Category Archives: Poser

I was asked “Why upgrade to the latest Early Access Poser 12.0.x ?” Good question.

Here are all the reasons I can find or think of:

* You want to try the new improved Blender Cycles version which has been plugged in, and which is branded in Poser 12 as SuperFly. This now has newer photoreal rendering nodes (too many to detail here, but “Principled BSDF” is the biggie) and other photoreal improvements. SuperFly now also does Ambient Occlusion. There was some early marketing confusion between “Cycles 1.2” and “Cycles 2”, but it is Cycles 2 in Poser 12.

* You want speed. “Adaptive Sampling” means faster SuperFly rendering on either CPUs and GPU. There are new tuned rendering presets for which take advantage of this. CPU renders with SuperFly should be twice as fast as before, as long as your preset’s bucket sizes are tuned to your PC’s capabilities. The same benefit (or probably more) should be seen when rendering with a GPU, depending on graphics card. “Adaptive Sampling” seems to translate to English as: “the renderer spends less time removing noise in the bright smooth or small-details parts of the picture, and more time on smoothing out the noisy shadows”.

* You want SuperFly renders to do what Firefly could always do — save renders as layers into a layered .PSD destined for Photoshop. Including z-buffer auxiliary render output such as a Z-Depth pass (used for quickly adding a depth haze to a scene, when in Photoshop).

* You work a lot with PNG cutouts and shadow layers. “SuperFly now does background transparency” and shadow catching aka shadowcatching, and has an Alpha node. These are apparently not GPU/OptiX graphics-card dependent.

* You want to try getting PBR materials into SuperFly. Apparently that’s now “really easy”, though I’ve yet to see an automated importer-script take advantage of that ease. I’m uncertain if using PBR materials might remove the 2x speed advantage gained with the the “adaptive sampling” rendering in SuperFly.

* You want to port some fabulous Cycles node layouts into Poser 12, including ones using the funky “Hair” nodes. 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.

* You have twin graphic cards. A Superfly render can now be done using multiple graphics cards, and twinning also works for the Render Queue. Apparently the cards don’t need to be identical.

* You want a built-in denoiser for quick-but-speckly renders. A menu easily adds new PostFX options such as “Denoising”, which is done fast and very nicely via Intel OIDN software rather than a graphics card. Apparently “Bloom” was set to be on the PostFX menu, but has not yet been added.

* You want to run Poser 11 and Poser 12 alongside each other. They can live happily side by side. Though I’m assuming here that the Poser 12 upgrade installer lets you keep your Poser 11 intact and doesn’t remove it. Just in case, you should make backups of vital 11 custom presets etc before install of either the main or upgrade Poser 12. I have a step-by-step guide for archiving the custom bits of Poser 11.

* You want a nicer Content Library experience. For instance, the “search/locate feature now jumps to the selected item, so the user no longer needs to scroll for it”. The Figure Hierarchy Window also has some nice changes to make it less fiddly, such as alt-click to completely open the list of all sub-parts of a figure.

* You’d like a nicer experience in the Advanced panel of the Materials Room. This Room now has “significant speed improvements when displaying texture previews”. Also a new “‘Replace All’ button in Texture Manager”, and “drag/drop of an image map, to replace an existing image map node”.

* You use the Walk Designer, which now supports “Poser 11 Figures”. So presumably La Femme etc. Not sure about the Hivewire Horse.

* You want a slightly improved real-time Comic Book render… “OpenGL Comic Book Preview: Last Draw checkbox option added to improve quality of geometric edge lines”.

* You want to test and tweak vital older Poser 11 Python scripts in Poser 12, so that they work in 12. Though note that the standard scripts that ship with Poser have already been updated to work with Poser 12. So has the important EZSkin script and SnapTo. However, it’s a huge drawback that many vital scripts (XA Toolbar, Scene Toy, Poser to Clip Studio, Rust-icator, the Poser Python Tools, Shaderworks Library, DSON etc) no longer work in version 12. XA Toolbar can at least be replaced by the Python Scripts panel used in perma-mode. SnapTo has a Poser 12 replacement.

