Well, I had high hopes for Poser 12. But when it appeared that the materials didn't work in Superfly, I thought forget it. This is no where near a commercial release, and indeed that was the impression Bondware gave. Well done for all those prepared to pay to beta test this beast.

I thought, I'll wait to Ezskin is released for Poser 12 once they figure out proper skin and material settings. Still waiting and it's April. So how much longer until these guys figure it all out do you think ? Love to buy Poser 12 really.

"But when it appeared that the materials didn't work in Superfly"

SOME older materials don't work in Superfly because they removed the jerry rigged solutions to make Firefly stuff render in the Cycles-based Superfly. We have new nodes for Superfly too, including some that make it much easier to convert older materials. IMO, things are rendering much more beautifully.

Other than that, well... ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I can't really say much other than that they're working nonstop on the thing. I keep P11 installed just so I can use older plugins, but apart from that I'm only using P12 these days (specially as P11 can't recognize my GPU so I'm stuck rendering on CPU there, which is much slower, and P12 has Optix rendering on top of that so... yeah I get render times of a couple of minutes whereas in P11 I'd have to leave it rendering the whole day)

Guess it will stay beta for over a year :) same did Poser 11.3 it never got out of beta , never got finished ! you might get lucky if Poser 13 Beta comes out before the final release of poser 12 or could be that the final release of 12 will just be 13" .... In the whole Poser history never it happen that there were so many Lies

They also said for over a year on Poser 11.2 up " We are working on it " ... " SM Messed UP " ... " SM Placed the Kill Switch " ... " SM Shut down 11.1 and 2014 Game Dew " Well People are just Naive and hope Dies Last !

Skin looks just fine in Poser 12. I'm using EZSkin settings from ShareCG like I've posed a million times. I don't think Snarly has ezskin sorted out yet but that is totally separate from Poser development. I never settle on final settings from the script anyway and tweak each character by hand in the mats room after. If I really need to run a skin through EZSkin I'll open the file up in 11 first and do all the ezskin stuff there but most of the time I just use and existing mat I've saved and change out the textures.

@qaz and @Azalh

You are right: Poser 12 is so frustrating, so deseperately disappointing, si deep in beta...

For example, you may play with a hundred objects, and materials, loading, deleting, reloading, changing, hours long, without saving, without a single crash... I can't find the words...

Furthermore, EZSkin3's Superfly mats look so aweful, especially if you lower the specularity and use PoserSufrace nodes to render:

And it's almost worst when using the new Cycles 2 nodes:

And worst of all... 2'50" on a 2 years old RTX2080 @35 pixels per samples... Can't find the words...

Oh Yes! I'm really happy with P12... definitely ??

I have to give you right Poser Is a great Programm it at least was !!!

PP 2014 i7 2ond gen Render time between 15 seconds to 40 seconds

same as Above !

Now there is just to Hope that they keep the quality and the Speed the was it was , were not talking about Minutes, about Hours , we talk about seconds with a reasonable result not having a High end machine .

I wonder what has gotten better and faster with visible quality throughout the past 7 years !

I'm not saying you can't get some reasonable results by playing around for ages.

I have been using Superfly solely for years now. All my many characters do not work currently in Poser 12. So yes I'm going to have to change the skin and material settings for all of them. That's a hell of a lot of work. The problem is that it appears that people are still playing around with settings without yet coming to a reasonable common standard. I'm only going to do this once. That was the beauty of Ezskin.

Have Bondware completed the bugs associated with correctly implementing Cycles ? I haven't heard from them in months.

Azath posted at 10:10AM Sat, 03 April 2021 - #4416111

I have to give you right Poser Is a great Programm it at least was !!!

Now there is just to Hope that they keep the quality and the Speed the was it was , were not talking about Minutes, about Hours , we talk about seconds with a reasonable result not having a High end machine .

I wonder what has gotten better and faster with visible quality throughout the past 7 years !

SM implemented Cycles V1, quite a few awesome things. Then they stopped for whatever reasons and wait... what? Everybody still wonders...

