Okay, I know folks here will be biased.  However, how does iClone Pro 6.5 compare to Poser 11?
I'm considering iClone, Character Creator (and going from CrazyTalk 8 Pro to Pipeline).
The iClone trial seemed like it would do much...though its supposed to be fully functional.
Any thoughts before I spend a bunch?

Hello,

What is it your are trying to achieve in your work, hobbies, or projects? I have used Adobe Fuse, Poser, Daz Studio 3D, and now iClone.

I bought Poser a while back, but still prefer Daz3D for making custom characters (as a content creator). I am fairly new to iClone, and had some early frustrations relating to Character Creator, but I find the rewards are far better once you get going. It is a higher quality animation suite, and the physics are pretty good and fairly easy to understand.

In short, stick with Daz3D if you're posing and rendering out images. And I'd personally leapfrog Poser and go straight to iClone if you're looking for animation and all around fun.

As with many things, it depends on what you want to do, and how much time and effort are you going to put into your project. I can tell you this --if you're looking for a definitive answer as to which one is better, you're not going to find one. As  Poser user, I understand where you're coming from. You want to spend your money wisely and not have a lot of regrets after you start. If you are looking for just a quick and dirty way of making animations, then you have to look at some of the kinds of animations you wish to make. Are you looking to do a lot of special effects and stuff? Are you looking for just a person talking to the screen, or are you looking to make something closer to an animated feature? 

I will say this about the Poser Environment. If you have a small library of content and you're only going to do a few simple things -it will do. Poser's a pretty Powerful package and I've seen a lot of exciting things come out of it. Google RWBY and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's a 3D Anime inspired production done almost entirely in Poser. You can do a lot with Poser's tools. That's the good part. The bad part is, that it's poorly laid out when it comes to actually working. In viewing your profile, you're going to more likely be in my boat where your eyes are not as good as they once were. Poser's native controls are tiny and prolonged use will strain your eyes. In addition, the Poser Library is designed by an idiot and they don't seem intent on changing it. It's not organized from General to Specific like a logical structure should be. In Poser, in order to find a product, you're going to have to remember the Artist's name for each product if you want to navigate the tree structure to find it. The published artists do not use a standardized file system so you're going to have to have a good memory to find things. 

Poser does offer physics. Bullet physics is pretty powerful. However, cloth simulations in Poser are slow. I have a dual six core xeon computer with 64GB of RAM and the Poser cloth sim took 45 minutes to drap a bedsheet over a bed with a prone figure. Bullet Physics in the viewscreen is faster, but it's not as in depth when it comes to controlling cloth for things like a walk cycle. Iclone's Apex Physics Soft cloth will run circles around Poser's cloth room. Poser's physical render capabilities are superior to iClone in terms of final output. Superfly Render, which is basically Blender Cycles will give you amazing outputs --but it will render slower than iClone. Right now, iClone's renderer is a game engine renderer so it's faster, but the final output will not be as good. However, I should point out that iClone's Render engine is getting an upgrade which should make quite a difference. 

Poser's models do not have the versatility of iClone. You can purchase the morphs pack for iClone and have access to hundreds of different combinations that will all work with little or no tweaking required. This is the true power of iClone's character creator. Poser's native models are good, but there are not a lot of content artists making morphs for them, so your range is a bit more limited. iClone's props and figures are designed for animation --Poser's figures and props are designed more for still renders than animation, and so  you will have longer wait times without an external renderer like Octane Render --but in order to take advantage of the speed of Octane, you're going to need some serious hardware to go along with it. iClone offers something that Poser does not --animated plants and trees with a physics system that makes it easy to work with. If you want to animate a figure, they are pretty even when it comes to ease of use give or take --but if you want to animate anything else -iClone is going to offer far more. Last I checked, Poser does not offer a tool to setup a vehicle to be able to be animated in just a few mouse clicks. This is where iClone pulls away from Poser. I would say that when it comes to animation, iClone is going to offer you more options.

They each have their own advantages and disadvantages. Now there is one other thing I'm going to put out there --iClone offers I think, a lot more help when it comes to getting your project off the ground. I find the tutorials that Reallusion puts out to be superior by far to either DAZ or Smith Micro sponsored offerings. SmithMicro puts out very little useful information on its own products and DAZ is in the same category. You can find other tutorials on Renderosity and DAZ3D, but buyer beware --a lot of the content is out of date and no longer applies in the same way. I also believe that this is one of the most helpful communities out there when it comes to giving advice and assistance to each other.
You should take some time on Reallusion's youtube channel and look in the content store --what you find there is going to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about. 

I don't have Poser 11, but I do have 2014 Game Dev, and I would say if you plan to do animation, iClone is by far superior. If you plan stills, then Poser may be better, I don't know. I tried to use it for animation but rendering anything outside of the limited preview renderer was slow and unstable for animation. I would have to go and render select frames again, nearly every clip I rendered. You don't use your GPU for the better Firefly renderer. iClone's preview renderer is lightning fast and IMO my results are by far superior to those I got from Poser's Firefly that took forever. Superfly will be even longer. Plus creating scenes and sets is so much faster and the included content lets huge amounts of trees and grass present on my system without bogging down. Poser would crash the Open GL and I would lose terrain details in Preview, making a quick render useless. Out of the box, for the money and performance. if I had to use just one, it would be iClone. I just switched over a few weeks ago and everything is more intuitive and easy, even though I am very familiar with Poser. Just moving items about is better. Daz I dunno. I would say maybe Daz and iClone paired work well enough together. I like Poser for exporting characters now that I understand it better than Daz. You don't have to make a timeline item for every morph you want to include, so Poser gets my thumbs up for that, but then, it isn't free.

