I’m not happy with it at all.

It uses an unbelievable amount of memory, it’s slow, it’s clunky and a simple scene testing only Poser 8 content and one Daz scenery prop and it crashed. Whoever designed the library tree should be fired on the spot. (ok that’s the frustration talking but it does appear to be unnecessarily resource draining)  It takes way to long to get to where you want to be. And it’s not like I have a POS system either. My runtimes are arranged into categories and the minute I loaded them it began to slow to a grinding halt.

I’m not all that impressed with Smith Micro either.  When I purchased my upgrade they failed to send me a conformation email which was supposed to include my serial.  I had to contact them for it’s location.  And after reading multiple discussion threads I still can’t find any real information on if and when there will be a service release.

My opinion is to save your money until they they release at least one service release for it.

Second try

So after walking away for a bit and venting I’m giving Poser 8 another shot.  This time I am avoiding any P8 figures and loaded V4 from Daz.  So far so good.  No error messages and no memory warnings either.  It’s taking a very long time to render but I’m using the P8 lighting and testing the indirect lighting.

As far as the lighting goes, and as far as I can tell just by the thumbnails, Poser 8 lighting has a lot more to choose from including studio lighting such as Rembrant, eye light and studio back light.

The interface is growing on me.  I still intensely dislike the library and think they could simplify it and save some of the memory usage.

I’ll post a render when I finish.

Ok, first image.  A simple scene with all Daz products and my clothing texture.   This is without indirect lighting.  (clicking on the images will open them up larger)

And here’s the same scene using a different light (still P8 content) with indirect lighting.

Indirect lighting takes avery long time to render.   I would appear that I am going to have to upgrade my memory just to use Poser 8.   Smith Micro should include on the box “Does not play well with others”.  When rendering a simple scene, I cannot have any other programs running, no music, no browser window, nothing.   No other program has had this problem on my system and this is something that Smith Micro absolutely needs to address.

After this render I tried loading a pz3 that I had saved in Poser 7 and it crashed on me.

I’ve tried hanging up a white sheet and setting up lights and it just doesn’t work. When you want a good product image you really need to use a tent. Now a decent one will run you a couple of hundred plus the lights. So when I decided to try Ebay I decided to try making my own. I remembered reading this tutorial a while back and so here’s what I came up with.

I started with a large box and cut out three sides and the top.

Now the tutorial recommended lining the inside with paper.  I wanted something super quick so I chose to use flat spray paint.

Once the paint was dry I cut my white muslin, wrapped it around the top and sides and taped it so the muslin was taut.   A large piece of heavy-weight paper fit perfectly as a back drop.  I set my lights up on either side and a desk lamp above and voila!  A quick and (somewhat) easy light tent.

As you can see, it works pretty good.   Good enough for Ebay anyway.

This shot was taken by my 13 year old son with his Grandmothers point-and-shoot camera.

He has expressed an interest in Photography and while it still remains to be see whether he’ll retain his interest or if he has a good eye for composition, he did good here.

I pointed out this shot to him as we were walking around the meadow after the Wagon Train had pulled into town.  It’s definitely a favorite subject of mine and I’ll have this years images uploaded to the gallery soon.

While you can get good images with just about any camera, it helps to have good image editing software. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is an amazing piece of software.

I took the image he took and rendered it to a Sepia tone.  We’ll print it for next years Wagon Train and he can display it as his creation.   Between now and then I’ll show him how to get the Sepia tone in Photoshop and let him decide on the final image.   Later in the week I’ll post a small tutorial on achieving a sepia tone in Photoshop.