Customer Reviews

Poser Pro 2010 (PC/Mac)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Poser is an advanced 3d application which models and animates human figures, at a price so low that it really has no competition in its market. Backed by an enthusiastic user community, it straddles the worlds of hobby/fanzine creation and professional illustration. However, the enthusiasm of the community has often led the product into complex worlds. Pro 2010 simplifies the complexity and allows professional graphic artists to focus on getting results from the package, rather than wrestling with a maze of esoteric file formats and directory structures. It is still a fairly steep learning experience for someone more used to Adobe Illustrator, but is vastly simpler and substantially more powerful than previous versions.

I've been using Poser since version 1, when it did -- cheaply and cheerfully -- exactly what it promised: allowed you to make reference poses of simple nude figures in preparation for illustration. Version 2 brought clothed figures, version 3 brought the possibility of creating your own clothes for figures and animation, version 4 introduced lip-syncing and more complex animation, and from about that time the Poser community exploded into what is now a major global marketplace. Version 5 was somewhat better than 4, version 6 better than 5, and version 7 offered you almost anything you wanted -- provided that you were willing to delve deep into the file structure to do it. At that point the software stalled a little. Poser has always had a complex history of commercial ownership, beginning with Fractal Design in 1995, and being successively owned by Metacreations, Curious Labs, eFrontier and now Smith Micro. It was three years before version 8 came out following version 7, and Smith put out an interim Poser Pro, adding some of the functions which would connect it better to other software. In the mean time, the community had been busy, adding 10,000s of add-on models, props, clothes, textures, and little bits of software to do some of the things which Poser could in principle do, but was never designed for.

Poser 8 and the Pro 2010 version take a big step towards reining in the chaos. In version 7, you could install an ever growing number of add-ons, but you had to individually manoeuvre up to a dozen files into their own separate folders, and getting it wrong could crash your machine. What's more, the compatibility between Mac and Windows versions was incomplete. Every new generation of Poser has brought better, more natural models, but it was previously very hard to convert props and clothing for earlier models to the current ones.

While Poser 8 addresses some of the issues, Pro 2010 comes with a large number of built-in scripts, some previously sold separately, to make installing add-ons a simple matter and enable older add-ons to be used with newer models. It also sports a 64-bit rendering engine on both Windows and Mac, drastically speeding up the process. Further, the sluggish Poser interface has been given a turn of speed, which is welcome to anyone who has sat waiting for the dials to do something when tugged at with a mouse.

All in all, Poser Pro 2010 is a radical upgrade to a product that had somewhat lost its way. It's a good upgrade which fans and experienced users will welcome, and which may well lure a number of Lightwave and Maya users, while drawing in illustrators who, thus far, have found pen and ink a quicker way of getting where they had to go.

My previous experience comes from Poser 5, and more recently DAZ Studio 2 and 3, with some minor understanding of DAZ Carrara 6/7. The computer is a Mac Pro with 4 Xeon cores at 3GHz and 8GB of RAM. This version of Poser Pro 2010 was the boxed pre-release version. I stopped writing this at a certain point because it became clear that there are numerous bugs with the software on this platform. These tend to be minor but point to an unfinished product. I don't believe that there is a better program than this, but wait for the SR1 on the Mac platform before you buy. If you have a Windows PC hurray - you win and the pictures quite different.

Errors and omissions
=============
The 'Quick Start Companion' doesn't work. The result is - "NULL (or empty), script name passed to PEPythonEngine::DoScript()", resulting in an empty project guide. This happens quite a lot, it also happens when applying the Random Face from Ryans, Expressions folder and then the Poser Library crashes.

The Room Help guides don't work either and give a blank result. The information appears in the 'poserHtml' folder in the main application folder.

The legacy content is incomplete with characters and high resolution textures being missing here and there. Don (Poser 5), the naked walk designer version doesn't load correctly and gives a white face texture (lips etc), white nipples and white finger and toe nails. These can be correctly selected in the Material room but don't exist as MAT poses. The nude version of Judy exists as textures but cannot be selected directly as a figure in the library, or as a MAT pose, and again has a low resolution texture. The figures don't seem to have the original morphs. So preserve any legacy content if upgrading. We still have 4.83 GB of runtime here, and the newer is better than the older.

MojoWorld 3 is nolonger directly compatible with Poser Pro 2010 and cannot select it to enable the importing of .pz3 files, but this is not really SmithMicro's fault. MojoWorld will export terrains but the textures for a parameter bomb need to be at least 6000 x 6000 to be useable. MojoWorld 3 is PPC on the Mac and renders at 1/4 speed, thus usually used within Parallels and the Windows OS.

IBL lighting (Image Based Lighting) presets can have their shadows turned on, they seem to be off by default. Poser Pro 2010 (Mac version, untested on Windows) cannot save the setting! So if you turn on, and set up the shadows, the saved file won't record that, so you have to turn them back on when reloading or reverting.

Background images will not be included in the exported or saved picture if the format of the background image is not compatible with the format of the saved image. So a .jpg background picture will vanish if the finally rendered image is saved as a .png file. Result missing sky (typically) and a confused beginner.

Figure Height, as in Figure > Figure Height on the menu? A legacy part of the program that should really be dropped at this point. Indeed, the manual says Poser 4 and earlier versions. It gives a wonderful range of variation to your loaded figure: Baby, Toddler, Child, Juvenile, Adolescent, Ideal Adult, Fashion Model, Heroic Model. However, in general the 'Ideal Adult' could be interpreted here as the 'Non-deformed Adult'. You CANNOT create interesting effects like it says in the manual. Perhaps it will work with (some) props?

Saving scenes and reloading scenes often fail to give what was saved. This appears to be caused by using the Symmetry tool, and this often produces results that cannot be successfully undone. It seems that what you see is often not what you get or what you save. In this case the file was imported into DAZ Studio 3 and shown to have been saved incorrectly (vertex order perhaps). Avoid the use of the Symmetry tool (or at least save a copy of the document prior to use).

First Impressions
===========
The program has a learning curve. It's not steep but time is required for familiarity. It can appear faulty here and there (and in some cases actually is), until greater understanding occurs.

Initially the same old problem exists with the default lights, they are NOT white and thus give incorrect (misleading) colours. Fix the lighting before you begin (please don't colour your textures turquoise)! Thankfully we have the Poser 8 Image Based Lighting (IBL) to choose instead and this works well but two factors need to be considered. Firstly you might like to untick Gamma correction on the render settings, and secondly - turn the shadows on!

Initially the default setting for the content library is 'Embedded' this can be changed in the General Preferences on the Library tab. Set this to 'External' as the external library application actually make sense. The library icon in the Dock on the Apple doesn't have a Poser Icon by default, so if the library is underneath it might not be obvious to click on the default 'A' application icon to bring it to the front. What is less obvious is the icon top right on the interface (five interlaced circles) that does the same thing (as stated in the manual). Probably easy to fix the icon as this is located at: MacintoshHD > Applications > Poser Pro 2010 > Runtime > ui > AIR > LSMGUI > Poser Library.app, so do the copy the icon thing with 'Get Info' and the main program to give it the correct icon (or suitable alternative as the correct one seems hard to find). There are various view settings here that produce good results. Keep the library window as small as you can because the approach here is really 'Drag and Drop' as this auto conforms the clothing.

The comparison to DAZ Studio here is stark, this is light years ahead but is sadly marred by inconsistent file structures that produce embarrassing errors in functionality. The colours of the interface work extremely well, making even very small text easy to read. In comparision take a look at DAZ Carrara for a frustrating example of how not to do it. Part of the Professional tag is getting this bit right, yet they have still retained the original design. Unfortunately the dials are still slow in some cases, and changing from the Render tab to Preview tab is also slow.

Where Poser 5 concentrated on being anatomically and clinically correct, this approach has been diluted probably for a younger audience. What might be considered as pornographic is arranged to be less immediately accessible within the library structure, and is not loaded by default with the figures, and perhaps this is a good thing.

The program can get a little confused over a period of time. Moving back and forth on render settings can lead to missing blocks or silhouettes on renders. If in doubt save the file and reload, or save, relaunch and reload. Adjusting the shadow parameter dial to less than one was causing such confusion. Setting some values to zero can hang the program on infinite render settings.

