I'm thinking about getting Poser 5 but I don't know what others think about it. Should I get it. Or should I just stick with Pro Pack ????

I only own Poser5, been happy since sr2.1 came out. I don't do animations so I haven't had hardly any of the problems others have. If I had it over to do again I would have bought Poser4, and pro pack, then bought n upgrade to poser5. I rarely use the Face room (twice I think I've used it), the hair room is neat, but everything Ive done looks like wire, and I still like trans hair better. Content paridise is a joke to me, never used it. Just getting into the cloth room, and there is a lot to it, but its not as easy as the ADs say on the box. I guess it all boils down to what you need to use Poser for. I'm still hoping for a Lightwave plugin for poser 5, and looks like its gunna be a long time coming. Its a tough decision to make, I hope you have an easyer time than I did. I would do it differently like I said if I could do it over again. my 2 cents, hope its informative.

I say stick with pro pack. Its not worth the upgrade Posable hair and dymaanic clothes are funky, buggy and an overly complex. Take a look at the shortage of the P5 stuff in marketplace is good guage of how it seems to be if not a dead end then sputtering The ONLY reason I keep P5 is because the improved library magamnent system- libaries can have subfolders and you can have more than one runtime

Poser 5 is like a gamble, for some it works, for others, not at all.
I have my doubts that P5 will ever be stable. The latest desertions of CL personnel are a bad sign.

It really depends on what you want to do. If you want to set up figures for rendering in other applications, use PP. The integration with other apps is non existent in P5. If you mainly use products as is, the PP may be better, because most products don't use the P5 specific things (yet) and may be optimized for P4. On the other hand, if you render manly in Poser and like to fiddle with things, P5 is much better IMHO. The material room alone is worth the update (materials options are very limited in PP). I spend most of my poser time playing in this room, it is so much fun and makes such of a difference in the render. I really like P5 hair because it enables me to create unique hairstyles in poser. It is true that the dynamics are bugy, but they are needed mainly for animations not for stills. I have not used the cloth room much, but from what I have seen from others, it seems to work well. Personally I found the user interface much improved from P4 (I don't own PP), but it is still basically crap. If they only had done a standard windows interface. Since I used P5, I would never get back to P4. I was able to realize pictures I could not in P4. stefan

Despite what others, say above - If you clothe your figures, P5 is the way to go. Dynamic clothes are so much more realistic than are conformable (ever tried to sit a girl down in a dress?). There is a learning curve, but they Dynamic cloth section is not truly "buggy". P5 hair still has problems with collisions. May always who knows? I've found that the pre-modeled P5 hair is much superior to even the best transmapped hair though. (Remember, all P4 hair has problems with collisions...) Just my $.02, but I'm very happy with my P5.

Here's my several hundred dollars worth. P5 does EVERYTHING more slowly than P4PP. Loading figures, adding figures, texturing, the works. Don't even bother trying to animate. I'll admit the renders look a bit better, if you can afford to wait for them. Sadly I can't. I found that P5 almost halved my workrate. Then I got Vicky 3. 5 minutes to inject the body. 5 minutes to inject the head. Poser stops responding. Ok. Only inject the parts I need for the project I'm working on. Still takes 5 minutes. Half of that to find the morphs I want to use. Thats my workrate back down to about the same as I used to manage 5 years ago on my original Pentium 200. So why did I need to upgrade all the hardware and software every couple of years? I'm going to have 'MUG' tattooed on my forehead. It'll cost a lot less than pouring cash into software that costs a fortune and then KEEPS costing every time I use it.

For me Poser 5 is about as fast as P4 for the same functionalty. I don't notice any slowdown in the Interface. And I can actualy work a little bit faster because of the somwhat better interface. The P5 renderer is much slower than the P4 renderer, but also much better. And the P4 renderer is still included in P5. Stefan

I'm going to argue in favor of Poser 5, though I'm biased and never used Poser 4 PP... However, I've been animating quite easily with Poser 5, with great results. As for animating dynamic cloth, I was in for a suprise treat last night when calculating a blanket animation. In the scene, the sleeping adventurer gets lifted up about 30 feet into the air by a monster. I'd expected the dynamic blanket to fall off and remain on the ground, but instead, it was caught up on the struggling adventurer's arm, yanked high into the air, and dramatically flung over the monster's head, where it drifted back down to the ground. I was quite impressed and overjoyed, as it added an unexpected element of panic that quite fit the scene. Oh, and while the Firefly renderer is slower than the P4 renderer, it does raytracing and reflective surfaces extremely well- not too many people are rendering more than figures with it right now (that I've seen), but when you start seeing more stuff that was textured in the materials room, you'll see how impressive it really is.

