Poser 8 is very user friendly and previous poser owners will be able to use the program as if nothing has change. The big improvement in regards to Poser 8 being user friendlier is Poser 8's layout of its work area. The work area makes better use of the space by positioning the controls in a tight and very organized manner that will allow you to easily find what you are looking for. Poser 8 also takes into consideration that people have larger computer monitors with better resolutions. All of this results in a better rendering area in which to create your art. Poser 8 even has a Quick Start Guide with video showing step-by-step on how to do basic things with Poser. So now all Poser newbies will be able to learn Poser 8 without any problems at all.

This is one of Poser 8's biggest improvements. In our opinion it's even bigger than the new content management system. We were able to render images as quickly as 1 minute rendering times for default rendering settings. Even the Final rendering time is incredible at 10 minutes. These times are based on a computer that has 2.5 GB RAM. Newer computers should have faster rendering times because of their faster processors and larger RAM. The 10 minute rendering time is a big improvement in two ways; 1. Start’s faster and 2. Poser 8 now has better and more complex lighting capabilities. To give you an example of the improvement of rendering times, Poser Pro on the same computer took twice as long and even longer for the same tasks. There is definitely improvement when it comes to rendering time.

This is another one of Poser 8's major improvements. Poser 8 has a new and improved lighting system that allows you to do more with fewer lights. You no longer have to deal with longer rendering times and overkill on the use of lighting to create good lighting effects. One of the improvements that you'll notice right away is the use of indirect lighting. Poser 8’s use of indirect lighting means that your shadows won't completely darken objects within the shadows. You'll no longer have to create additional lighting in order to see objects that are positioned in the shadows.

Poser 8 will give you a better image render and requires less work to create great lighting. Poser users who had trouble with zombie looking characters or bad lighting will be able to create computer generated art like a professional "right out of the box." The rendering is just that good. There is little need for extensive lighting adjustments. Those who are really good at creating Poser art will be even better with the new and improved rendering on Poser 8. Let's just say that it'll make advance Poser artists want to redo some of their older works of art.

Poser 8 is every Poser Artist's dream come true for the simple fact that there is now an easy to follow searchable content management feature available. It took us a while to really understand how the searchable content manager works on Poser 8, so we'll give you a tip on how to really get it to find what you are looking for. Searching 3rd party content (like DAZ3D) on Poser 8 can be tricky but if you understand how files are named within DAZStudio and Poser, then you'll be able to get accurate results when searching. For example, searching for the term MAT will list all files that are named with MAT and material files for characters. You can also search within categories and by 3D content name. Searching for the word cloak will bring up all of your cloak related content. Searching A3 Cloak will give you cloaks associated with Aiko 3.

These are the big 5 improvements that we noticed right away. We have about 10 or 15 more improvements that were made and we'll be posting those throughout the 2 weeks we’re spending on reviewing Poser 8. Initially we had 2 program crashes when we first installed Poser 8, but after restarting the computer we haven't had anymore issues. The most that we can tell is that it was a problem with our computer and not the software. So far things have been bug free for us.