Customer Reviews

Poser Pro [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

When I heard that a company with a techie name like Smith Micro was buying Poser, I hoped that what had been a fun, but fragmented program might at last be in good hands. No such luck. As noted in the title, Smith Micro does not bring much technology to the Poser table. It basically adds network rendering, which was needed, but at a hefty price, especially for those of us in the Art community who never intended to use Poser with a high end program like Maya. As noted in another review, they haven't done much for those guys either.

In its last release Poser 7 seemed like a mish-mash of modules each designed by a different person. The cloth room required a very different approach from the materials area and the hair and face modules had nothing in common with the rest. This made the Poser learning curve rather large. The program needed a more intuitive interface in these areas. As far as I can see, nothing much has changed. Poser Pro is essentially the same program as Poser 7. If you had issues with Poser 7, chances are the new bells and whistles presented here will not address any of them. Go the website, read the enhancements and check to see if any are really useful to you. BTW I have also had trouble updating my POSER 7 program using the SMITH MICRO webpage. They don't appear to recognize my serial number. Bad start in my book!!

UPDATE: I went back to the Smith Micro site today after getting an email with a nice discount on a program called GROBOTO. When I tried to order the program the website told me that it would not accept my order because US addresses only have 3 zip code numbers!!! This is the worst company I have ever TRIED and FAILED to do business with.

Poser Pro is fairly stable by itself (a bit better than Poser 7) but still slow in rendering and without any significant change in its dated user interface. The collada export, which was widely advertised for its integration with XSI etc. is buggy and crippled. The tutorial on collada export to XSI, for instance, works for non animated models, but if one selects to export the skeleton (bones), it will not import correctly in XSI 6 or 6.5. It also won't work with Maya 2008. The native plugins work for C4D (but unlike the InterPoser Pro plugin available elsewhwere, are not editable in C4D) but are almost unusable with Maya 2008 (see contentparadise forums for details). The tech support with SmithMicro is very bad, and generally one doesn't get any response. It is a slightly more stable upgrade to Poser 7, but was released prematurely. Perhaps this has to do with changing parent companies from e-frontier to SmithMicro.

Review of Smith Micro's Poser Pro

Well, at this juncture I've been working almost daily with this product, and thought it was high time I shared some of my impressions with other prospective customers/victims.

First of all, as a long-time software professional, I am quite aware of the complexities associated with 3D rendering, and the high demand on processing resources -- both memory and CPU. Even though I'm running a fairly capable machine (quad-core, 64-bit, 8Gig of ram, 2 - 1-terrabyte drives, Win XP-64, etc.), I am prepared to accept that complex 3D scene rendering will take some time. That said, what I DO NOT accept is the necessity for the program to outright refuse to render, or even LOAD some scenes, reporting "not enough memory to load texture map'! In software engineering terminology, this just indicates sloppy memory management. Even after researching the issues, tweaking the render settings, running a 3rd-party memory management utility -- the problem persists.

Perhaps even harder to excuse is the generally brittle nature of the package. It regularly becomes necessary to resort to ctl-alt-del, bring up the program manager, find the process, and use the "kill process tree" command to get rid of the hung application, and then start the whole process over from the start, often losing work in the process.

Then, of course, there are the incessant "An unexpected exception occurred: -50" messages. Once again, ctrl-alt-del, etc., is the only way to proceed.

Don't even bother looking in the event manager, or searching for a log that might explain the source of the problem. The Poser "engineers" apparently considered such niceties as superfluous.

Interestingly, it's often possible (and necessary) to load a scene that Poser Pro refuses to accept by using Poser 7! I can then eliminate some elements, save the file, and reload back into Poser Pro. Did someone decide it was necessary to introduce some additional bugs into the flagship package.?

I also have a strong suspicion that the program suffers from some severe memory leaks. If you monitor memory usage, you'll see that, regardless of the nature of the scene, memory usage just keeps on increasing, until, inevitably -- that's right: ctrl-alt-del.

The thing that amazes me most, is the proliferation of gushing reviews of this shoddy piece of . . . programming. Are the reviewers on Smith Micro's payroll? Have they done any more with it than render a quick naked woman, gawk over it, and then write: "WOW, what a GREAT product!"?

There are, of course, so many other annoying quirks as to defy enumeration here. Suffice it to say, that this is an extremely irritating program with which to work.

Smith Micro touts this as a "professional package," an utterly absurd assertion. It's quality is such that I might overlook the bugs in a freeware package, but certainly not in something costing nearly five-hundred bucks. Oh well, there's a sucker born every minute.

Now, as someone who has watched my own company's profits eroded by software piracy, I am generally opposed to such abuses, however, in cases like this, my advice is to acquire the product from someplace like Emule, or Vuse, or other torrent servers, use it for a while, and if you still think it's worth the asking price, then by all means, write that check. Otherwise, just use it at a cost that's precisely what it's worth: $0.

