Category Archives: Spotted in the News

The third-party P3DO Organizer Poser library (May 2020) now has a November 2020 fix for use with Poser 12 Early Access.

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.

Poser 12 Early Access is now available on Windows, here, as a Trial and a purchase for Poser 11 owners. The Trial can apparently run happily alongside your existing Poser 11.x.

New items of information on the new pages are:

* SuperFly rendering (the Poser equivalent of iRay) is now based on Blender’s Cycles 1.12 (it’s possible they mean 1.2?) Forum chat suggests this upgrade breaks some of the materials in old Superfly materials/shaders sets and skins.

* Inclusion of “Intel OIDN, an A.I. based image denoising system” for SuperFly. The SuperFly ray tracing support and Adaptive Sampling had already been announced. It appears that the denoising is located in the UI on the… “New post effects palette for denoise and more.” The palette’s other ‘post’ effects are said to be only basic items like Saturation, at present, though there will presumably be more and more artistic ones in due course. Though I suspect we’re not going to get a full in-Poser multipass compositing engine, working in tandem with repeatable automation.

* New Material Management tab, which had previously been announced but for which we now have a screenshot…

* “HiveWire3D’s Dawn, Dusk, Baby Luna, Gorilla, and HiveWire3D’s Horse all feature SuperFly materials.” Which I assume they didn’t have before. They’re found in the freebies bundle. No news of any additions of new figures to this freebies bundle. There is also a new automated content-installer feature, but you can still install the old way via manually unpacking .ZIP files and then a careful cut-paste into your runtime. I assume that the L’Femme and L’Homme base figures are also still in the big freebie bundle, and that their skin renders fine in the new SuperFly version. Presumably these flagship figures will still be the base versions of L’Femme and L’Homme, and not the paid-for Pro versions.

* “21-day full feature, free trial.” Windows 10 is specified, but forum talk suggests Poser 12 can run on Windows back to Windows 7.

* Importantly, note that this release is only Early Access and thus… “You must currently own a copy of Poser 11 to upgrade to Poser 12. Only valid licensed copies of Poser 11 are eligible for upgrade.” I assume this also applies to the Early Access Trial.

* Update: Apparently Poser 12 Early Access broke DAZ Hexagon export for Poser, re: the scale setting being a bit different than it was. TSoren on the forums suggests the following conversion numbers should work with Hexagon for Poser 12: “Poser [12] to Hexagon, export % value 26212.8 Hexagon to Poser [12], import % value 0.381493011048”.

So… version 12 is not getting me to stump up $130, at least as it stands in Early Access. Perhaps it will when “features are finalized” in December 2020, or at the first patch early in the New Year. At present it has some nice tweaks for the SuperFly photoreal and raytracing crowd, but nothing new for anyone who wants to use Poser’s unique non-photoreal features. Indeed the broken SuperFly skin/material shaders and the script-breaking move to Python 3 are active disincentives to upgrade, until things are fixed.

There are some good things though, simply by their absence — there’s been no big UI “makeover” and no move to a subscription payment basis.

A bit more official news on Poser 12 has been released.

* Poser 12’s SuperFly render-engine has had its Cycles render engine updated from Poser 11, to a more recent (unspecified) version of Blender’s Cycles. It’s still called SuperFly.

* Several new GPU rendering options have been added to SuperFly, and it will now support the NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine (for which you’ll need a suitable NVIDIA graphics card and a PC capable of running it — the entry-point graphics-card averages about £350 here in the UK). Some forum trolls will no doubt jump on this and use it to insinuate that users are being ‘forced’ to make expensive upgrades. That’s not the case, as SuperFly users can easily switch it over to use normal graphics-cards (NVIDIA or AMD) or to CPU-only rendering, like you can with DAZ’s equivalent iRay renderer.^1.

* Improved image quality via SuperFly integrating Cycles’s new “shadow catching and background transparency” features (with or without OptiX Ray Tracing, it seems). Plus “adaptive sampling” (i.e. it automatically detects ‘noisy’ areas of the picture, such as shadows-in-haze, and does a bit more rendering in those bits — so they’re less noisy on the final render).

* And there’s a firm release date for Poser 12 on Windows (Early Access version): Monday 2nd November 2020. At which point we’ll presumably get the full itemised feature-list and (hopefully) a complete detailed technical changelog.

1. There is a misleading claim made in the linked page, that DAZ iRay “only functions with NVIDIA hardware.” Not true, though NVIDIA do their very best to make you think that. I can run it quite happily on an AMD PC via CPU, or on a CPU-only Xeon workstation. The latter is fast enough, running only on the CPUs, to even give me a real-time main viewport of reasonable size and responsiveness.