Animation
=======
In a simple head to head with DAZ Studio 3, the Andy mannequin had a G2 animated jump pose applied to it of 120 frames. DAZ Studio 3 was able to import the Poser file if given the location of the .pmd file in Posers runtime. DAZ Studio's final render appeared to be without individual lights, Poser defaulted to the Preview render engine. The Poser result was superior but it's not a direct comparison. Both took 5 minutes to render, with DAZ Studio on 4 cores, Poser on 1 core. Changing Poser to the Firefly render engine saw the same animation taking 19 minutes as it had three lights and shadows. This is nearly four times longer but again not a direct like for like comparison.

The Poser preview render which was initially compared to a DAZ Studio final render, looked superior as Poser had gone through the Quicktime dialogue which asked for keyframes, and 1 per frame was specified, the result was a very smooth animation. Daz Studio didn't go through this dialogue and therefore there were less keyframes and the result was jerky. The colours were better in Poser, as was the shape of the figure.

Sorting out the lights in DAZ Studio seems very hard to me, but in Poser there are three lights by default and this is an easier method to understand.

Comparing the final Firefly render of Poser to that of DAZ Studio, it's no surprise that Poser's was superior given that it took 4 times longer. The colours were once again better as I had turned off Gamma correction. However comparing that to the Poser Preview rendered result (given that this figure was very simple), the Preview render looked better than the Firefly render in this case. Doing the same with DAZ Studio both the final and preview renders looked worse than Poser. Perhaps it's an unfair test (Poser is better than DAZ Studio).

I was also able to import this (at least the object) into DAZ Carrara Pro 6. It also rendered in about five minutes and this fell within it's 'Memory allocation error' window of opportunity (bug corrected in Carrara 7), thus ran multithreaded. The result was quite good but more complex to set up (no colours here). As this was on the default photorealistic settings it's not clear how those settings compare.

In practice these different programs are probably going to render like for like with similar times. It's the quality of the end result that will cause choices to be made. Different programs offer different features, but at least Poser is on par if not better than most of these. As DAZ Carrara Pro 6 was free on a magazine, and more recently DAZ Carrara 7 Standard (DigitalArts July) stick with that if the complexity is not a problem and you can get the content from DAZ freebees. Carrara will produce good results that are better than DAZ Studio, if you can tolerate the poor user interface with it's unreadable fonts, and it's standard Gouraud preview as the Textured version is a little slow (top marks to Poser here). Of course, Carrara can do far more than Poser, and at least it can directly import Poser's saved files including animation, so Carrara and Poser actually work quite well together (but not perfectly so), where as Bryce 6 and DAZ Studio 3 do not with regard to animation despite the DAZ link (at least on the Mac platform). Carrara 8 may be an improvement but wait until it works on the Mac and the documentation has been rewritten! Carrara 7 Standard seems to fail on the Mac platform with regard to the promise of opening DAZ Studio files, it's import of 'DAZ COLLADA' is also rather worse than DAZ Studio's import of the same file (generated by DAZ Studio in the first place). Poser is a more polished program than Carrara but both have faults.

Rendering
======
This is always complex but is my favourite part of the program so far. The renderer is what produces your end result, and if it's not good enough then you'll export to your No.1 program whose renderer does produce the end result. Recently I have chosen MojoWorld over Bryce, despite the DAZStudio link. It may be slow but it did well with the shadows. In this case Poser Pro 2010 appears to be better and more flexible probably due to the lighting presets available.

Check the render settings first. Turn off Gamma correction? Always tick to use displacement maps. Best to tick Smooth polygons. Push the auto slider up a couple of clicks until all the possible settings are in use. An initial strategy here is to tick 'Shadow only', and start with the shadows. Find out where they are, how big they are, how fuzzy they are, whether they are on or off, and change their settings on each of the light 'Properties' tabs. Perhaps turn them on (again)! See how they improve or mess up the image. See how they show up the artifacts, and adjust them until they don't. Get the shadows right first, then consider the rest.

