Is Poser worth it?
HyeVltg3
Posts: 87
Kind of feels biased to post this in the Daz3D forums.
My main Q is Why should I purchase Poser 11/Pro 11 ?
So far all I keep reading is how Poser users that want to use anything from the Daz3D shop, need to "Convert" to Import figures, mesh needs tweaking to work in Poser, this, that and the other.
Why should I spend $130/$350 on a product when Daz3D Studio is free, all I need to worry about is buying things for scenes instead of Buy then convert/import, this does not make sense to me when the application costs so much while the "competition" is Free.
Am I just missing the bigger picture or the main reason Poser costs $$$ while Daz3D studio is free?
Please help, I've been itching to get into Poser/Daz but kept putting it off because of time reasons, now I have the time to pick up something new and am stuck at this "money-wall"
Main reason reasons I am even siding with Poser is because of my AMD gpu, I heard that Daz3D is great for Nvidea users. (unless, again I am misinformed?!)
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Comments
DS uses nVidia cards to accelerate Iray rendering (Iray is an nVidia product, using a proprietary technology) - however, I'm not sure how much use Poser makes of AMD cards in Superfly, it doesn't use them at all in its older render engine (Firefly).
Poser has a very good set of models, including animals & toon style characters for free in their price and that price with Poser Pro 11+ includes an interactive license so you can use them in games & such.
Poser has a store called ContentParadise.com that you can buy more models from and all the Smith Micro models in that store include interactive licenses.
Downside is every two to three yours you will probably want to upgrade Poser again. That upgrade cost is typically $49 - $79 dollars.
If you just want a good 3D program with premade content so you don't buy content Poser is much better deal.
DAZ Studio includes some premade content but mostly only humans from Genesis - Genesis 2 - Genesis 3 - Genesis 8
So you need to figure out how much you are likely to spend in the DAZ Store compared to Poser Pro 11 to make them equivalent. If you are wanting to make games or interactive content on a budget Poser Pro 11.+ is the easy winner there.
If all I want to work is Genesis, is my only option DAZ?
Yes, because if you only want Genesis you have much work to convert Genesis functionality to Poser Pro 11.+ but since Genesis (not Genesis 2, Genesis 3, or Genesis 8) are old product you can buy many of them cheaply if you join the Platinum Club Plus for a year. However, if you want to use those in a game or other interactive app then to buy those interactive licenses becomes very expensive.
You can install and use Genesis and Genesis 2 on Poser, using the DSON importer. However Genesis 3 and 8 will not work on poser. THere is a fix around which allows a partial use, but the resulting figures are not truly Genesis 3 and 8.
Superfly does not use AMD cards for GPU acceleration, only Nvidia cards.
I thought that might be the case, but couldn't recall for sure. So in this repsect there's nothing to choose between them (though I belive that the developers of cycles, on which Superfly is based, do want to support AMD cards in the longer run).
Cycles supports AMD cards but like nVidia support for iRay you need a video card that is new enough.
Unfortunately, Superfly is a subset of Cycles, and doesn't yet support AMD cards...
Well Blender is free if you buy either one and does support AMD via Cycles and there is also the AMD Pro Renderer you can download & install into Blender.
You would need to learn how to export your DAZ and / or Poser scenes once you composed them to your satisfaction to Blender and reconfigure the materials for use in Cycles though. Now that's not near as bad or failure prone as it was in the past if you've tried that before.
Blender is also making major improvements to their render engine in Blender 2.80 but that won't be available until July 2018 according to their road map.
The last I checked Cycle supports AMD cards at mostly an **experimental** level... some features are not implemented as they are in the Nvidia version. Very few renderers use AMD becuase of performance issues and the OpenCL spec. Several companies had publicly stated their intentional support of AMD cards in their products then had to backtrack once they tried to implement and found the cards not ready for primetime in comparision to Nvidia. In short, if you want to use GPU rendering, do not buy an AMD card. You're really wasting your money if you're seeking to use it for that purpose; it's only useful for games.
