I am wanting to upgrade my Poser 4 program but I am confused as to which product to purchase. Should I upgrade to Poser 5 or should I upgrade to Pro Pac? What is the differance? Does 5 include all the features of Pro Pac?
Any help with these questions would be great.
Eric

Poser 5 contains most of the ProPack features and more (hair and clothes rooms for example). It doesn't contain the support for certain third party renderers like Pro Pack. If you prefer to render elsewhere (like Lightwave for example) then this will affect your choice. The new Firefly renderer in Poser 5 is much better than Poser 4s though and includes Raytracing - ah reflections, lovely reflections!

Poser 5 has no export function to 3ds Max, Lightwave or Cinema4D. These functions are only integrated in ProPack.
Hair and Clothroom ( in P5) doesnt work as they should be, and many other features too. Poser5 on his actually status has for me not more features as the ProPack and was 2x expansier than the ProPack.
It might be usefull to wait till DAZ will release his new DAZ-Studio (or whatever it will be called).

Ron

There seem to be a lot of replies in favor of P5 and many for ProPack. I bought P5 when it was first out and have never been able to use it because of all the problems. It may be fixed now but in the meantime I also bought ProPack and decided I will write off the $175 for P5. I like the ProPack software. I think you have to make sure you have the latest patches regardless of which one you choose. So I guess my answer is to go with the ProPack. Maybe P5 would work good on your system but I think a lot of us who bought it in September are just tired of trying to make things happen that won't.

well, I use pro pack, Stormrage has poser 5. still haven't seen half the problems that people have been screaming about. ( not one blue screen of death from poser 5 ) depends on what exactly you want and need. do you have a 500mhz p3 or better? 512mb ram or better? if not, go pro pack, cause p5 won't work. ( really bad idea in my opinion to design for newest hardware / os, not for oldest, but cl isn't the only company making that mistake ) do you routinely use a different app to render? then go pro pack. if you use poser to render and your machine will run poser 5, you choose, but p5 limits options in some ways if you aren't happy with it's rendering engine.

So what I'm hearing is that if I had P4 already sans PP, and got P5 with SR2 thinking it would cover the functionality of PP, it would still be worthwhile to get PP for my P4, if the non-overlap is of sufficiant interest? The two versions are different enough, and have enough complementary strengths and weaknesses, that I have found myself using both, depending on the task at hand. Ridiculous, but not out of place in a world designed by a mind that gets off on frilled lizards and televangelists...

I got both and I'm using Poser 5 now. I have a very powerful machine and it is starting to slow down as I add more to the libraries and that's still with only one figure, mind you, its a fully loaded Vicki3. I dont' think I will ever be able to work three and four person scenes in Poser 5 with any kind of sanity because it gets so slow-- that's a shame because I really like its renderer. It's a rock and a hard place, truth be told. I have 2.4G processor 2 G's ram-- not fast ram. Lots of virtual, but still slow as molasses. I hate to think what this thing was like before the SR2_1. I don't want to go back to Pro Pack-- which is very stable, but then so far, so is P5 except if I try to cancel a render. The FireFly renderer is good enough that I don't think I can be satisfied with plain old Poser renders any more. Like I said, rock and a hard place. I would like to see an SR2_5 or 3, but that is not this company's pattern. As with Prop Pack and Poser 4, they fix everything that crashes often, and leave the rest of the bugs alone. Emily

Poser 4 with Pro Pack is much simpler to use than P5. P5's new texture room is difficult for me to grasp and incomprehensible even with the manual. A lot of people have grooved on this new room, though, maybe I'm just slow. The new hair is a like a vampire that drains your system resources, I perfer the good old hair props of P4. I still haven't figured out dynamic cloth and the new clothing options. I've found the new P5 models somewhat limiting, but if you want to make Poser figures that look like friends and family there's the new face room where you can do that. If I had it to do over again I would have waited until more patches were out. If I were you I'd look at what both programs offer carefully and decide if you will really use the new P5 features, if not you might want to go with the simpler P4. One other note. The best thing about P5 is the Firefly rendering engine which produces much more realistic skin tones. That feature alone may make it worth your while to fully upgrade, however if you render in outside programs you might not.