The render settings on the Auto Settings slider are not transferred to the Manual Settings when you select that. You need to switch back and forth to transfer each value across, but this in practice is a good thing because it means you can set up expert settings but jump back to simpler settings without writing down the previous figures. Thus you have two different sets of render settings. If you tick 'Indirect Light' on the Manual Settings, guess what... No Shadows!!! Gamma correction is something that seems to work with the old Poser textures from Poser 3 & 4. In those cases the textures can come out kind of green and it fixes that. On the modern textures used in later versions of Poser, it seems to make things worse rather than better.

File Handling
========
There's good and bad here. On the upside Poser Pro 2010 is really good at finding files. It will find files that DAZ Studio declares missing. It looks in obvious places, probably a result of indexing. On the down side it no longer reads .rsr files, and these need to be converted to .png. An external program will probably be required to do that (http://braintrigger.com/software/RSRConv/) and where the .rsr is incorporated within a .cr2 file then you won't easily be able to fix that. You'll just get the shrugged shoulders icon. It fails to save the on or off status of shadows with (at least) the IBL lights as previously stated. What looks like a good document prior to saving can be loaded back ugly and distorted, perhaps associated with the symmetry tool.

Face Room
=======
Although quite well set up this does tend to glitch from time to time. At one point Apollo Maximus, who did seem to be a compatible figure had his head detached, with no obvious way of putting it back. Re-launch and the problem vanishes.

Import Original Figure Head Texture before you begin, as then changes will work correctly and give the same photorealistic texture that you started with. I am pleased to say that the Random Face button now gives a sequence of faces that are slightly different to the last time you used the feature rather than an identical sequence.

When the texture of the head is different to the body - well thanks for warning me, but what I need is for you to change the colour of the body to match the new head. How come that's not possible, or rather should I keep looking until I find that bit?

Material Room
=========
The original room area is still here and just as obscure as ever. What we have here is a new area (since Poser 5) which is a Simple tab. This resembles the functionality of DAZ Studio's Surfaces tab. You can quickly see what texture maps are being applied and can easily load different ones, or pick the existing loaded textures to apply elsewhere such as in the Bump area where the main textures can be used to fake bump maps. This area is easy to use and it works well. The main area is complex to use and doesn't respond to simple efforts. The main area, to me, is kind of worthless. Simple changes like applying the head room texture shade to the rest of the body should be easily achieved here, but isn't.

Conclusions
========
While this is a good program, it continues to improve at a slower pace than expected, and there is still a long way to go. As I have found a significant number of problems on the Mac platform I am bound to say, wait for the SR1 to appear as this is in desperate need to fix the problems with the Mac platform. I am of course, slightly biased in favour of Poser here having seen both DAZ Studio 3 and DAZ Carrara 6 Pro both fail on this platform, thus denying any purchase of those products for now (Carrara 7 is looking good though).

The design and intent here are excellent, and the interface is good looking (less so on Windows). The program is very functional but has many flaws. It is hugely entertaining - a jigsaw puzzle for the 21st Century. Poser Fusion (I think) was not tested here as I don't have those other programs. We take a lot for granted, we have the program competing against itself rather than the opposition. It should be tested (by SmithMicro) to see IF it works and then non-functional features should be left out where these are less important on the Mac Platform, or the Pro version.

If you purchased DAZ Carrara 8 Pro (Windows version), and if you can read the text on the interface (after changing the font but not the size), and if you have studied it until you're as 'blue in the face' as the interface, then stick with that. Poser Pro 2010 will probably not be an improvement for you. Poser Pro 2010 is currently No.1 (in my view), but DAZ Carrara 8 Pro should be considered as No.2 a worthy alternative if it was cheaper (and that's the rub - it ain't). Compare and choose based on your needs. Extra content from both DAZ and SmithMicro/Content Paradise may be needed in practice. Poser Pro 2010 is worth the money that I paid for it, but I got a discount, and if you're paying more, then you need to consider it some more. The current availability of Carrara 7 Standard for free with the magazine is a clever move by DAZ. You might get that instead or as well, and DAZ will be happy either way, and if you like it you'll buy the new one.