* You want to see which Poser 11 scripts work in Poser 12 without any tweaking.

* You want to develop new Poser 12 scripts, taking advantage of the new Python 3 and the new Cycles nodes and suchlike.

* You want to use Pillow for scripted image processing in Python 3. Pillow “adds support for opening, manipulating, and saving images” in response to commands from a Python script. This has now been added in Poser 12.

* You could really use the new Python “method to find a parameter specifically by internal name”. Also, the scripted “Disconnect” node command is now available for more Material Room nodes than was the case in Poser 11.

* You want to get Poser 12 and its massive content bundle snail-mailed to you on a USB key. You can. Useful for those with dial-up in the wilds of Whereizitagin. You will have to be online to run it, though, as 12 ‘pings home’ occasionally.

* You’d like a SuperFly horse. The free content bundle has had the HiveWire figures updated for SuperFly rendering (Gorilla, Horse, Baby Luna etc).

* You or your studio need to use the latest .FBX export specifications for figures and props.

* * You or your studio need an External Library. It’s called Poser 11. They can both run at the same time. P11’s Library can then drag-drop to the P12 stage.

* You need Poser to support a certain type of graphics card not supported by Poser 11. Specifically some in the Nvidia RTX 30 series.

* You and or your boss or studio team need good documentation. As of December 2021 the Poser 12 manual now documents the new features in 12.x in a nice online Web manual. There was even a handy 108Mb PDF version (now vanished, it seems, though I have a copy). Poser 12 also ships with good documentation of the Python methods.

* You work with creatives in Japan, and they need a really good localisation of the software before switching to 12. By all accounts, the Japanese support in that respect is now excellent.

* You want to make a scene in Poser and easily open it in E-on Vue. Poser can still “speak Vue”, so far as I know. Meaning that a saved Poser 12 scene should still load fine in Vue. Untested, and possibly Vue may not cope well some some new-fangled souped-up SuperFly shader. It’s probably best to stick to tried and tested materials for a scene intended for Vue, which is highly tuned to auto-interpret Poser scene materials.

* You want to make Poser 12 content with DAZ Hexagon. Poser can apparently still work with DAZ Hexagon for export for Poser, but may just need new export settings: “Poser 12 to Hexagon, export % value 26212.8 | Hexagon to Poser 12, import % value 0.381493011048”.

* Other than these new things, you want Poser 12 to have the same features as Poser 11 had. It does, and I haven’t heard of anything being removed other than: 1) the “Partners” scripts (which may return. once Poser gets out of Early Access); 2) the “Combine Figures” menu item; 3) the Face Room (no loss); and 4) the official script to help you calculate Depth of Field (but there is now a free Poser 12 script to do DoF setup). Also, “Show Folder Thumbnails” doesn’t appear to work in P12, severely limiting the usability of the Library.

* Poser 12 can also open scene files saved with older versions, and should also be able to write saved scenes that can be opened with older version (this may change in the future). Drag and drop from the third-party Library software PzDB works. All your old Poser runtime content works, provided it was not dependent on some complex Python script. It’s a tried-and-tested UI that’s very well documented, and which old hands can pick up again quite easily.

* You don’t want to be “nickel and dimed”, pressured and tricked into add-ons and plugins that are actually vital to have to run the software. Poser is more or less “all in” as a complete one-time purchase package, with little left to buy other than your creatives figures and clothing.

Incidentally despite the misleading “Windows 10” claim on the specs, Poser 12 works fine on Windows 7 and up. Though be warned that, last I heard, paid script downloading/installing from the Renderosity Store was not working on Windows 7. Specifically the scripts would not activate (i.e. be registered with a serial number) in Windows 7 for some reason. I’m not sure if this problem has been fixed yet. If it requires some Microsoft encryption that’s only built into Windows 8/10/11 then it may never work on Windows 7? Just my guess.

That’s it. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything.