Poser 13 - anyone using it?

daveso

Is it worthwhile to upgrade to Poser 13? What features were actually improved? etc etc... your opinions of it overall, or just stick to an old version?

Martirilla

Poser 13 was mostly a big upgrade for 3D photoreal animators. At 13.3 it's now pretty mature and bug-fixed. But note that Poser 14 is apparently around the corner, possibly (my guess) before Black Friday / Christmas? Which will likely mean discounts on Poser 13.

The “Windows 10” system spec is only to cover their backs. 13 runs fine back to Windows 7, with the only drawback being you can't use Ken's paid-for scripts from the Renderosity Store (since only a later Windows OS has the required decryption module).

12 and 13 still interface fairly painlessly with Vue (now wholly free, incidentally), importing scenes nicely once the software is told where things are. Just make sure you keep your old Poser 11 installed and with its runtime - the Vue SDK will expect to find that. Some Poser 12-only characters (Pink 2.0) and new complex Blender Cycles X shaders may not convert well, but nearly all older content will. Vue also serves to replace all the old PoserFusion plugins, since it exports your Poser imports to the latest versions of big-beast 3D software packages and also to game engines and VR etc.

12 and 13 switched up to using Python 3, so many of your old Poser 11 / Python 2 scripts won't work. But by now there are plenty of free replacements for nearly everything. See here for a directory.

Lots of changes in 13 due to the new Blender Cycles X (aka SuperFly in Poser) render engine in Poser 13. There's a lot to get your head around, in terms of a new approach to render settings. But once mastered, you get much faster rendering - especially on animations and complex scenes.

Improved Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN), now a key feature in speeding up render times. You can now also denoise the Raytrace Preview.

Updated Walk Designer and Talk Designer. Also default Viseme mappings for "all Cartoon Characters", though I assume that means only the characters in the free 13gb content bundle. So far, as I know, no Visemes for the Nursoda toon fantasy characters.

Maximum Undo limitation increased to 200.

Slight improvements to Comic Book Preview real-time rendering. Less 'chips' in the line-art, seemingly due to a double-pass with slightly different settings and then an insta-composite of the two versions of the same line-art?

Import and Export for Render Presets.

Also a number of changes only of interest to clothing and content developers. 

The UI is much the same, thankfully there was no disastrous UI makeover by Kevin the Tea-boy!  Also, of course there's the usual long backwards compatibility with older saved scenes.

If adding 13 alongside Poser 11, you'll also want to consider what was added in Poser 12. Adaptive sampling for faster renders. Superfly rendering into a layered .PSD including depth passes etc. Superfly making PNGs with background transparency.  Funky Cycles nodes inc. 'hair' and PBR materials. Dual graphics-card support. NVIDIA 30 series cards support. Many Materials Room improvements. Python Pillow support.

Hope that helps!

daveso

that is an awesome overview for sure. Thank you very much. I haven't been using Poser, but I do have 11 floating around on a drive somewhere. the price of 13 is now only $79 for an upgrade, so its tempting. I would assume 14 won;t be that inexpensive at the beginning.. I started using Poser a version 1, and have always likes using it. I know a lot of people don;t get along with the ui, but I like it. Always seemed very intuitive to me. 

ibr_remote aka infinity10

I am using Poser 13