What's different between Poser and Daz Studio?
robkelk
Posts: 3,259
I used to know the answer to the question in the subject line, but the state-of-the-art has changed, so...
What works in Daz Studio but doesn't work in Poser?
What works in Poser but doesn't work in Daz Studio?
What works differently in the two programs?
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Comments
The UI...
Under the hood, they are very closely matched feature-wise. Except for dynamics, Poser still holds that edge.
I'm sure there will be a lot of 'but Poser can do this...nonny-nonny-boo-boo' stuff, but really most of it falls flat, because things that are the usual items to pick on were available in DS, long ago, they just weren't advertised and as such weren't very well supported at the base level.
DAZ Studio was designed to make use of Poser file types so even if certain products or freebies state they are not tested in DS, chances are they will still work. Buyer beware and make sure you read everything carefully before purchasing (cause most of us haven't!)
The Glossiness values between the two programs are always opposite of one another. So a 0% in DS is the same as 1.0 in Poser and 100% in DS is 0.0 in Poser.
Spec map settings from one program is not read by the other.
Bump maps are read but bump values are not.
All image maps in DS are tiled together. Poser image maps can be tiled independant of each other.
The advanced features in the Poser Material Room do not translate to DS. Shaders made from the Shader Mixer or Builder in DS do not translate into Poser.
If you are making something for use in both, make seperate material files, you will not be able to have an all-in-one for both.
Lighting from Poser does not translate into DS properly.
Dynamic Cloth does not translate between the two programs though you can use the dynamic cloth in the program its intended for and export it as an OBJ for use in the other program.
Poser Hair room hair cannot be used in DS. The up comming "Look At My Hair" & "Garabaldi Hair" for DS will not translate into Poser as they rely on a RSL compliant render engine. However, LAMH will export the hair model. (according to the author)
DAZ Studio will automatically render all normals forward so you do not see any gaps or holes in the model. Poser does not by default but you can change that in the material room one surface at a time.
If you can get a trial version of Poser and some freebies for each and try them both, that's probably the best way to see which you prefer.
My very subjective opinion is that Poser's handling of cameras and lights is much more deft, but its renderer is more sluggish (I hate trying to do anything with Depth of Field in PP2012). PP2012 and DS4.5 crash about the same frequency on my system, but it's harder to tell when Poser has because its progress bar is less reliable about showing when it's frozen. It is easier to get a soft, real-feeling light setup with Poser Pro's indirect lighting than with DS Uberenvironment.
Poser's Material Room is much easier to get good shaders out of than DAZ Shader Mixer, if you're talking about doing advanced shaders. Shader Mixer is a bear to use. Most people find the Mat Room easier to navigate initially, but with experience, equally good results for basic shaders can be achieved with the Surfaces tab.
DAZ cannot do dynamic strand hair at all (a plugin for strand hair seems to be in development). Poser's dynamic strand hair is migraine-inducing to work with, but it does exist. Both have dynamics available in some form, but Poser's cloth room is easier to use.
Both DAZ Studio 4.5 and Poser 9/PP2012 can use weight-mapped figures, which deform more realistically than the old .cr2 falloff zone figures. DAZ Studio has the smoothing and collision mechanic, which can eliminate clipping without fixit morphs on most items. Poser has no equivalent. This right here is a pretty significant ding for me and also makes it harder for an artist to support Poser through the DSON system, because they'll have to add more morphs to achieve the same functionality.
Important weight-mapped figures include Genesis (DAZ), Alyson 2 (with Blackhearted's Anastasia add-on, Smith Micro), Ryan 2 (with Blackhearted's Tyler add-on, Smith Micro) and My Michelle (third party from RuntimeDNA, but with add-ons by Blackhearted as well). Weight Mapped V4 and Antonia have their fans, but never took off with any real support.
I have to agree with this. i have poser 2012 and DS 4.5 installed and DS just makes my work flow so much faster and the smoothing modifier is awesome!
To the OP, just try both apps and figure out what works best for you. if you ask others, you will get way to many different replies. The user interface of each has always been the biggest issue, with myself also, but once i took the time to figure out DS, it's second nature now.
Yes, as I keep saying it is very much a question of horses for courses. Some of us prefer Poser and some of us prefer DS.
However that is not what Rob is asking, he wants to know what the differences are between the apps, what works in one and won't work in the other, and so forth.
Can both programs use the same weight-mapped figures, or is there still an incompatibility "under the hood"?
Rob, advanced shaders are usually not viable in both programs as each does things differently. As for weight mapped figures, there are some inconsistencies when using each one in both programs, so no, they don't all work perfectly in both. Each app deals with weight mapping a bit differently.
Since you use DS, the main advantages of poser are the dynamics, the advanced shaders with some products and in general it's easier to get better renders with firefly (out of the box), but with knowledge i have seen great things done with 3delight also. One plus for me, poser can import .3ds and LWO files which DS can't which helps with importing many outside, non poserized objects and such
Yes, but with Hexagon (since it's free, too) and the Bridge, 3ds are well within easy reach for DS (along with a couple others).
