is it really worth changing over at this time? when is poser 6 due - anyone have news insight, speculations? just upgrade or get full pack? as part-time and occassional user what am i gonna miss by not upgrading - apart from obvious marketing blurb on curious site? regards balloon

If you have Poser 4, stay with it.... If you are only a part-time and occasional user, you are not going to miss anything by not upgrading IMHO:) I never had Poser 4....jumped right into Poser 5. If I could have chosen, I would have gotten Poser 4 because I could have used it with Vue d'Esprit. Right now, if given the chance, I would "upgrade" from Poser 5 to Poser 4....that's right...I'd go backwards if I could get Poser 4 for the upgrade price! What will you miss if you don't upgrade? "Bugs" for one thing :) Aside from that: Poser 5 has the P5 hair studio. If you have all day to fiddle with creating strand after strand of hair then maybe you would find that useful....I don't. Personally, there are a number of transmapped hair products that look a lot better than the P5 hair. Plus you need a computer with more than 512 mb of ram...that's what I have on a pentium IV 1.7gz. It takes forever to render this hair! It may actually be better for making grass or waterfalls than hair :) I don't think the hair looks that great...unless you like "wiry looking hair" :) Not sure the materials room is that much of an improvement over what you already have. The big change is the materials designed for P5....how many products have you seen that rely on those? Nope, me either! Cloth room: That has the most possibilities I guess for those who already know how to make clothing and can master the huge learning curve involved. It should have been a great tool for those who are doing animation, because of the dynamic nature of the cloth. The problem: animation tools in the rest of P5 have a lot of issues...I don't do animations, so I just know what I read. Face room: limited to P5 figures...I believe just Don and Judy. Have you seen a lot of stuff for sale for Don and Judy?? Nope...me either! Plus, you need the "perfect photo" and a lot of patience to make it work. It is more a tool for the person who is making characters than for someone who fiddles with this stuff as a hobby (which is my case and possibly yours??) Firefly renderer. This may be better than the old Poser renderer (which is also included in P5 by the way!), but again, it demands a lot of computing resources if you're going to render shadow maps and the like. If you're going to do professional prints of your stuff, then maybe the rendering engine is really important. For the hobbiest, there is just so much that the human eye can really differentiate in a gallery where size is limited to 1024x768 or smaller. Bottom line: If you're a hobbiest and are not using Poser to make money, stay with Poser 4. As for Poser 6.....they still haven't come out with their SR-3 patch yet! I don't know if we will ever see a "Poser 6"! Keep your eyes on DAZ Studio....that may be the future in this genre. BTW: Ignore the marketing hype...it's just that.

Take a look in the Rendo market place, Daz, Poser Pros, Poser World, RDNA, etc. How much of the product offered at these locations are P5 specific? That's right...not much! As I look at the products that are available and continue to be made, the vast majority are still being designed for Poser 4 or Pro-Pack....including all the newest glitzy products being created by DAZ. If I had Poser 4 and was considering an upgrade, I think I'd go the Pro-Pack route first.

propack stuff is the stuff to buy if you have p5 unless it is a python script :)

Get P5. It's cheap now and lots of fun. Don't buy into the negative hype. You'll love it.

Unfortunately, it's not "negative hype". I wish it were that simple. Poser 5 may be cheap at Amazon right now, but it still has a lot of unresolved issues. Unless the person who asked needs the extra "bells and whistles" (many of which still don't work properly or require additional hardware expenditures to use them effectively), then it doesn't make sense for him to spend even a small amount of funds if Poser 4 is doing what he wants done. I cannot recommend Poser 5 to anyone who does this strictly for a fun hobby(not a merchant). I use Vue d'Esprit and Bryce 4. Poser 5 is painful to use by comparison. It's complicated, it's cumbersome, frustrating,terribly time consuming and in my opinion, not at all user friendly. I can create and render an image in Vue in a fraction of the time that it takes to create and render something in Poser 5. Furthermore, until CL fixes the stuff that needs fixing, I don't think it makes sense for anyone to buy Poser 5, especially when they already have Poser 4. If, on the other hand, he is a modeler and plans to market his goods, it may make sense to get it. It might also make sense to get it if he has an extra $199 to spend(the cost at Amazon compared to the $319 at CL), and set it aside until the fixes are made. That way, if it does get fixed, he will have the base program to apply the fixes to. I've got it.....I use it, but maybe not for long. In checking the price before quoting it here, I discovered that the standalone Poser 4 is now available at Curious Labs for both Windows and Mac for $199! That's close enough to the price of upgrading from Poser 4 to Poser 5, that I may just get it. After a few questions of the sales department, I may not be using Poser 5 much longer.