I've lost the number of buyers, I just remember curiouslab, metacreations (or was it metacreations and then curioslab?), corel, smithmicro. Always the same: a few steps, great for some, and stop and wait or sell... Bondware bought Poser, and they added Cycles V2, quite a few enhancements, you can read this thread, and this one for example,

They added speed, thanks to a new approach (for Poser): "Adaptative Sampling w/threshold). When I compare the very same scene user Poser 11 and Poser 12: using the classic Geforce it has doubled the speed, and using the RTX mode it's twice faster than the GeForce mode, sometimes more, sometimes less than 2x the speed.

And I'm going to repeat like many others: yes a lot of addons, python based, are broken. The jump to python 3.x was mandatory, as python 2.x is dead 2 years ago. But still, they made the choice to use only python 3.7, just because Apple refuses to advance in this domain...

That being said, and as I've show before: use your P11, or a previous version, lower the Superfly Specularity, save the mats, and reload it in your P12 and it'll work.

The program is still in Beta, yes. But Bondware has published 8 updates since last Christmas, and as far as I remember, that's in 4 months a lot more that all the SmithMicro years... Just give them the time. And Lately, we had to wait a full month just to let Bondware publish a very first Mac preview, which is is still not stable, and far more difficult to implement given the Apple way to do business...

qaz posted at 10:27AM Sat, 03 April 2021 - #4416112

I'm not saying you can't get some reasonable results by playing around for ages.

I have been using Superfly solely for years now. All my many characters do not work currently in Poser 12. So yes I'm going to have to change the skin and material settings for all of them. That's a hell of a lot of work. The problem is that it appears that people are still playing around with settings without yet coming to a reasonable common standard. I'm only going to do this once. That was the beauty of Ezskin.

Have Bondware completed the bugs associated with correctly implementing Cycles ? I haven't heard from them in months

.They are still correcting bugs, yes: it's still a preview. but Cycles is better than before. The 2nd picture I've shown before is created using Cycles V2, and its new PrincipledBSDF. Other bugs have been corrected, too, for example the AnisotropicBSDF was broken, now it works. For a time, Poser was unable to handle correctly HDRi, now you can look at Ghostship's example: an HDRi bitmap correctly connected to the Background node and you'll get an awesome lighting of your scene.

And EZSkin can still be used, with P11, and the Superfly Specularity lowered (look at my first Elf, in the previous example). And if you use Cycles with EZSkin: the same rule apply: lower the specularity. It's as if it was wrong before and more correct now. Or maybe more sensitive.

Personally I do not mind Updates Upgrades it can be useful for many things. But when looking at the whole story that from a working poser 11.1 it just went into a 11.2 beta with already a broken pyton engine and many other things that gotten removed , that never got out of Beta , just got dropped , this does not show allot of strength . Considering that all started in august 2019 One year and never fixed before Poser 12 Beta came out , after all the release of Poser 12 Beta was almost a half year ago , so we are in the 2ond year of Beta that is not really realistic !

Sure If you are experienced with Poser it is a great thing you can fix the stuff your self that you Purchase, but where are all the Pro's now ?! the ones who made all the great modeling and Pyton scripts !?

Just a simple strategy would of Prevented such disasters. Would of Bondware and Smithmicro worked together and removed the call home in Poser 11.1, 11.2 - 3, and 2014 Game Dew they would of had allot more success and would of kept allot of users over the Globe! But well control fanatics always get what they deserve. They could of left the Call Home on Poser 12 . Users would of gotten trust Creators would of been motivated to make more releases for Poser attracting more customers.

Creators would of had a Working essential Pyton engine for creations and would of also been motivated to learn using poser 12 , but no instead they just excused there moves saying " It was Smith Micro " kicking out allot of valuable Creators and Members " Trying to make em Mouth Dead " .

Good moves would not of shown weakness, it would of shown strength and a will to bring Poser back up on feet.

qaz posted at 6:23PM Sat, 03 April 2021 - #4416112

I have been using Superfly solely for years now. All my many characters do not work currently in Poser 12.

If you are already using Cycles or PhysicalSurface shaders, you may just need to 1) remove ambient occlusion anywhere you still have it, and 2) replace any Roughness value with the square root of that value.