The two 'main' formats that one most commonly encounters are obj and 3ds, with lwo coming in at #3 (yeah, there are lots of .max files that won't open in anything other Max, but many times they have at least one other format available...).
Well aware of that mjc1016 since i use 3DSMax and have many other modelers installed, it is not a problem for me, but I always see posts with users trying to open a file format that DS does not import natively and some people don't want to installed extra apps, especially for a file conversion. There is always a way, just pointing out the basics.
But I thought I'd point out Hex, since Daz, at least to start, was pushing the idea that DS, Hexagon and Bryce were a bundle...
I am kinda new to this world, but for my experience the main problems I had is that content creators are kinda elitist with poser. You wont have problems if u buy from daz but if u buy from renderosity for example, most of files are always optimized for poser, the promotional images always look better the poser renders and its like SSS shaders are he best thing of the world and are just for poser, but michael 5 has SSS shaders and for what i see they work the same in my daz. It's just like creators dont mind optimize the files for daz. Also u just have to look the lack of content for genesis till DSON importer appeared.
Said this once time u learn to tweak the files, mainly tweak the surfaces and build your own lights I find daz more versatale and i love the content manager and how i can organize things wich saves me lot of time.
...If you are going to do a lot of clothing content design, this is where Poser tends to have the advantage because of it's cloth and materials rooms. It also works better with third party design tools like Marvelous Designer which is a dedicated clothing modeller that also involves cloth dynamics.
If you are just set on using existing clothing content, Studio 4.5Pro has the Morph Transfer Utility which is a big step above Autofit since it will also handle footwear. I've successfully translated a fair amount of Gen4 clothing to Genesis (even "cross-figure" in some cases), often with better results than the original conforming fits would do on the character the clothing was rigged for. I agree that both Collision Detection and smoothing are very useful tools in this department.
If you already have a lot of Gen4 or (even Gen3) content, I'd also consider the GenerationX plugin (which lets one transfer basic and add on morphs from older supported figures to Genesis) as well as the various legacy "body shapes" for Genesis (the latter which are on sale through tomorrow as they are Daz Originals).
As I also discovered (somewhat by accident) 4.5 will also let you save a fully weight mapped version of an older figure as either Tri-Ax (which is the format Genesis uses) or "General" (which can be exported to Poser 9/Pro 2012). The one downside of this however is the new figure becomes somewhat "exclusive" as the change in geometry will not accept most morph/character injections or texture maps after conversion save for the default ones.
This is certainly true for dynamics. Many of us are still unhappy that DAZ never released the method for making dynamics work with the program, effectively preventing users from creating their own.
With conforming clothes, on the other hand, the Transfer Utility is practically a Make Clothes for Genesis button and is a huge improvement over the old Figure Setup Tools, whereas rigging conformers in PP2012/P9 is hardly different from the clunky and inefficient methods of previous versions.
...I actually transferred some K4 wear to my LeelaTeen.character (of course she does have a bit of "Basic Child" in her).
What I am still impressed with though is that overall, clotyhing fits are so much better. One of my favourite, yet frustrating clothing meshes to use for my Leela is the Teen Ashley top. Never looked quite right as it would always distort in the chest area due to Leela's more petite physique. With the Transfer Utility and just a little tweaking, it fits like a charm and looks great.
Can both programs use the same weight-mapped figures, or is there still an incompatibility "under the hood"?
DS will read the basics of Poser mat files so some of the info is applied to the model. Poser cannot read a DS shader/mat file at all.
The two weight mapping systems are different. I have not seen how weight maps are created in PP2012 so I cannot compare them to DS. But they are different systems.
Something I haven't seen mentioned (but very important to me, it's a feature I use all the time) is that in DAZ Studio you can look through spotlights and distant lights as if they were cameras, and in Poser you can't.
...yes incredibly valuable.
That is something I wish I had available when I was theatrical lighting tech back in college. Ever try to fine tune the aim of a 30# spotlight that's on (and very hot) while straddling the top rung of a nearly two story tall free standing ladder?
Once...then I went back to playing with speakers and sound boards.
...smart decision.
Back then people would ask me if I got "high" and I would tell them "only when setting up lights for the next production."
*badoom shhhhh*
In Poser you can. Poser calls them shadow cams. Select them like any other camera.
Poser 7
In a nutshell, the two programs are completely different, despite doing a similar job, on top of that the content from one program isn't compatible with the other program, DS has always used an import plugin to convert Poser formats into something it can use, and now Poser9 SR3 needs a plugin to convert DS4's DSON format into something it can use.
Even with those plugins there are still gray areas between the two programs, dynamics, surface settings, shaders etc.
Originally there was one main difference between Poser and DS. Poser was a "complete" package that carried a pretty hefty price tag.
Once Poser Pro Pack was introduced (add on to Poser 4), Poser users has python scripting and the set up room.
Poser 5 introduced the cloth room, hair room, face room, material room and rather useless content room.
