As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has swept the globe, it has forced people everywhere back to the safety of their homes. That includes the staff at Bondware, the parent company of Renderosity and Poser.

We are following the World Health Organization's and U.S. Centers for Disease Control's recommendations to reduce our contact with others by social distancing. Because the virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person, the CDC and WHO recommend reducing close contact with one another by staying about 6 feet (2 meters) apart.

"The health of our employees and team members is paramount," Bondware CEO Tim Choate said. "Luckily, as a software company, we are able to work remotely, hold meetings online and still get our work done. All our teams work remotely, except for a handful of employees at our corporate office, who have been working from home since last week."

Because we can work remotely, that means we are currently putting the finishing touches on Poser Pro 11.3, which is set to release at noon (CDT) Monday, March 30. The update will be ready for download at that time. Development is also continuing with Poser 12.

We've been able to stay on track because our dev and beta teams were mostly remote workers before the pandemic hit. We are still working daily on testing, software development and planning the future of Poser.

"We have a solid team in place. We have some really talented hearts and minds, who have great ideas for future versions and features to add that we think users will really appreciate," said Jenn Blake, Renderosity marketplace manager.

As we developed the update, we did so with nightly builds from our remote dev team. Then once weekly, the latest, stable nightly build was made available to the beta testing team, who ran it through its paces. Right now we are polishing up the latest stable beta into a production release.

This process means the beta team is always working with the best iteration of the code available. It also means we are getting immediate feedback from the team on what is working and what isn't.

Meanwhile, Renderosity's vendors are still hard at work creating content for you while we are all "social distancing." We will be curating content bundles that will be available for purchase on PoserSoftware.com at the time of 11.3 launch as well.

What to expect in Poser Pro 11.3

Poser Pro 11.3 will offer an improved library search, auto-sync of content purchased from Renderosity, fixes for Mac's Catalina OS but at the top of the list of new features is support for the latest NVIDIA RTX (Turing architecture) GPU cards on Windows.

NVIDIA’s RTX 20 Series GPU cards simulate the physical world at high speeds. RTX GPUs are able to render photorealistic objects and environments in real time (with accurate shadows, reflections and refractions) because the Turing architecture uses AI, ray tracing, rasterization, and simulation SDKs. Adding support for the RTX 20 series to Poser Pro 11.3 will significantly reduce render times and increase render quality.

The La Femme figure will be updated to remove dial for L’Homme morph, which will now be a stand-alone figure. This change was done in response to the community requests and vendors so that they may now create content for the male figure in a much more streamlined manner to which they are accustomed to making products for Poser.

Additional features and fixes are: various issues related to Catalina on Mac, added the ability to remove missing runtimes, updates to Windows Component Libraries (Python 2.7.17, latest FBX and Alembic export formats), La Femme updates in preparation for release of stand-alone L'Homme figure, faster loading of default scene load time by using PMD, plus hundreds of bug fixes.

Poser 11.3 will be a free update for anyone with a license to any version of Poser 11. 

If you still haven't updated to Poser Pro 11.2, you can do so at PoserSoftware.com/downloads. Or you can upgrade a previous version for $99 here.

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