Smith Micro have just officially announced Poser Pro 2014, and they’ve even priced and dated it: 21st May 2013!
Here are the new features, with my comments on each:
* There’s a new Pro-version only “Fitting Room”… “to convert your existing clothing and props to fit any figure”. Useful, although third-party software such as CrossDresser (my review) already does that quite well and also works seamlessly for DAZ Studio too. Plus a related… “Morph Brush now supports Sag, Tighten and Loosen so clothing works better”. Poke-through, begone! Maybe.
* “Pixar Subdivision Surfaces for fast and efficient scene building” This means you can change the density of the surfaces on your model, by making the mesh looser or tighter. Looks like an on-the-fly polygon-reduction system, and one you can apply to any bit of a 3D model. Nice. Not sure how many times I’d use it. If I ever had a scene that heavy then I’d break it into background, foreground, character, and then composite their multiple renders together in Photoshop.
* “Bullet Physics for Soft Body Dynamics, Rigid Body and Hair.” Nice, for the small handful of serious Poser animators.
* A new “Comic Book Preview Mode” for color and B&W cartoon illustration and animation. A bit more on this one: “This feature will enable you to create comic art with fantastic line control and color, or clean black and white outlines with persistent shading even when rotating or animating your point of view.” Plus some new semi-toon characters which will ship with the software.
Sounds cool, especially if we can tweak it and can make share-able presets. The existing sketch mode in Poser can be made to produce rather nice effects. But I’ve yet to see a useful straight comic-book filter from any software, and I’ll be surprised if Poser 2014 manages to finally get it right.
* “Interactive Raytrace Preview.” Grainy real-time preview in a tiny window, but it looks really useful in terms of seeing what your render is actually going to look like, and as such could save a lot of time. Reducing the amount of wasted “fiddle-about-with-it time” can only be good, since that’s a real drawback in using DAZ Studio or Poser compared to iClone.
* “OpenGL Speed Optimization.” Nice. It was a bit sticky and slow, for me, so improvements are welcome. Not sure it’ll be as lovely-looking and responsive as DAZ Studio 3’s implementation of real-time Open GL, but we can hope.
And of course, the ever-present promise of faster rendering…
* “The Firefly render engine has been optimized for faster performance when Raytracing.”
So for me, the new version boils down to: it may render a bit faster, it has a useful real-time preview, and the comic-book filter might be cool. The real-time preview window looks like the must-have “killer feature”.
Anyway, judge for yourself. Here’s the official video for the new features of Poser Pro 2014…
“* “Pixar Subdivision Surfaces for fast and efficient scene building” This means you can change the density of the surfaces on your model, by making the mesh looser or tighter.”
Actually, this sounds like it’s Open Sub-Div, which is a new type of sub-d that Daz studio just added, which was developed by Pixar. As far as I know, Poser hasn’t had Sub-d before so this is a pretty cool thing for them, especially for people using Genesis (which requires Sub-D to look right), and for anyone wanting to use older, lower poly items that could use a little updating.
Ah, I see. Thanks Chance. So it intelligently adds polys as well as reduces them. Yes, that does sound useful for some older DAZ and Poser content, although it’s mostly the soupy textures that drag the old stuff down.