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Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation.

User Reviews about Poser 8

I love this program, but I feel I have to mention that when they say you can "easily create 3D character art and animation," that that's a bit of a misnomer. For me there was a long learning curve, but it was worth it. The interface doesn't get in the way of your creation and that's good. The program doesn't hog up my computer and that's good, too.

I've had the program for a couple months now and worked with it for maybe a half hour on average every day and now I feel that I'm well on my way into being a novice. There is plenty of help for you online and I needed it. I'm pretty jealous of the people who said they were able to "get" the program after of week of messing around with it, because that certainly wasn't the case with me.

But I've had a lot of fun with Poser and I can see that if you're into 3D animation that this would be a good program for you. I'll never use this professionally and I never would have purchased it for myself, but I was lucky enough to get a review copy and I have to say it's turning into a pretty good hobby for me. -- Poser is Turning 3d Animation into a Pretty Good Hobby for Me

I have experience with both Poser 4 and 7, so I know the typical ways Poser is treated and supported by it's creators. Rather than give a "It's great/ it sucks" review, I'll show you what I feel are the pros and cons compared to my experience in past versions.

The short version: Works just as well as past Poser programs. If you're new and willing to learn, buy a 'how to' book and you will love it. If you're an old pro, this iteration will treat you just as well as it's predecessors, plus new shiny things to play with.


Pros:
--Updated UI allows for better freedom with new functionality to windows by 'floating them'. Floated windows overlap so you can devote more real estate on screen to what you need.

--Newer content and along with the older 'freebies' that have come with Poser through the ages.

--Faster renders

--Handles ERC/Easypose enabled figures better than 7.

I will state right now that I have not come anywhere near using the full capabilities of Poser 8 yet, but the aforementioned Pros stand out the best to me. And now, the...

Cons:
--MASSIVE resource hog results in slower performance the longer the program runs/more the program renders. Cache clearing does not seem to do much to remedy this problem. Clearing the undo cache helps a bit and closing/restarting Poser helps a bit more. Restarting your PC works best.

--Simply dragging items/folders from my old library into the new seems to have corrupted several files. While Poser 8 continues to recognize and attempt to use them, I have had to reinstall several DAZ 3D products in order to get proper functionality. Most common corruption has been geometries responding strangely to morph injections... either auto-scaling during application or deactivating all other morphs on injection while keeping morph values active.

--UI does take some getting used to. Small personality quirks in the system can sometimes cause frustration (after zooming, attempting to pan the camera causes it to zoom. you actually need to double click the pan to get Poser 8 to recognize that you now want to pan instead of zoom.)

--They STILL cannot, for some reason, give a PROPER up-to-date help file! This is, what, the 3rd company to produce a version of Poser now and they are STILL just adding new features to the Poser 4 help file without updating the info on updated features. Get a 'How to' book if you're wanting to actually learn the program.

--STABILITY. You're doing it wrong. Even after updating to SR3, the program still crashes on me at least once or twice during a complex character build. And I'm not even using the higher functions like dynamic hair or cloth. Doesn't crash in the same spots as 7 did, but still crashes. Save and save often. -- A step up, tho still your typical 'Poser'

Others have said it, but I'll repeat it, this program requires effort, but I think in the end it'll have been worth it. I know it took me forever to get friendly with Photoshop. I am nowhere near being friendly with Poser, but I don't think it's any harder to learn, though it looks like it might be a bit tedious creating animations. Tedious, but interesting. So far I've just done faces, no actual animations.

If you get this program there is a multitude of models and other content you can download from their site (Content Paradise), though sadly they all come with a price tag, usually between ten and fifteen dollars. And even sadder still, the tutorials on their website cost more, they are pricy. Fortunately there are a lot of free tutorials on You Tube. I've watched some of them, but so far they are beyond me.

All in all, I think this is probably a five star program, but I have a long, long way to go before I can truly evaluate it. I'll come back and update this review when Poser and I are a little more friendly. -- Hard to Learn, But it Looks Worth the Effort

I've been in the IT profession for many, many years. I have not done professional video production, but I have edited many home and small business videos, and consider myself fairly tech savvy having used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator with ease. I figured I would try my hand at some rudimentary video animation.

Not so fast.

I found this program EXTREMELY difficult to use and, judging from the other reviews, I am not alone in this opinion. If you have little to no previous experience with animation software, I would suggest you start with something else or take a class for this, if you can find one. For those of you more daring, good luck to you.

Considering the option sets I've seen, and parts of the tutorials I've read, it is a very versatile piece of software. Unfortunately, I could not give it all the credit it probably deserves. It's just too difficult to use.

-- Robust software which is not for the faint of heart

I do multimedia design for literacy curriculum and thought this might be a very interesting way of personalizing the content significantly more than I've done before. I don't, however, do this work as my full time job, so I wasn't able to spend a significant amount of time with learning software, nor do I have a background in using previous versions of Poser or similar programs.

I do know video software and have used the Adobe and old Micromedia, now Adobe, software fairly regularly, so I thought I would have a good instinct going into this. I was mistaken, but still think Poser 8 is worth it.

First off, my nicer XPS desktop died on me before I had a chance to install this software, and I assumed that I would not get a chance to even try it out. My three year old laptop was purchased for battery life and weight, not processing or video power. I gave it a go and was very pleasantly surprised to see not only Poser 8 work, but run quite well. Certainly not as quick as if I had a nicer computer, but even still this was a sign that the software itself didn't suffer from the terrible Adobe bloat and was something I could begin to play around with even on less than ideal circumstances. And play around I did. But it was very frustrating, because the controls are not entirely intuitive. Fortunately, there is good help and tutorials are all over the web. Because I got it early, there were not yet books out that would help, but I think this has changed.

Overall, Poser 8 really is astounding, but it is also time consuming. There is a very steep learning curve so this is not for the faint of heart or the pressed for time. But it is, I think, worth the effort if you are developing multimedia in a variety of contexts, and would like some, literal, personalization.

I'm still far from being an expert, indeed far from being even a beginner, but each step brings with it a lot of excitement over the possibilities and so I'm definitely pleased. -- Amazing potential but not for the uninitiated