There are more issues if you were using PoserSurface shaders.

Azath posted at 12:39PM Sun, 04 April 2021 - #4416132

Personally I do not mind Updates Upgrades it can be useful for many things. But when looking at the whole story that from a working poser 11.1 it just went into a 11.2 beta with already a broken pyton engine and many other things that gotten removed , that never got out of Beta , just got dropped , this does not show allot of strength . Considering that all started in august 2019 One year and never fixed before Poser 12 Beta came out , after all the release of Poser 12 Beta was almost a half year ago , so we are in the 2ond year of Beta that is not really realistic !

Sure If you are experienced with Poser it is a great thing you can fix the stuff your self that you Purchase, but where are all the Pro's now ?! the ones who made all the great modeling and Pyton scripts !?

Just a simple strategy would of Prevented such disasters. Would of Bondware and Smithmicro worked together and removed the call home in Poser 11.1, 11.2 - 3, and 2014 Game Dew they would of had allot more success and would of kept allot of users over the Globe! But well control fanatics always get what they deserve. They could of left the Call Home on Poser 12 . Users would of gotten trust Creators would of been motivated to make more releases for Poser attracting more customers.

Creators would of had a Working essential Pyton engine for creations and would of also been motivated to learn using poser 12 , but no instead they just excused there moves saying " It was Smith Micro " kicking out allot of valuable Creators and Members " Trying to make em Mouth Dead " .

Good moves would not of shown weakness, it would of shown strength and a will to bring Poser back up on feet.

Don't forget that SM really slowed down with Poser 11: V11.2 was released in 2019-09-20 and V11.3 in 2020-02-06: 4 months later. Something like 10 months later, Bondware has already released at least 8 versions of Poser 12, in 4 months. Furthermore, Python 2.7, used by Poser 11.x, was officially stopped on January 1st, 2020, , whereas this Python was slated to be retired in 2015! One can really wonder if SM had one day ever planned to follow Python's life... Just as a reminder: Python3 started in 2006.

I've dived in my archives, and I've found that the PDFs installed with Poser Game Dev, which corresponds to the last Poser 10, date from March 6th, 2015. And That means that Poser 11.0 should already have been planned to use the Python 3... And If I look for files that date from 2006, I retrieve a lot in... Poser 7.

Now, Bondware doesn't any choice: upgrade to 3.x. And only the 3.7 because of Apple...

I guess that SM already realized that upgrading to Pyton 3.7 would mean a Downgrade for Poser due the loss of a decade of Pyton scripts meant to support the Poser users and creators. It does not mean that New is better " New " in the Industry just represents a Income. We all know that In New there is often a quality loss.

People are like this , You been told it is New and you believe it is better , you take it without even the consideration that your old might be good enough by just obeying on the acts of the Industrials weather justified or not , weather right or not .

It is always Placed this way ! There was no Choice ! All the Poser users had no choice as the activations got killed, Bondware Had a choice and took the decision to hit the switch. It is easy to blame others for your acts but does it make it right that all who bought Poser 11.1 Poser game Dev just got turned Off even that we Payed for it ?

Like I said People just believe in what is told, even apple could shut down all I-Pones in the whole World by hitting an Enter Key. And no one would say a word about it .

Azath posted at 5:20AM Mon, 05 April 2021 - #4416222

I guess that SM already realized that upgrading to Pyton 3.7 would mean a Downgrade for Poser due the loss of a decade of Pyton scripts meant to support the Poser users and creators. It does not mean that New is better " New " in the Industry just represents a Income. We all know that In New there is often a quality loss.

People are like this , You been told it is New and you believe it is better , you take it without even the consideration that your old might be good enough by just obeying on the acts of the Industrials weather justified or not , weather right or not .

It is always Placed this way ! There was no Choice ! All the Poser users had no choice as the activations got killed, Bondware Had a choice and took the decision to hit the switch. It is easy to blame others for your acts but does it make it right that all who bought Poser 11.1 Poser game Dev just got turned Off even that we Payed for it ?

