I've used Poser before (but not since v3) and recently tried out Daz Studio. Daz seemed unintuitive to me, whereas my memories of Poser were that it's dead easy to use.

So my question to any more experienced users out there - do I buy Poser or persevere with Daz? Big price difference (!) but is that all that counts?
 

I've been looking at both recently too.  Perservere with DAZ (maybe until Poser 7 is out) is my advice, you'll find some aspects of Poser's intiuitve interface can actually get in the way.  I think the cameras also make more sense in DAZ.  On the other hand Poser's Firefly renderer seems far better.

I also think some of Poser 6's standard content is fairly useless - the robots and many of the props for example.   If they'd only create one program that had the best of both!

Ah, now this is a question that a lot of people ask..   Poser or Daz Studio???     Yes, Daz Studio is free..     Personally, I find it hard to navigate through and work w/ myself..   Although I do like the Camera's and how they work compared to Poser,   But, I also find that Studio just seems like a toy..  I feel that Poser 6 is a lot more powerful w/ a better render engine and staging area..   A draw back of Poser though is its intense memory hog issues..  Standard content person seems to be useless on both of them right out of the box..   Adding stuff to poser has gotten alot easier from Ver to Ver..   While Studio just seems to be lacking or difficult at times... 

My comparison opinion..          

Rendering..                Poser..
Rendering time          Studio
Staging                     Poser
Camera setup            Studio
Importing                   Poser
Scene setup              Poser
Lighting                     Poser
Material room             Poser (But they both are some work)
Interface                     Poser (I like the way it looks and feels)
Exporting                   Toss up (Poser has some really freaked up sizing, but if you can live w/ it works all the time)
                                           (Studio I have had a few things export ok but not want to import back into somewhere else
                                               in one piece).

An option that I would love to see in P7 would be a Render to disk theory like in Max or Vue...

Hope this helps good luck..



 

personally i really struggled to get to grips with how Daz Studio worked and the interface.

I kow alot of people like Studio though and there are some truly nifty rendering plug-in for it that would certainly make it a worthy consideration......

Hey everyone, thanks for the constructive advice. I thought it was kinda odd that I've seen a few Poser tutorials in IFX but no Daz ones. I thought with Daz being free it would be the one in most widespread use. Either that or Daz is so easy it doesn't need tutorials...

Kirisute, did you stick with Daz? How do you find it nowadays?

hey there,

nope certainly didnt...i was part of the ongoing BETA testing of it and, after writing a tutorial for Daz's Material Manager, they asked me to test Studio and start working out a few "newbie" guideline tutorials......with one thing and another that project never really got off the ground...

i think made some major changes to Studio in those early days and the BETA community really supplied alot of the information that would have been in the tutorials anyway.....

these days i use Poser 6....but if im honest i still always render in the poser 4 render engine! LOL

i guess id still be happily using pro pack or P5...but hey ho....gotta stick the times ;)

Personally, I find DAZ a lot more intuitive than Poser, as it's closer to what one expects in a 3D app. Also Poser has to be one of the slowest 3D applications I've ever seen. I have a fast PC (core2 duo 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, GF7950GT), but it's really testing my patience.

Poser has more features than DAZ and is better for some tasks, but I'd rather do everything in DAZ if possible. DAZ 's renderer isn't going to be enough if you want to render complex scenes directly in it, though.

But anyway, both share many of the same problems. Both are really poor at posing characters. Yes, that's what they are made for but still compared to how easy it is to pose a well rigged character in most general 3D applications, both DAZ and Poser seem incredibly inadequate for the task.

So in the end if you want to be able to use the huge amount of content commercially available (and that's what it's all about isn't it?), there is no choice but to choose the lesser evil.

I use both Poser and DazStudio. However, to be honest I use Poser for anthing finished. I use DazStudio mostly for animations and playing around.

I'm currently using Poser 7 and Daz Studio 2.2.x. I think that this version of DazStudios is vastly easier to use than Poser in nearly every respect. I hate the library tool in Poser and use PRPC and Advanced Library which is a pain in the rear, but way better than the built in library tool. The content management capabilities of Daz Studio are just amazing. Plus Daz Studio is so fast and quick to respond on just about everything... loading a scene or model, applying a pose, etc. I don't have to wait. In Poser, I wait for everything to finish then Poser hangs until it finishes churning.

 All that being said... I just CANNOT get any decent renders out of DazStudio. I could show you some examples where I have the same model, texures, lights etc and do side-by-side renders at the maximum quality settings with the same screen size and resolution. Poser renders look photorealistic. Daz's look like amateur hour. I simply do not see how they get the incredible renders that they show in their products. Clearly it is me and I'm doing something wrong.

 However, teh past few days I've played more and more with Daz and am rapidly falling in love with it. I may end up doing all my setup in Daz then exporting it all and importing into Poser for final renders.

 Kimiko 

Hi Kimiko,

I've been using DAZ|Studio for a few years now. I have Poser installed too, but only for rigging and a couple things that DAZ can't do yet. There are basically two areas that I think D|S is still behind Poser in. The first is surface shaders. Poser's node based material room is vastly more flexible. The second is that Poser's Firefly engine supports things like Image Based Lighting (IBL) and Ambient Occlusion (AO) that D|S doesn't have "out of the box".

There are a couple of plug-ins for D|S that can get around these, though.

PW Surface (link: http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/pwsurface?item=4184 helps a LOT with surfaces. Particularly skin. It expands your available options in the material settings by quite a bit. Definitely one of the "must have" plug-ins from my standpoint.

Pendragon's ahEnvironmentLight Version 2 (link: http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/ahenvironmentlight-versio?item=6920 provides support for High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) and AO support as well. Personally I like the control that Arthur's plug-in provides better than the similar UberEnvironment lighting shader.

The other light products UberSpot and UberPoint also give you some more options on controlling spot and point lights that can enhance your experience.

Since I (re)started my 3D hobby with D|S, I could never get used to the Poser interface. Despite the strong arm twisting my friends at Aery Soul tried to employ to get me to switch. ;)