Poser is worth it if you want to use some of its older, but popular, figures. Terai yuki (1 and 2) comes to my mind. Poser also has some unique figures not found from Daz line.
As for AMD support, Blender has had fully support for AMD rendering for a while now. I haven't seen much complaints with AMD rendering. It's on par with CUDA speed.
As the only supporting document that supports that comes from blender's page, and it only applies to the mid-range; once you put a good card in your machine, CUDA is faster: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.htmlWell, but where did I say Cycles complete & correctly bug free? And since when is nVidia & DAZ Studio gotten past the stay of experiemental because they are clearly not.
Did you know I can Cycles & iRay render with no nVidia card or no AMD card? It takes longer but I can. So it comes done to implying those renderers can't render without an nVidia card. That is mistaken.
You were not being addressed. And we are talking about superfly not cycles as this is a discussion on poser.. If someone wants to render with a gpu with superfly, they can't use an AMD card. That's what I was speaking to and on that I wasn't mistaken.
Please keep the discussion civil and on-topic.
One thing that I think is important is that SM supports poser with an up to date user manual, that is Through and Accurate.
DAZ does not, they have no interest in keeping their documentation up to date or accurate, and if you need to know something thats left almost completely in the hands of the Forum community.
Personally I think this is something a person should know if they are to make and informed choice between the two products.
Actually, as someone who finds documentation to be really important, I've found that documentation has seen a fair bit of advancements in the last so many years (and more and more is being added every day) If you have gone and looked at the documentation previously, and found it maybe didn't have what you were looking for yet, I would take a look again as things get added in pretty consistently (Kudos to the person doing it as I for one am really glad to see more and more being added).
You can find quite a large amount of information here: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/start
And then there is also Daz's Youtube Channel here as well: https://www.youtube.com/user/WWWDAZ3DCOM which also gets very frequent updates and additions.
And then, as you mentioned, there are the Forum Moderators, Community Volunteers, Forum Admins, and PAs who are all generally happy to answer any questions. There is even a forum dedicated to new members and giving them individual help here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/new-users and also a hands on teaching challenge that our wonderful Community Volunteers help with that goes over specific topics every month here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/new-user-contests-and-events and we are looking to be adding more topics to that in coming months.
All in all, as someone who started in Poser and was fairly resistant to trying Daz Studio (I was comfy in Poser and why fix what isn't broken) I will say that once I did I was really delightfully suprised. It can be an uncomfortable change for some depending on how you take to Daz Studio as, while they are similar in some ways, they are very different in others but I've found that once you get used to DS, there are a lot of things that are far easier to do and control in it. That said though, what is best for you...is what you personally like and take to the best or what best suits your personal needs. For me it was Poser for a long time, but now my personal preference is Daz Studio, yours may be different
I am sure whichever you choose, you will find lots of artistic fun and enjoyment in your future
Thanks for the Links Ann, maybe I am overdue for a 2nd Look BB.
Here is Blender since you the OP are concerned with budget. It's also getting much easier to use.
https://www.blender.org/
And it's documentation is second to none:
https://www.blender.org/support/
Prebuilt changable human models as a Blender plugin:
http://www.makehuman.org/index.php
No. Poser has lost the battle to DAZ Studio. DAZ Iray & Genesis 8 put Poser to shame. I currently use Poser and plan on switching to DAZ as soon as I can. Superfly is a great renderer, but without the high quality model of Genesis 8, it's pointless to use Poser. Poser doesn't have a high quality male and female model. Superfly is also a mystery, no one really knows how to use it properly, it's all experimental stuff that no one has figured out yet.
Not without workarounds, which makes it basically Genesis 2 again. That's what Chohole meant by "partial use"
If DAZ Studio had an easier-to-use interface for creating scenes I would switch to it since it is faster than Poser. I've been using Poser since it came out and it looks like content for it is becoming obsolete since nearly every store is going the DS route. Even Smith-Micro is abandoning Poser in their store. I don't see it sticking around long if stores continue to not support it. I only continue to use it because it's much easier for me. I never could get a grip on DS and I'm sure I would have to convert everything I've already created in Poser.
