Long ago when I was first getting my paws wet in digital art I got a copy of Poser 3. It was a horrible experience and colored my view of this amazing piece of software for a decade or more, thus I delved into the burgeoning program called DAZ Studio and although it was still in beta, in my eyes, was so much more intuitive than Poser! Now that's changed in many respects. Poser has pretty much done a 180 in many ways but still has a ways to go before it's fully intuitive esp with Poser 13, my only niggle is the outdated UI! Maybe someday they will introduce a more streamlined and updated look for Poser. In the mean time, it is what it is!
One of my biggest niggles with the program is that in the Material room you can only select one surface at a time. (So easy in DAZ Studio with the ability to multi select) This totally makes getting things set up much more time consuming. There are Python script's that can help with that but I'd rather it come in as native code. Recently Python had a huge update so the little interfaces are much easier to deal with, older Python UI's were simplistic and kinda ugly! I'm a very visual learner and if the package that something is wrapped in isn't appealing to me it colors my perception of what it can do to help me reach my goal! That's just me, I'm sure others reading this are rolling their eyes. LOL
With the latest release of Poser (13) they now have their own stand alone figures that are very nice. Not Genesis level but nice and worthy of my time to create content for. The male is called L'Homme and the female is called La'Femme. There was a recent release of version 2 of each figure with better bending and other fixes! Very nice! They are both pretty much backwards compatible, working in Poser 11 and up!
ME, I always support the underdog! LOL So you know where my talents are going to be, L'Homme! Another note about these figures. The "standard" version comes free with Poser 13 but there are Pro versions, see the link below to go to Renderosity to look over the Pro figures and all their clothing and accessories! Side note, there was a recent release of Dawn 2 from HiveWired 3D and patiently waiting on Dusk 2!
Anyways, the program has "rooms" or really TABS, for the various operations. The Rooms are:
Pose Room where you pose and render your figures and scenes
Material Room is for setting up surface materials with textures and shaders to get the right look to your creation
Hair Room is for utilizing the Hair system, similar to ZBrush's fiber mesh hair but from what I remember Posers hair room really tests your patience with styling and getting something natural and nice looking!
Cloth Room is where you can make use of their Dynamic Cloth engine for natural looking cloth draping. You can drape just about anything with it! There are now "insta" scripts to make using it MUCH MUCH easier!
Next are the last two for rigging figures and fitting clothing to figures (I'm still learning these two areas and so far not had much luck)
Fitting & Setup Rooms! They seem similar to me but:
Setup Room is more about rigging from scratch or transferring a rig from one figure to another.
Fitting Room I think replaced an oldie but good, Wardrobe Wizard.
A tool I REALLY enjoy in Poser is called the "Morphing Tool" it's basically a way to enhance, fix poke throughs, smooth out troubling areas and allot more. This sort of tool is something that DAZ Studio does not have. While I love ZBrush I don't always have to export out to that program as I can, allot of the times, fix stuff right there within Poser!
I tend to use the Fitting Room most of the time, works fine for my needs (for now)!
La'Femme Pro L'Homme Pro