Poser 11 Standard is 20% off at Renderosity (offer ends 17th Jan), at $159. And the plugin Reality 4.2 (updated for Poser 11) is currently 30% off at the maker’s website, at $34.95.
Reality allows the use of newer AMD graphics cards (DAZ’s iRay and Poser’s SuperFly can only use NVIDIA cards) and also allows you to ‘render in background’, so you can continue to use Poser while the render is running. So if you’re someone who runs a powerful new AMD graphics card, and you need to keep working in Poser while the renders are running, then Reality 4 at a mere $35 seems like a pretty good investment. Reality 4 can also run on the AMD GPU and the main CPU at the same time.
For artists without a powerful new NVIDIA graphics card or a Microsoft Kinect, and with no hankering to create sale-able content, the differences between Standard and Pro versions of Poser 11 are basically:
* No FBX import/export.
* Can’t use HDR to light your scenes.
* Can’t have Firefly render as a ‘Render In Background’ process.
* Can’t export a render as a .PSD Photoshop file, with layers including a masked z-depth pass.
Standard has the real-time Comic Book Mode, which many comic book artists and illustrators will find is worth the $159 all on its own…
