Here are just a few main details from the many given in Sunday’s key Poser 12 webinar. It went very well, and the upgraded “500 capacity” room was required as people continued to pour in.
Poser 12 SuperFly, based on Blender’s Cycles render engine:
“Adaptive Sampling” means that SuperFly is now stated to be “almost twice as fast on a CPU render”, provided you’re willing to do slight and fairly-easy tweaking of bucket sizes and other render settings (as was shown in the webinar. Doubtless there will soon be shared “ideal” render presets for CPU-only and cards on the forums, if there are not already). CPU users of adaptive sampling in Poser 12 will paradoxically see better results from quite small bucket sizes.
As is well-known from the forums, for GPU’s and for a further 2x speed boost in SuperFly you’ll need an NVIDIA 20 series RTX graphics card, or a NVIDIA Quadro card that supports RTX. Poser 12 should work with the new 30 series RTX, but they’re so rare that Renderosity has not yet been able to get hold of one to officially test.
The new SuperFly now supports Ambient Occlusion, and it was said that it can also render to a set of render-pass layers much like the Firefly renderer can.
The new Cycles also makes it “really, really easy” to set up a PBR material for Poser 12’s new SuperFly. Just export three layers from Substance Designer (or, presumably, 3D-Coat), and plug them in to the simple node setup (as shown in the webinar) inside Poser. Also, these PBR materials “will just look right” in Poser renders without much tweaking needed. Other Blender’s Cycles node setups can be easily ported over, once you know that Blender’s direction of node flow is a “mirror-reverse” of that used in Poser. However, it was highly recommended not to try to toon in SuperFly, and to instead use Poser’s excellent and real-time Comic Book mode.
The new SuperFly also has a Hair node, deceptively simple-looking but actually very complex in its own right, which can produce complex and “amazing” results. More neat new shader nodes for Cycles/SuperFly will be exposed in Poser 12 in due course.
Intel OIDN Denoising of quick renders is software based, and is not graphics card dependent.
Scripts:
As is very well-known from the forums, the move to Python 3 has broken many old PoserPython scripts, but these are getting fixed. DAZ’s DSON importer for DAZ Genesis 1 and 2 is broken, but such old Genesis figures can still be imported as .CR2 (or, I would add, poly-reduced static posed .OBJ for more wieldiness and which can also do Genesis 3 and 8).
Runtimes:
Also well-known from the forums, there’s a new integrated method of installing purchases via the Library, but you can still do it the old way via .ZIP files. And downloadable .ZIP files for content will still be available on the Renderosity Store.
Yes, you can still have all sorts of weird and wonderful locations for your Runtime. If your Poser Runtime is safely stored in a cave on the Moon, and you access it via infra-red radar pulses, just so long as it has a mapped drive-letter on your network… then Poser is sure to see it.
Windows/Mac:
Yes, it’s common knowledge now that you can run Poser 12 and Poser 11 side-by-side. Yes, it can install and run fine on Windows 7 and 8, even though the official store specs are for “Windows 10”. Yes, the Mac version is coming.
Update: Yes, forum reports say Poser 11 and 12 have been tested on the new ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS and both run fine.
Others:
There were also a lot of special “reveals” and hints about what’s set to be added to Poser 12 in due course, but it’s not fair to list those here. Of those I’ll only note that Bloom is to be added to the Post Effects tab, thus enabling Glow. Glow can already be done natively in Poser Firefly with an atmosphere and a point light, even with an emulated emissive spillover, but has severe limitations. There are also SuperFly glow materials. But I’m guessing this Cycles node may be more controllable and have less need to interact with other stuff?
Renderosity’s trailer-page for the webinar had mentioned “new Geometric Edge Lines for Comic mode” and “new lighting: area lights and caustics”, but those were not shown this time around.
Poser can still “speak Vue” and thus presumably send a scene to Vue. The currently subscription Vue still supports Poser scene imports.
Nearly all of the new stuff other than the new SuperFly update appears to be “as well as” rather than “a replacement for”. Check out the free Trial version of Poser 12 Early Access to re-assure yourself that your favourite bit is still in there.
So, steady progress and it’s looking very positive for the probable December release on Windows and Mac, and even now looks especially nice on photoreal render speeds. Congratulations to the team for more or less sticking to the schedule, even during the lockdowns and changes re: Macs and Python.
Glad to hear confirmation that Poser 12 will run on Windows 7. When I first read the official specs that it needed Win10, I basically was prepared to walk away from Poser completely and fully move over to Blender instead. You’ll not get me to use Win 10 anytime in this century.
Yes, same here, I want nothing to do with the giant disaster-zone that is Windows 10 – ever. It’s annoying when software states just “Windows 10”, but it will actually run fine on Windows 7 and 8. As you suggest, it also puts 30% of potential users right off buying the software, so it’s a big sales depressant too.
I’m not sure if Bondware realizes that Win10 isn’t popular among many artist types (my brother also won’t install Win10 on his computer citing it as a giant piece of spyware from MS) and will definitely affect sales.
Disappointed that there was no news on comic book-related features like geometric edge lines. A huge improvement there might get me to finally upgrade from Poser 2012. Really what they need is to implement even more AI features like style transfer that turns 3d renders into real comic book (or other styles) of art, stuff that makes the novice artist go “wow, I gotta buy this”.
At this point, the only thing stopping me from jumping ship to Blender is the daunting user interface and learning curve. But Blender is free and constantly gets new kickass features, I don’t see how Poser is going to compete against that with its pricetag. Or against Character Creator, if one can afford to dive into its eco system.
“finally upgrade from Poser 2012”. At the current price of just $80 from Neowin Deals, I’d strongly recommend Poser 11 Pro and its real-time Comic Book mode.