I think I have a pretty high tolerance for software that requires a tough learning curve or is challenging to use. You have to be like that if you are into graphics for film and games. But for some reason Poser just irks me more than the others. I hate having to installer power, then go to their website and figure out how to download and install the "rest" of poser. Then to go to yet another website to download enough content to make poser useful. Then to realize that this content is completely undocumented and often is plagued with problems. And on and on. Like someone else said, this whole product has very much a "freeware" type of feel, and that is not a compliment. Just a whole lack of polish and professionalism seems to surround this product in every facet making it very frustrating to own and use.

I really can't recommend it, although I'm kind of stuck for recommending an alternative. Oh well.

Poser Pro expands on Poser 7's basic framework, with some useful added features that seem targeted to saving time or getting Poser figures into other places, like Max, Maya, Cinema 4D or Lightwave.

Time savers include network rendering, which I use all the time. I set-up a scene and want to test lighting for instance; I set it to network render, even if it's just to my local computer, then I continue working on the scene. For large finished scenes, I send the final rendering to network render on an second computer and manage it to render when I want, like once I'm done for night - I set a bunch of images to render and wake up to check the results. I like background rendering as well, but honestly prefer the network rendering application they include with Pro.

Poser Pro also includes COLLADA export of the figure, it's rigging, and some animated data. I've met professionally with the folks behind COLLADA and they are very pleased with how robust Poser Pro supports their 3D character specification. That's innovation in my book. Be aware though - COLLADA is a little like the wild west still, with lots of partial implementations, and non-optimized content, so it may work flawlessly sometimes and less so others.

On the render engine side - Poser 7 only renders in 32 bit mode, which limits how much system RAM you can use on your machine (3GB max on XP) Poser Pro includes a 64 bit render engine that can use unlimited amounts of RAM (whatever you have installed and available), when running in a 64 bit environment. This sounds like a good thing for 64 bit system owners with lots of RAM.

Poser Pro also lists some image quality features like Gamma Correction. I don't need my rendered images to comply with an exact gamma value. If you need Gamma Control you know it, and Poser Pro supports it.

Poser Pro also introduces something pretty revolutionary - distribution free figures. How's that work? They included some raw figures which can be customized using their included face room or morph brushes (or better yet: Z-brush), and they've permitted the figures to be freely distributed. This means you can edit them, morph them, mod them and then resell them royalty free, prototype with them, give them away, even develop and distribute garage game content like the Jon and the folks at [...] are doing.

Based on Poser 7's overall four star review, I'm holding firm with that number. The two reviews above seem out of line on the face of it. Poser Pro is basically Poser 7, but more stable, working on more modern hardware, with some realworld time saving features and acting as a portal to get basic 3D figures into the four most popular 3D production tools on the market.

AS for SMSI tech support? I spent a half hour on the phone talking with a tech support guy that worked through a graphics card driver issue with me (my card, my driver) and then helped me understand how their IBL (Image Based Lighting) light system worked, and how to set up images to use for those lights. And physically, he was sitting right next to the engineers in California, no off-shoring! Yay!

Is Poser Pro perfect? Nope. There are some things I'd love to see improved. But does it do the job? Absolutely. Solidly. Four stars. There you have it.

Mr. Rigger.

I know, I know. "If you don't use Maya you're not a real animator." Whatever. I HATE modeling, and Maya and 3ds Max are just FOR modeling. So what if you just want to animate bipeds that you can customize? Poser is perfect. I can get the look of the characters that I want (from old witch, young Goblin, or a prince) and animate them. In addition, you can import mocap files (which I love) and have dynamic clothes and hair (or custom strand based hair), all of which moves with the character. My images are just as good as any Maya character, and produced in half the time.

GO POSER!

:)

I'm aware of the difficulties of learning Poser. And there are times where it just loves to crash.

But I give it 5 stars because of how valuable it is to me in my workflow and it is the only software I know of that
I can use the way I do. I'm talking about Poser 7 / Poser Pro (not Poser 8+).

I'll list a few reasons why I like this software for animation:
-Super easy to apply bvh mocap data to your characters
-Build-in IK/FK switches for hands and feet! This alone drastically makes animating characters easier.
-The library system is amazing for making use of previously used animations
-The Animation Palette (where keyframe are viewable on a grid) allows you to see and edit everything in a way I have not seen pro 3D apps do

The things I don't like, but have learned to not let it bother my flow:
-No way to scale keyframes
-Graph Editor is tricky to navigate (opening/closing it fixes the view if there are keys that go too high or low out of view)
-Slow Firefly renderer...but in most cases Preview renders are more than enough for my type of work.

Overall, despite its flaws and limitations, what you see is what you get (words of a friend).

And...most people probably don't know how far Poser can go as it's so underused. The absolute best example of what can
be done with Poser is Monty Oum's work. If you've never heard of him, you need to seriously check out his movies.
Google search Monty Oum, Dead Fantasy, or Haloid and you should have no problem finding something impressive.

Another thing is, there are not many resources for advanced animation with Poser. Everything I've read only covers the basics.
Maybe there is something out there I'm not aware of. If it weren't for Monty Oum I probably would have never ventured into
sing this product. He has opened my eyes to how valuable and efficient it can be.

Well, that's about all I can think of. Good luck on your search for animation software.

This is a great product. Still learning how to use it. it's a little difficult to use, but because I have no clue not the product. The seller was nice a very good experince I would buy from them again.