Worth it? Probably not if you've been using DS. I only stick with what I know and only used DS to convert for Poser, but it never did work very well and I no longer use any of my converted DS content for Poser and isn't worth the hassle it creates. Also DS props are generally one object which makes them very difficult to work with in Poser. I gave up a long time ago. It's unfortunate because there are a lot of quality models on DAZ that I can't use which is why I no longer subscribe to the PC. Fortunately there are still a few vendors who create for Poser, but how long will that last because they get tired of creating for two platforms.
Smith-Micro dropped the ball on this one and can be the only one to blame. They're probably feeling the pinch which is why their store is predominantly DS models. It looks like they lost too.
You can use Poser Models in DAZ Studio. I went completely over the Daz after years with poser, Studio is great and useful and it has the best of everything in the store. Poser for me has a far better lighting system, you can see what your doing but apart from that no, you just dont need it, The other thing with Poser is it has been static forever, they did introduce new sections but Daz blew them away for content you can actually use
AFAIK, if you do this, you end up with a poser model that doesn't have any of the advanced fratures of Genesis. It probably doesn't even use Poser weight mapping.
If Genesis 1 and 2 figures are brought in via the DSON importer, which is seamless for items with Poser Companion Files, they generally work pretty much as they do in Studio, even HD morphs. The principal drawback is there is no Smoothing Modifier in Poser.
The imported figure is indeed weightmapped, and can be converted to a native Poser figure if one is inclined to do some cr2 editing; search for Hacking Vicky for Speed by JoePublic at the Renderosity Forum.....
If you buy the "standard" version of Poser, you miss out on some features you might want. DAZ Studio gives you equivalent features for free! You can use your DAZ products out of the box. You don't need to convert them.
I prefer to use Genesis characters. Genesis characters don't always work well with Poser. You have to convert some, Sometimes results are not ideal. I don't even think you can easily convert the latest generations of Genesis characters for use with Poser.
I've been working on getting Genesis into Poser since some of the sales earlier this year meant I could pick stuff up very cheaply, and after getting a computer that could run Studio without crashing the whole time. So far, I've been using Netherworks' scripts to help make things Poser native, I've been having a lot of success with Genesis 1 and 2 - I'll admit to a few mistakes with clothing early on but I'm getting the hang of that too now. Genesis 3 is next on my list to try and it looks like there's a Poser script to convert the expressions so that it too can be native to Poser. My understanding is that Genesis 8 would be more of a problem as it's expressions are linked to some HD morphs.
HD morphs in general don't seem to move over. I believe there is a long winded way to do it I won't be tying that though as I don't have a need for them (I don't have an interest in photorealism and the faux painting effects I'm using would mask them anyway).
The creatures that I've purchased have converted quite easily as well - though I've noticed that even the Poser companion files don't apply things like displacement or normal maps, so they have to be added manually (DAZ have tended not to support those in Poser as far back as the V4/M4 muscle maps, which I always thought odd).
I've wondered about starting a thread here for successful Poser conversions but I never seem to have the time.
"And then, as you mentioned, there are the Forum Moderators, Community Volunteers, Forum Admins, and PAs who are all generally happy to answer any questions. "
This part sucks.
I'm so frustrated with the zero to zero speed of the learning curve on DAZ and Hexagon that I could scream.
The only true source and reliable source of learning information is written., Everything else is what someone else thinks or tried. Worst part of "forums" and their users regardless of the level of user is that it typically takes a week to two weeks to get any real useful information when you post anything and trying to find useful assistance on any particular matter is like trying to find a mcDonald's cheeseburger wrapper in the middle of a 60 acre corn field.
You can spend hours or days digging and ditching in Google searches.
A user manual is priceless but tell that to the idiot IT techs who spend their lives writing this code and they start screaming that yo're the one not doing it right.
Funny thing is though, ask them to change the oil in their own car and they blue screen till they cna find a manual on it.
I'm still trying to get honest input on my thoughts about buying into Poser but at the Poser 5 level rather than the pricier 11 and I've been waiting on that for almost a week now.