Like I said People just believe in what is told, even apple could shut down all I-Pones in the whole World by hitting an Enter Key. And no one would say a word about it .

Note that I totally understand and respect your point of view.

But: different actors, different methods, differents decisions, such as controlling the customers or not, etc...

You may find some ineresting points in this blog: why the jump from Python 2 to Python 3, and why Python 3 has been made incompatible. One of the reasons is a problem I've been confronted almost every day. I'm speaking French, English isn't natural at all for me. And we have more letters than English. It's the same for numerous languages around the world. And definitely, managing unicode with Python 2.x has been a nightmare... Another important reason is the way data is handled internally.

The Python Foundation didn't decided this huge step to lock customers, they had no choice, whereas Apple is constantly locking and controlling their customers.

I am a Python developer, on Odoo, an Open Source ERP partially written using Python, and partially using Javascript as the client part runs in all major browsers. And the transition between Python versions pushed my company to rewrite everything, too. And definitely, the new code is simpler, more elegant, more efficient.

I try to assume positive intent, did my research, had no issue with understanding why the Python needed to be updated... just wish the script updates were possible faster. The fact that the previous owner left Poser languishing now hinders Bondware in a major way, in my opinion.

Rhia474 posted at 12:53PM Mon, 05 April 2021 - #4416233

The fact that the previous owner left Poser languishing now hinders Bondware in a major way, in my opinion.

I agree with you Rhia. It's unfortunate, but Bondware got a real mess dumped in their lap, and it's also unfortunate it's going to take a longer time than expected, to get it all sorted out.

WOW! She's....awesome. Terrific render!

ghostship2 posted at 5:59PM Mon, 05 April 2021 - #4416100

Skin looks just fine in Poser 12. I'm using EZSkin settings from ShareCG like I've posed a million times. I don't think Snarly has ezskin sorted out yet but that is totally separate from Poser development. I never settle on final settings from the script anyway and tweak each character by hand in the mats room after. If I really need to run a skin through EZSkin I'll open the file up in 11 first and do all the ezskin stuff there but most of the time I just use and existing mat I've saved and change out the textures.

Y-Phil posted at 5:33PM Wed, 21 April 2021 - #4416183

Don't forget that SM really slowed down with Poser 11: V11.2 was released in 2019-09-20 and V11.3 in 2020-02-06: 4 months later. Something like 10 months later, Bondware has already released at least 8 versions of Poser 12, in 4 months.

Poser 11 had a pretty rough life, they had a great team create it (giving us the original and almost seamless SuperFly that allowed you to pretty much pop any previous Poser object in it and just have it work.) Then shortly after the release of Poser 11 Smith Micro discovered how cheap offshore dev teams could be and promptly fired the whole Poser 11 team. The new team then spent most of Poser 11's life learning how it even worked before Smith Micro then sold it off to Bondware.

CobraBlade posted at 1:29AM Thu, 22 April 2021 - #4417433

Y-Phil posted at 5:33PM Wed, 21 April 2021 - #4416183

Don't forget that SM really slowed down with Poser 11: V11.2 was released in 2019-09-20 and V11.3 in 2020-02-06: 4 months later. Something like 10 months later, Bondware has already released at least 8 versions of Poser 12, in 4 months.

Poser 11 had a pretty rough life, they had a great team create it (giving us the original and almost seamless SuperFly that allowed you to pretty much pop any previous Poser object in it and just have it work.) Then shortly after the release of Poser 11 Smith Micro discovered how cheap offshore dev teams could be and promptly fired the whole Poser 11 team. The new team then spent most of Poser 11's life learning how it even worked before Smith Micro then sold it off to Bondware.

And it's something that I've seen with many softwares, almost each time when the company which owns it decided to outsource...

"And it's something that I've seen with many softwares, almost each time when the company which owns it decided to outsource..."

Ouch.

I still have the scars from when a then-well-respected and, IMHO, very versatile home-design program needed to re-compile its core code for bigger memory handling. Their off-shore Devs refused to 'play nice', the title was switched to a new 'engine' with a very different 'look & feel', which was not back-compatible with prior plan-files... Yeah, that was my Medieval-ish mega-project trashed...