I have used PP pack with plugins for other apps like my world builder and still do for the most part when the sceen is a complex world sceen and not just a room or limited city block. But for thows limited location sceens, P5 has removed the need to export to Maya do cloth work save and export for rendering in world builder or others. so with P5 you have all you need to creat a limited world sceen animation and render. You Have dynamic cloth ( and it is not Buggy in the least! ) dynamic hair ( the dynamic portion at this time is worthless) But the styaling tool more than makes up for this. as to looking like wire well i get more realistinc results with this hair than i ever did with transmaped hair. and can fully and easaly style and comb the hair to fit the animation where needed, I'm sure CL will in time fix the hair sim to make it usefull. so if you bont have an ergent need for plugin saport, P5 is the way to go you get options only available in High end Modeling pacages like Maya Unlimited (6,999.00 Us ) or 3DMax with the needed plugins some where in the same price range. for 300.00 give or take dependint on upgraid or start out purchase. as to limited P5 stuff Hmmmmm. as P5 comes with all the P4 models all clothing for them fits and works. P5 Don Judy and the like yep still limeted but then there only a few months old. and they are compeating with V3 release for clothing makers time. Yes I make clothing for poser and sell here at rosaty. At this time its hard to deside what Model to make for P5 D/J Vickie 2/3 and the meriead of other models out there. So dont base your purchase on the limited clothing for D/J wich if far far more diverce than V3. and that is only with the basics that come with P5 for them. in closing the only thing to consider is plugin saport. If you need it then get PP, if you dont Get P5 or you will be kicking your self for not doing so in the not to far distant future. Sheeeeezzzzzzz I wrote this EEEEppp! Laters Vel

Velan said: "so if you bont have an ergent need for plugin saport, P5 is the way to go you get options only available in High end Modeling pacages like Maya Unlimited (6,999.00 Us ) " I'm sorry Velan, but comparing Poser's Cloth dynamics, to anything like Maya's dynamics is a joke...surely! The dynamics in Poser (although as good as can be expected for the price), are very, very, very limited compared to Maya's....even when you are just comparing the cloth dynamics of both. The saying, "You only get what you pay for." springs to mind. Cheers

If you don't care about dynamic hair or cloth, turning your friends into a Poser Figure or the bizzarre materials room go with P4 with PP. I personally perfer the old prop based hair because it was simpler to use. In fact, in my opinion, P5 is much more complicated and has very poor documentation. I'm still waiting for a good 3rd party book that can help me master the advanced features. If you plan to do most of your rendering in Poser, then the rendering engine might be the determining factor for you. The P5 rendering engine, Firefly, produces much more realistic skin tones and can do ray tracing, than the old P4 PP engine. To me the P5 human figures leave something to be desired, but some people like them.

I have Pro Pack, which was much more stable than Poser 4. I also have Poser 5 which, so far, is more stable than Pro Pack. The big question is do you want to render in Bryce, or Vue or LIghtwave, etc. If you do, stick with Pro Pack. None of the new stuff will work in any of those and the Poser to Vue transfer that was so easy is lost with Poser 5. Though some people have found work arounds. Also, if you are planning on doing animation, forget 5, it is probalby too slow and buggy a renderer-- collision detection is too iffy for animation. If you plan on getting tons of clothes, models, characters-- if you want everything that's out there to work with, consider getting Poser 5. I was spending at least an hour rearranging my libraries because only Poser 5 allows imbedded folders and Poser 4 goes terribly wonky with over full libraries. I had to learn Poser 5 because I had NO room for V3. I'm not sorry. If you have a powerful processor and lots of memory, you will probably have little trouble with Poser 5. If you have less than 800mhz, and less that 512 ram, well, you'll have problems with hi-res textures in any Poser but those can be resized. Some people run Poser 5 with fairly weak processors-- I don't know if they only use Posette or Judy. I don't know if they run big scenes. I'm leery of trying big scenes myself and I have 2.4G and 2 gigs of ram. I want a bit more virtual space first. Poser 5 is not as tough a learning curve as I thought if you take it slowly. I really like firefly. I also like the dynamic hair, though I don't make my own, I buy the Rdna hair that's designed for quick renders. It really is and really works about twice as fast as other hair. Emily

Dang How in the world can you say that PP4 is better than P5. More stable and faster yes But!!! All you have to do is look at the the renders that people submit that are not post processed. The ones in P5 blow the P4 cartoony rendered looking characters away. When I upgraded to P5 my mouth dropped open when I saw my first firefly render I have to admit I am not to happy with some of bug problems that have occured and the slownest of its fabulous renders. But its hard for me to look at a PP 4 rendered character and take it seriously. The only time a PP4 render is going to look as good is if a lot of highly skilled artistry performed a significant amount of of post processing on it. Or someone used a expensive high end program to render it with. If CL can stabilize this product it is by far the best value and most powerful product in anything near its price range.