Poser Pro 2010 is not PRO on the Mac (at least, not yet) and perhaps SmithMicro need to consider the possibility of selling the Mac version for less - if it is less functional, perhaps calling it something else, but then I did buy it for less, which is just as well.

PROs
===
Much improved intuitive interface. The buttons do what you expect, and are mosly well placed.
Useful help section at the bottom of the render settings window, tells you what each variable does.
Material Room has a choice of Simple or Complex interface tab and both are useful.
External library is a great idea - a back button would have been useful though.
Excellent documentation but a few typos and some has to be found (due to glitches).
Although the structure of the content is the expected can of worms, you do get a lot here.
Head to head with DAZ Carrara and slightly cheaper.

CONs
===
As the program is complex initial results can be quite poor.
There are a number of malfunctioning aspects on the Apple platform.
Symmetry tool may produce corruption and result in faulty saved files.
The legacy content is incomplete, some useful items are left out.
Parameter dials can still be sluggish and the interface is slow to switch from one tab to another.
Not functional in Linux under wine - as far as I can tell (.dlls required, won't start).
DAZ Carrara Pro 8 may be a better choice and has more functionality.

After playing with this and looking at all the various configuration issues it seems that it would be fair to say we have a proper animation studio for figures.

Two things:
1. Have you got experience animating figures?
2. Have you ever worked in an animation development environment?

If the answer is no to both these questions then you, like me, will struggle with this. Naively, I thought I would get this and create an avatar that I could use to stand up in a virtual classroom and replace my own real presence.

Well, the reality was somewhat more involved. In order to get a decent figure I discovered the complexity of repeating mouth movements corresponding loosely to the spoken word. It takes time to properly animate - but you need a script and knowledge of facial movements against vowel and consonant utterances.

Too much for me. I asked an animation friend to take over and...the results were excellent - though a little reminiscent of second-life.

Brilliant software but patience is required. Don't expect to be animating straight away. Work through the Tutorials at your own pace and slowly everything slots into place. I'm still working through tutorials but well worth it. What this program can do is amazing as you have parameter dials that control every part of a figure.

Poser is a bit pricey but Amazon.co.uk had a good deal so well worth checking on. If you are really interested in animating go for it.

It's been months since I received my copy of Poser Pro 2010, and I've waited that long in order to give it a fair review.

Poser is a deeply flawed product. And I mean DEEPLY flawed. There are bugs and errors in this piece of software that boggle the imagination and deep-fry the brain. On the other hand though, Poser Pro 2010 is a unique piece of software, capable of delivering unparalleled power to developers and artists alike. It's impossible to rate this piece of software any less than 5 stars because, despite all its deficiencies, nothing else on the market can even begin to compete with it in terms of ease-of-use and the quantity of royalty-free content that comes bundled with the package.

My last experience with Poser was several years ago, with Poser 4. It was not a happy one. My figures looked too 'cookie cutter': Whatever pose I tried, whatever render I used, no matter the importing and exporting and mesh manipulation I employed my scenes were still, aesthetically, 'poserish'. This is in no way true for the new edition of Poser. With access to full body morphs, a few clicks on some sliders can create a unique body for your character: Dials you can choose from range from "Bodybuilder" to "Heavy" to "Emaciated" to "Smooth": The number of unique physiologies an inexperienced user can create is almost incredible.

The second key element in character customisation is the "Face Room": No longer do developers have to put up with identical mannequins interacting with each other: Now the face can be manipulated directly, from lowering the brow to adjusting the 'ethnicity' of the face mesh in remarkably realistic ways. One can even import photographs of real people which are then converted into a texture map for the face. The flexibility of the face room is exceptional.

Poser's "Hair [Room]" is also second to none. Hair can be grown from anywhere on the face or body: Side-burns, mohawks, beards, bobs, mullets: These are all possible (and more). Users can adjust the hair's clumpiness, its frizziness... almost anything about it. And then they can run simulations of how it is affected by gravity for maximum realism. Oh, and when the hair renders out it looks BEAUTIFUL. Really exceptional.