DS was designed to be modular. You had the base program which was free and you could expand its features through the purchase of plugins.
DS uses QT as its scripting language rather than Python. Materials render differently not because one is "better" than the other but because the two apps use different render engines. DS uses 3Delight natively and Poser uses Firefly.
Both apps have their good and not so good points. We still use DS3A for some work but haven't done much with DS4 on the professional end.
I'm sure that are others who can give you more info or if you need more, ask.
Basically both are tools that can get your work done either faster or slower depending upon your experience, workflow and pipeline.
In Poser you can. Poser calls them shadow cams. Select them like any other camera . . .
I didn't know that, I always heard Poser couldn't do it -- little experience myself, every time I've tried Poser I was always thrown by my strong dislike of the GUI (but that's off-topic, sorry).
DAZ Studio has Genesis, an outstanding STANDARD GUI, a fabulous system to organize morphs, Genesis, a decent render engine, and did I mention it has Genesis?
Poser has a kick ass render engine, a decent cloth editor, a piss poor hair editor (it actually sux), but it absolutely does have my favourite light controls ever made. I've never seen anything else that makes it so easy to control lights. I'd love to see a pluggin for D|S that gives us the same type of controls.
The dynamic cloth room, to me, is the single most important feature that puts Poser on the top of my pile. I've had great success in clothifying various conforming skirts and dresses to make them drape naturally from a wide variety of poses. You can even toss in a little breeze effect to kick it up an even bigger notch.
I'm having trouble with Cloth in D|S4.5, all the freestuff I got from http://www.optitex-dynamiccloth.com/ no longer loads... :( That said, the Dynamic Cloth from Optitex is lightyears ahead of anything Poser can do... the drawback is you have to get it from Optitex, you cannot make it yourself, so that's why Poser has the edge on Dynamic Cloth.
...I find Poser's light controls to be less intuitive than Daz's. From my perspective, the Daz Studio light system works much like theatrical lighting which I have done in RL. Transition and rotation is almost identical to stage lighting so I have little difficulty setting up even large light arrays.
The manipulation controls in Poser don't have that same familiar "feel".
I do agree that the Firefly engine is more efficient as even on my old 32 bit notebook I can use IBL and AO without it crashing the render like it does in 3Delight, and until the release of 4.5Pro, it was noticeably faster. The one feature I like of Pro 2010/2012 is the ability to render in background or outside the app using the Queue Manager. This is a huge benefit for those such as myself who are on older systems with limited memory and processing resources.
Outside of the obvious (user created dynamics) I would like to see the above rendering options brought into Daz Studio.
...I find Poser's light controls to be less intuitive than Daz's. From my perspective, the Daz Studio light system works much like theatrical lighting which I have done in RL. Transition and rotation is almost identical to stage lighting so I have little difficulty setting up even large light arrays.
The manipulation controls in Poser don't have that same familiar "feel".
I do agree that the Firefly engine is more efficient as even on my old 32 bit notebook I can use IBL and AO without it crashing the render like it does in 3Delight, and until the release of 4.5Pro, it was noticeably faster. The one feature I like of Pro 2010/2012 is the ability to render in background or outside the app using the Queue Manager. This is a huge benefit for those such as myself who are on older systems with limited memory and processing resources.
Outside of the obvious (user created dynamics) I would like to see the above rendering options brought into Daz Studio.
My experience is completely opposite when it comes to PP2012 and DS4.5 Pro. Both of these are 64 bit applications on a six-core i7 with an Nvidia GTX 560 in Windows 7.
I regularly do renders in DS4.5 at 1600x3200 for Rendo with UberEnvironment in a large light setup, similar render settings, DOF on, and pixel sample rate at 0.2, and it takes three hours for a one-character scene. I can't even render at that size with DOF, IBl lights and indirect lighting in PP2012 because I can't afford to let it run eight hours when I've got work to do on the machine (if it doesn't completely choke on any distant background with DOF on and force me to render twice, blur filter the background, and composite them in post).
...notice I mentioned "until the release of 4.5 Pro" which I agree has much improved memory management over older versions of the app and an entirely new 3Delight that handles ray tracing and shadow mapping more efficiently than it's predecessors. Rendering time for relatively simple scenes with the standard (non UE) lighting and shadow mapping takes a minute or less at 800 x 1100 size.
My comparison was based on render performance between Studio 3Advanced to PP 2010 on my old notebook. Pro 2010 won hands down, rendering a similar scene in about one fourth the time (rendering in background mode) compared to Studio3 Advanced. Adding IBL & AO with raytracing crashed 3Advanced, but in Pro2010 the process completed successfully and still took less time than S3A with just normal lights and shadow mapping.
This was performed with the 32 bit versions of both apps on a duo core system with Intel integrated graphics and a maximum usable RAM limit of 2GB.
Oh, my bad! I thought you meant DS was doing WORSE since 4.5 :-D DS3 definitely has some issues in terms of freezing and crashing that are less apt to occur in the new version; although I never used the 32 bit version they did exist in the 64.