If you think that the face and cloth rooms are bells and whistles, that's unfortunate for you.

Personally, I find the Material Room a whole lot more fun than the incredibly basic materials of P4. And i would say the reason most products do not come out with P5 materials is for backwards compatability. Yes, one of my products is P5 only, but since the majority seem to stick to P4, it has sold very little.

I upgraded from P4/ProPack to P5 the day P5 was available. Thank the Lord I didn't uninstall 4; I never use 5 anymore, it's just not worth the time, hassle and frustration. Sandoppe gave a good tip: check the various market places. There's a reason you don't see much P5-only stuff. My advice is to stick with 4.

fls13 states: "If you think that the face and cloth rooms are bells and whistles, that's unfortunate for you" I say...that's a pretty "arrogant" comment! :) Look...I do this for a hobby. Frankly I thought when I purchased P5 that the face room might be a nice feature. The problem: unless you're going to use Don or Judy, it's not much use,not to mention the other reasons I cited for it's "not ready for prime time" status. The cloth room is a wonderful concept and I believe those who do a lot of animation were looking forward to it. But from what I read, the animation capabiliites of P5 are problematic. Both of these and the hair room offer tremendous potential, but they were not, in my opinion, ready for general public release in a software program that promised to be "drop dead easy to use" (CL's "marketing hype", not my words). The person who started this thread asked for opinions....I gave mine based on my use of the software, my status as a hobbiest and my personal opinion. If fls13 has positive reasons why the poster should spend money to upgrade to a program that still has a lot of unresolved issues,other than his first statement: "Get P5. It's cheap now and lots of fun. Don't buy into the negative hype. You'll love it" or his arrogant comment about my observations, then fls13 should state what those reasons are. I'd love to hear those comments myself!

thanks for your posts - i am not going to buy .. yet!

Having bought P5 pre-order I have to say that all of the things I like about it, or would use & find usefull are things that come with pro-pack, I may wait for DAZ to see what they have, but if it's not all I hope it will be, I may spring for pro-pack for the split windows and python alone.. later jb

It's not meant to be arrogrant. I'm a hobbyist, too. I think the reason I like the face room so much is because it functions so much like the 'create a player' feature on EA Sports video games which, quite frankly, are designed for kids. I thought, "why can't Poser have something like this?," when I used P4. With P5, they did it, although a lot better, and a lot of other things too. As it turns out, the guy who started this thread writes he's holding off on buying. It's a lot more unfortunate for him.

If you have a powerful processor-- over 1.5G-- and lots of memory--1G is best I have 2Gs-- then Poser 5 can be a very enjoyable experience. I have tons of stuff and could not stand the library situation in Poser 4 and PP one more minute. I also had more freezing in 4 and pp from the bumps or jpgs that weren't there as well as the memory leak that affects Poser 4, Pro Pack and Poser 5. It's more noticeable in 5 because 5 is slower. I like the improved rendering in FireFly and I would never go back to the mess of libraries I fought through before. I don't make hair, I haven't tried the cloth room because it seems like a ton of work for one instance of dynamic cloth. With a smaller, pared down Poser 5 runtime, I rarely have freezes. When I have them, it is in rendering to a larger window, I ctrl-alt-del and reboot and go on. Mostly this happens with VIcki3 who is a lot of meg for Poser to handle. If we were all working with just the morphs that we were using in Vicki3, there would probably be less probs, but I'm lazy, I haven't saved out all my characters yet in slmmed down versions. Poser 5 on my hefty machine is not a major problem to run. I can do multiple person scenes as long as they are not Vicki 3. I don't do animations so the problems with collision aren't making me miserable. Honestly, I think you would be happier having Poser 5 if you also had Poser 4 or PP. But it is not the complete disaster they first issued, no where near. It is a slowish, but very versatile program. Emily