Release: Poser 14.0

Poser 14 is now available.

Price-cut: $100 upgrade or $175 new, which effectively means a round $200 after you’ve added one of Ken’s vital scripts from the Renderosity store. Though bear in mind that going to a new version usually means that the old version pops up at Graphixly (Clip Studio’s store) for sub $30 after Christmas. Graphixly still have Poser 12 for $29 there at present, but it’ll be interesting to see if that’s replaced by Poser 13 in 2026.

No ‘3D to AI rendering’ integration, sadly. And also, it’s not a big “wow-gosh!!” feature-packed release. But, let’s give the devs credit for what they have done. Looking down the release notes for 14.0, this is what catches my eye…

* A “new Render default”, and new matching startup scenes for beginners. (A nice touch, for newbies).

* A load of fixes and updates for the Background picture / sphere / video / dome features. (Apparently it’s much easier now, to deal with backgrounds).

* A bunch of problems fixed in the Materials Room, and several workflow improvements there.

* “Removed Cloth Room until we can replace with modern, open-source alternative lib”. (So it sounds like that was removed for licence expiration reasons? No great loss for me, and I guess people on Windows can always use the Room in an earlier version. Though presumably older “dynamic clothing” now won’t work in Poser 14? Not that there was much of it, compared to the mass of dForce stuff for DAZ Studio).

* SuperFly PostFX Denoise is now set to “On” by default. (This is the excellent Intel OIDN denoiser, which effectively cuts render times. I assume this is now the latest version of OIDN?).

* FBX and Collada [export] added back to the File Import/Export menus. (A copy of Poser 11 is still required for integration with the free E-on Vue, and thus access to Vue’s wealth of robust export options for imported Poser scenes).

* GLTF format added to Import/Export. (GLTF is yet another attempt at a universal 3D scene export-import package. Possibly useful if it makes it easier to load a GLTF in ComfyUI, for AI ‘rendering’? By “easier” I mean easier to load it into a large viewport and easily navigate the scene. Though sadly everyone in AI-land seems utterly bedazzled by “2D Img to 3D”, and the huge value in doing precise “3D to Img” is all but ignored).

* “Optix now requires Nvidia RTX 581.” (Don’t panic, they mean the 581.xx Nvidia graphics driver, not that Poser 14’s Optix only works with 50-series cards).

* “Tkinter fixed and now available in included version of Python.” (Sounds good, as this is used to make easy graphical user-interfaces for Python scripts. Possibly this is one of the benefits of ditching Mac support, as I seem to recall that Tkinter was banned from Macs?).

* Various fixes for Cycles Principled BSDF, Cycles. Easier setup of PBR materials. CUDA updated to v12.9.1. Apparently includes the latest LTS Blender Cycles (aka Poser SuperFly), though not the very-very latest Blender 5.0 cycles. Because Blender 5.0 and Poser 14.0 were released in the same week.

* SuperFly rendering can now output a Z-depth pass, which had been broken. (A useful fix).

* Animation render no longer freezes after opening a .PZ3 file. (Another useful fix).

* Added the ‘Perspective’ dial to Dolly Camera. Dolly Camera fixes. (The Perspective dial being very useful for comic-book style foreshortening effects, so some may welcome this).

* Support for the new Intel ARC graphic-cards.

* From third-party developers, I see that EZSkin is already updated to support Poser 14.

* One forum report suggests that the ability to do a no-fuss Windows 7 install has finally gone, with this new version. Previous versions installed fine on Windows 7, though 7 lacks the encryption modules needed to run paid-for scripts from the Renderosity store.

So…. just barely enough to justify the leap to 14.0, if you also consider the price drop. But it could have been so much more, especially in terms of seamless and reliable AI rendering.

Yet I guess we should be thankful they didn’t transition to a naff Web-only version with Firefly ripped out, backwards compatibility thrown overboard, and a doomed pitch for an annual subscription. It could have been so much worse.

As usual, there’s a free 21-day trial so you can test it out for yourself.