These three core attributes of poser combine to make it the easiest solution for the rapid development of humanoid meshes that I've ever seen. There are many more features (cloth simulations, a walk designer, a talk designer, many many procedural textures etc) bundled with the software, but to describe them all would take too long. It's enough to say that Poser will continue surprising you with its power and flexibility again and again for many months.

It's also worth mentioning Poser's inbuilt rendering capabilities: The Firefly renderer is extremely powerful (as many people have said), but I found Poser's real Easter Egg to be its Sketch Designer. There are many images of the sort of things that can be achieved with this online: Google it and you'll understand what I mean.

After all this praise, I should probably mention Poser's gaping flaws. Gaping, terrifying, soul-destroying flaws.
Poser is a product with a torrid and savage history: It's been developed by company X, then company Y, then company Z. At the moment it's under the umbrella of Smith Micro. Poser's history means that, although you get a lot of content with your package, very little of it 'fits together'. The poser libraries (Which, by the way, are VERY clumsily executed with a glitchy AIR setup) are a mishmash of meshes from Poser 1-8, very few of which work perfectly with each other. And converting a Poser 4 jacket to work with a Poser 8 man is an enormous chore: The much-touted "Wardrobe Wizard" is not intuitive in the slightest. Poser's Frankenstein nature is not, however, its biggest flaw. It's biggest flaw is the crashing.

I've run Poser on 3 PCs, each with a different spec, a different gfx card and a different version of Windows. And no matter what I try, Poser still loves to crash. It adores it. The software is simply badly written. Try to save a file and sometimes it'll work, sometimes it'll SUDDENLY CRASH. Try to import a new figure and most of the time it'll work, but occasionally it'll SUDDENLY CRASH. Try to texture a model and some times it'll work and other times... well, you get the picture. If you're going to be using Poser a lot, get used to backing up data.

Poser's third major flaw is its "Undo" button. Usually, this will Undo your last action. In Poser Pro 2010 it can do almost anything. It can rotate your model through 180 degrees. It can delete its texture. It can change the background colour or alter a camera's zoom. As I said earlier: Back up data often.

In conclusion, I'd recommend Poser Pro 2010 to anyone: It may be flawed, but its a work of sheer genius, and within a few weeks you'll find yourself both loving and hating it, just like I do.

I was initially interested in this product to see if I could devise new ways of lighting my photography models differently without having to have people to be the "dummies" shall we say, I do maternity and family photography in the UK so thought this could open some more inspiration and show me the results. To cut a long story short I have played with the software quite considerably and am still struggling to use the basics with the easy to use cue card.

The software is very powerful as you'll see if you take a look on youtube for some videos made with this, beware however as the content looks stunning and trying to re-create anything like this would take you a long long time, I merely wanted static models and struggled. Exporting frames isn't a fast process either - with a iMac i5 with 8gb Ram it still took a minute to render and save a frame!

You can add objects, models, clothing, change the model dynamics and just about anything you want but be prepared to seriously devote a lot of time and effort - might be worth seeing if Lynda has any tutorials to watch on how to use more effectively.

A great product I can't dismiss but I am far better spending my time using photoshop that this. I would say it's a little overpriced at anything more than £200 but I suppose it depends on your needs. A good thing is that you can use this on the MAC and the PC so you're not limited to platform!

Well I will admit it, before I got this I hadn't used Poser before, not to say I hadn't heard of it. Yet now I have it installed, it is one of those things that I wonder how I survived without. It does so many nice little tricks, so many ease of use things. Such as rendering an image of someone as a 3d figure (apparently an old ability, but still useful). The program is expensive - but put in context it isnt a high end product price-wise. It is fairly user friendly and I have found it easy enough to get to grips with the basics on it.

The best combination for this would be to also get hold of Bryce (FREE) and also Photoshop (expensive) thus combining the ability to render 3d characters, 3d landscapes and painting tools that work with both.

I did look at the other reviews for this - I didnt understand most of the terms, nor did I know most of the history, yet I feel pretty secure in saying that this product is a sound option, certainly check Shaun's review out for some initial tips - might help you a fair bit. But I would definately say just to give it a go (before buying, perhaps get the trial version for a month and see if it works for you).