the dust.
DaremoK3
Enthusiast
Hear hear, kobaltkween.
I love both DS, and Poser, but building my Blender Poser Studio and Marvelous Cloth Creator with Blender is hands down far better than what either of them can do with all the bells-n-whistles mentioned by kobaltkween.
For Poser, though, I would have to say that it is a toss up for me between ver 4 and ver 6. I cut my teeth on P3, but P4 is where it really took off for me, and I loved the simplicity of it compared to the current versions (I also have P9, P10, and PP2014). But, on the other hand, I love P6, because that is the one I got into using the Python scripting with (missed P5 completely), and all my favorite scripts are in that one (most broke with P9). P4 is no longer viable for me, because of hardware, but I still use P6 more than any other version I own. Although, less and less, as Blender holds my attention more on a daily basis...
Hey, Robyn, just wanted to say hi, and that I haven't forgotten about you. I am working through bugs porting gazer cloth, but I am finishing up the unstructured tris, and quad converison addons. I thought I remembered you were on Linux (someday I would like to pick your brain when I am ready for a hard install [not just running virtual], and would like your help), and I wanted to send you the modified addons for both for your cloth creations in Blender to Poser. I will make sure they both work on my virtual Linux Blender 2.79 first...
I love both DS, and Poser, but building my Blender Poser Studio and Marvelous Cloth Creator with Blender is hands down far better than what either of them can do with all the bells-n-whistles mentioned by kobaltkween.
For Poser, though, I would have to say that it is a toss up for me between ver 4 and ver 6. I cut my teeth on P3, but P4 is where it really took off for me, and I loved the simplicity of it compared to the current versions (I also have P9, P10, and PP2014). But, on the other hand, I love P6, because that is the one I got into using the Python scripting with (missed P5 completely), and all my favorite scripts are in that one (most broke with P9). P4 is no longer viable for me, because of hardware, but I still use P6 more than any other version I own. Although, less and less, as Blender holds my attention more on a daily basis...
Hey, Robyn, just wanted to say hi, and that I haven't forgotten about you. I am working through bugs porting gazer cloth, but I am finishing up the unstructured tris, and quad converison addons. I thought I remembered you were on Linux (someday I would like to pick your brain when I am ready for a hard install [not just running virtual], and would like your help), and I wanted to send you the modified addons for both for your cloth creations in Blender to Poser. I will make sure they both work on my virtual Linux Blender 2.79 first...
Robynsveil
Admirable
It's all good, mate... we all get stuck into our projects ... I know I have to come up for air every now and then. With you, it's cloth (really keen to work on that as soon as I've gotten rigging my figure set in Blender), me? it's shaders. Just getting my head around the Principled node and how to manipulate that in code. And then, in a panel menu.