• Queue Manager – is a powerful tool that lets you manage your rendering process. You can choose where and when to render. It can be in the background, overnight, or when the computer is idle. You can create nodes on both Windows and Mac machines and distribute jobs across the queue. You can process, suspend, resume, and delete jobs. Manage a job list, and control individual job options.
• Background Rendering – will let you increase your personal productivity by letting you work on poser scenes in the foreground, while rendering the time consuming still frame images with the Firefly render engine in the background. You can monitor the status of background projects with out interruption.
• 64-bit Firefly Render Engine – now takes advantage of today's more powerful 64-bit systems. You can run ever increasing amounts of system memory, and with the right operating system, you will see performance increases when rendering large 3D files. Poser Pro includes both 64 and 32-bit versions of the Firefly render engine. Depending on what system you are running on, Poser Pro will select the most powerful render engine so as to take advantage of every bit of available system memory.
• Gamma Control – lets you specify gamma and apply the values to textures, as well as specifying the gamma values that will be applied to exported images. This lets you perform linear rendering for increased luminance accuracy. Gamma correction on the Texture Manager allows you to specify gamma values per texture. This assures that full images and animation are color-accurate and comply with Gamma settings for output and displays.
• HDRI Support – allows you to create High Dynamic Resolution Images so that you can render the most vivid, life-like images possible. Because HDR images represent a wider range of intensity levels as you might see in real world scenes, Poser Pro images can be exported to Radiance (.hdr) or OpenEXR (.exr) formats to give you a greater control over luminosity, opacity, and reflectance range of your work.
![Poser 7 3D Figure Design and Animation [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41p2TOHvJrL._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
1 - Joe Befumo
Review of Smith Micro's Poser Pro
Well, at this juncture I've been working almost daily with this product, and thought it was high time I shared some of my impressions with other prospective customers/victims.
First of all, as a long-time software professional, I am quite aware of the complexities associated with 3D rendering, and the high demand on processing resources -- both memory and CPU. Even though I'm running a fairly capable machine (quad-core, 64-bit, 8Gig of ram, 2 - 1-terrabyte drives, Win XP-64, etc.), I am prepared to accept that complex 3D scene rendering will take some time. That said, what I DO NOT accept is the necessity for the program to outright refuse to render, or even LOAD some scenes, reporting "not enough memory to load texture map'! In software engineering terminology, this just indicates sloppy memory management. Even after researching the issues, tweaking the render settings, running a 3rd-party memory management utility -- the problem persists.
Perhaps even harder to excuse is the generally brittle nature of the package. It regularly becomes necessary to resort to ctl-alt-del, bring up the program manager, find the process, and use the "kill process tree" command to get rid of the hung application, and then start the whole process over from the start, often losing work in the process.
Then, of course, there are the incessant "An unexpected exception occurred: -50" messages. Once again, ctrl-alt-del, etc., is the only way to proceed.
Don't even bother looking in the event manager, or searching for a log that might explain the source of the problem. The Poser "engineers" apparently considered such niceties as superfluous.
Interestingly, it's often possible (and necessary) to load a scene that Poser Pro refuses to accept by using Poser 7! I can then eliminate some elements, save the file, and reload back into Poser Pro. Did someone decide it was necessary to introduce some additional bugs into the flagship package.?
I also have a strong suspicion that the program suffers from some severe memory leaks. If you monitor memory usage, you'll see that, regardless of the nature of the scene, memory usage just keeps on increasing, until, inevitably -- that's right: ctrl-alt-del.
The thing that amazes me most, is the proliferation of gushing reviews of this shoddy piece of . . . programming. Are the reviewers on Smith Micro's payroll? Have they done any more with it than render a quick naked woman, gawk over it, and then write: "WOW, what a GREAT product!"?
There are, of course, so many other annoying quirks as to defy enumeration here. Suffice it to say, that this is an extremely irritating program with which to work.
Smith Micro touts this as a "professional package," an utterly absurd assertion. It's quality is such that I might overlook the bugs in a freeware package, but certainly not in something costing nearly five-hundred bucks. Oh well, there's a sucker born every minute.
Now, as someone who has watched my own company's profits eroded by software piracy, I am generally opposed to such abuses, however, in cases like this, my advice is to acquire the product from someplace like Emule, or Vuse, or other torrent servers, use it for a while, and if you still think it's worth the asking price, then by all means, write that check. Otherwise, just use it at a cost that's precisely what it's worth: $0.
2 - Bubba Hotep
Thank you, Joe, for taking the time to write a decent review, not just another press release. I have been holding back from upgrading from an earlier version since I have been burned before by SM. I was generally depressed to hear that this company had acquired Poser, and your comments seem right inline with my low expectations.
As for the writer of the review, thanks for having a comments section for reality to have its say.