DAZ Studio > Poser
I get a bit annoyed when I read posts explaining why people shouldn’t bother with the “toy” DAZ Studio and use “grown-up” Poser instead, such as one I read in the Platinum Club forums today.
Yes, DAZ Studio is lacking in a few features Poser has still, such as the ability to create dynamic clothing, and a few tools necessary for tweaking new created figures, but when you compare it to the position, say, a year ago – Studio is catching up fast.
DAZ Studio now has dynamic clothing, although you can’t create your own yet. Studio also has about 90% of the tools to create new figures from scratch, with the remaining 10% you can work around in 3D modelling software or may not even need at all in some cases.
DAZ Studio is actively supported by a company interested in pushing it out free to as many people as possible in order to sell content. Poser is … uh.. well, I heard rumours about a version eight coming out soon (after a couple of years of languishing at a nearly-compatible with Windows XP level), but Smith Micro don’t exactly scream about the product from the rooftops.
DAZ Studio has a nifty, fast-ish UI built on Qt. Poser has a clunky heap of crap that uses so much of your PC’s horsepower drawing unnecessarily graphic UI controls that theres barely anything left to do the actual 3D work with.
DAZ Studio comes as a free base package with additional tools available to purchase as plugins as and when you need them. Poser comes as an expensive, but complete, package. The majority of users just looking to throw scenes together and render probably will never touch half the menu options in Poser.
Studio has a lot of support on the DAZ site, including product info pages, tutorials in the wiki, and active forums. As far as I can find, Poser has a couple of pages on the Smith Micro online store.
DAZ Studio lets me throw a quick scene together in minutes and render it quickly. In that time with Poser, I’ll probably still be waiting for the screen to update after I clicked to open a panel in the UI after the third crash in a row.
And if anyone really wants to get into a rendering argument with me: Poser uses a custom rendering engine. DAZ Studio uses an industry-standard Pixar Renderman-compliant engine used in Hollywood – 3Delight.
I tend to frown at Poser the same way I used to frown at WordPerfect – a piece of software people have gotten used to because there wasn’t any real alternative at the time, and are scared of letting go now there is.
On a side-note, I’m considering doing a weekly review of DAZ model releases. Something to think about…
BTW: WordPerfect users still tell us that the concept behind it is by far the best concept to write documents
. Could be.
For Poser vs. DAZ. Your post is not correct in describing what it will cost to get a Poser-like feature set with DS. You’ll pay more. On the other had there are AniMate and other ideas I can’t get with Poser today.
So, you can’t compare the basic DS with Poser. That’s not fair. And I can’t recognize that the rendering result are better because they have an industry standard compatible (how many percent?) renderer. All the images I have seen so far were not better than with Poser, but a lot were much worser (maybe because of the limited functions of the basic DS).
I’m looking at every release of DS, but I’m still waiting for the functionality that beats what Poser delivers. Then I also would accept to use this ugly user interface. Did you have a look at Poser 7? The interface is fast, the rendering is fast. Ok you need the right hardware, maybe that’s the problem with your biased comparison here.
Wow, someone actually read what I was writing. The value of that far outweighs the fact that it shot down everything I said
On the WordPerfect argument, I know people who say vi is by far the best option for editing text files. That may be true for the 1% of people who edit text files that actually *know* vi, but for the other 99% of us the best option is something that has menus and doesn’t require us to know what the keyboard shortcuts are
Yes, I’m heavily biased towards DAZ Studio. It lets me do what I want to do as one of the majority who are still learning about this stuff. I just see that as a counter to the heavily-biased longtime Poser users who keep telling everyone the answer to their problem is to jump ship. Personally I’ll choose the new, experimental, unfinished option over the slow, clunky proven one and wait for the designers to fill in the missing parts by the time I need them. Obviously that isn’t the answer for people who are already using those advanced features in Poser.
Currently, the only thing I’m unhappy with in DAZ Studio is the lighting, and that’s more a problem of me having to learn how to do it properly. In the future, my next hurdle will be the lack of an assembly room, but I reckon the Figure Setup Tools should tide me over. I’d like to be able to pin limbs in position in global space too, but I think I’m close to having a handle on that by the time it becomes more than a minor irritation.
Oh, and sorry, but when Poser 7 can’t keep up with what I’m doing when I manipulate a single figure with no props on a three-month old quad core machine with 4GB of RAM I figure it isn’t my PC thats the problem. It looks like the programmers were more concerned with drawing a pretty custom UI than a fast, usable one.
I found this when I was actually searching for a way to use Poser’s render engine on a DAZ creation. My reasoning: I would rather go do that amount of trouble than use Poser by itself.
In Poser my work usually goes something like this:
1. Start Poser
2. Load figure
3. Angle camera
4. Go make sandwich while waiting for camera to decide what it’s looking at
5. Restart after crash
6. Load figure
7. Dress figure
8. Restart after crash
9. Steps 1-7
10. Cloth room
11. Restart after crash
You see what I mean.
The ONLY strength Poser has over DAZ is it’s render engine, which unfortunately, good enough for me to keep trying with the program.
Sounds so familiar
I do have to say that Poser 8 is a HUGE improvement, both in the UI and stability. The new content library is a bit… meh, but if like me you’re happy with your existing content it certainly makes the choice between Poser and Studio a lot more difficult. The only real thing I miss in P8 is my nice organised content database from Studio, but the favorites tab helps out there. Now, if I can just figure out how to write a Poser addon that reads my Studio content db….
Which I’ve now done…