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

Hello,
I'm new to the 3D field and am looking  to find a software  that will help me create figures that will demonstrate  exercises for personal  training , to make mini demonstration videos.
The figure needs to be able to move like human  and perform the exercise, like bicep curl or bench press.
I have no knowledge  in programming  or 3D animation  at all, so the software  needs to fit a beginner  level and under...
Thank you for any suggestion. 

There is nothing that can beat iClone for doing animation, no matter what your level of expertise.  While there is a learning curve, it's nothing that any person capable of running a computer can't handle, as long as you are willing to make the effort to do so.

And now, with Character Creator 3, you ought to be able to create just about any figure you want, using clothing from almost anywhere.  Start with looking at some of the tutorials on iClone 7 (go to the Reallusion Channel) and see what you think. And then you can ask specific questions here.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thank you for your reply
Between  Iclone  and poser 11, which one will suit me better for these training figures and still be doable for a beginner  level ? 

Does I clone  have props like dumbbell , bench,gym ball and so on in the software ?
Thank you so much.

Poser isn't well suited for animation -- but it (and Daz, which is free) are very good and easy at, well, POSING figures (hence the name).  If all you want is stills you'd be better served with either (is Poser still free?  If not, use Daz Studio).

iClone is ALL about animation -- while you can "pose" figures, it is designed from the ground up to be easy to animate them.  There isn't anything that can compare, and I wouldn't bother with anything else.  As for props -- anything you can find on the net (and you can find the stuff you want for free on the net) can be brought into iClone IF you have 3DExchange -- those are the two essential programs (and you will get Character Creator for free in the mix, so that covers making all the people you need).  Again, I would suggest you watch some of the many tutorials out there to get an idea on how it will be to learn to animate in this program... assuming you want to animate.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hi again,
Thank you so much. I'm a personal  trainer and I'm looking  to have a mini library of videos that will contain those figures that demonstrate  how exercise  needs to be done. Let's say I want to show how bicep curl us done with weights, then I'll create a figure that will hold the dumbbells  and it will perform the exercise to show you how to perform  it correctly, 
I've looked everywhere  to find a company  that will create these videos for me but no one allows to upload them to you tube under my chanel.
So that led me to do it by myself.
Now , I'm not an animator and have zero knowledge  in animation or 3D....but I've heard about poser and iclone  and that's why I'm here... I don't want to become  animator or to do anything else than these demonstration  videos for my business  needs as a personal  trainer.
Based on my situation, may I please ask for your opinion ,which software  will suit me best? Again, my knowledge  in animation us zero...so the easiest software  the best for me...
Thank you so much for your time.

Well...  to be honest, I'm not sure I'd recommend you do this at all.  Could you do it?  Of course.  Any reasonably intelligent person can use iClone to create such animations, with or without extra tools (I would NOT even think about doing this in Poser).  But it's a bit like you saying to me that any person who really wants to and has the motivation can workout and get a great body.  I'm sure it's possible.  Heck, once upon a time I even did it.  But there comes a time in a person's life when they have to decide what's important to them and how much time they want to spend on something.  Just like I don't want to workout enough to do that, you probably don't want to learn enough animation to do what you want.

And, honestly, even as decent an animator as I am (having done it for many decades now) I would not even attempt to do what you are doing without the right tools.  Expensive tools.  My mocap setup would allow me to capture all the animations you needed in a day, but would that be cost effective for you to buy and learn how to use one?  Unlikely (maybe -- perhaps you're a personal trainer in Hollywood or some such.  I hate to make assumptions).

The best advice I could give you would be to find someone locally who IS interested in animation and has the right tools.  You'll have to pay them for their time (and their time is no less valuable than yours as a trainer).  But I think I'd be leading you astray to advise you any other way.

With one big exception: maybe you LIKE computers.  Maybe you'll even like and LOVE animation.  It can happen.  Once upon a time I was a gym rat and I never thought THAT would happen.  So, you could kill two birds with one stone.  Hell, you might find you like animation more than even physical workouts (I certainly did).  Then you'll need to hire someone like yourself to help you <g>.

If you want to go that route then iClone plus 3DXChange is the minimum software you'll need.  As I said, I really wouldn't want to do this without mocap (which makes capturing body movements easy) so add to the cost of a computer to run this (you'll need something fairly beefy, or at least with a beefy graphics card like an nVidia GTX 1070) the mocap suit, around 2K.  So you're looking at an investment of around 3-4K depending on what you might already have.  With mocap you ought to be able to learn how to do this very quickly -- maybe even less than a month, depending on how adaptable and motivated you are (get one of your fellow trainers to come in and yell at you :>.  Heck, depending on where you live you *might* be able to rent all or some of this (if you let me know the general area you're in I can look it up for you -- while I'm retired from the industry I have lots of friends across the country who are still working).

Sorry it couldn't be better news... but if it were easy, everyone would be doing it (and you'd find those videos out on the web for your own use).

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley