Hello All, I currently have Poser 4 and I was wondering is it worth switching to Poser 5 some of the people that I've talked to have said that in the beginning they had several problems including taking forever to load and render. Does anyone have any positive experience with P5 or do you think that making the switch is worth it regardless of the problems? Please let me know what people think...P4 vs P5...which is the winner? :)

If you have Pro Pack for 4, then it's a tough judgement call. If not, Poser 5 is now cheaper than adding Pro Pack to 4.

In Poser 5, you get:

• Hierarchical Library folders - very nice feature
• Firefly renderer + old renderer
• Pro Pack's Setup Room (for character creation)
• Pro Pack's Python scripting support
• Face Room - use photos for faces, limited
• Hair Room - only good for eating memory
• Cloth Room - cloth dynamics is a nice feature
• Content Paradise tabs - convenience links to Poser stuff
• Material Room using new node-based shaders - some love it, some hate it. :)
• No Pro Pack plugins available yet
• Some of the same bugs that have persisted for some time. You'll get them in Pro Pack as well.

So, it's really depends on what you need to do and how confident you feel about Poser 5's stability. The latest Service Release fixes many problems and removes the nasty protection system, so that is a consolation. Pro Pack, on the other hand, is rock solid. BYS

Probably depends on your operating system. I've had relatively little trouble with P5 on win2k and the latest service patch helped a lot. P5 is slower all around. I had to upgrade my cpu and ram. Was on a 1.4 amd with half gig. Went to 2.1 amd with full gig. That helped, but the cost is there to consider if you're on an older machine. That aside, P5 does offer a lot more. The material room is great once you get to know it (and there is a learning curve). The face room only works on the P5 people which are not seen that often any more. But what can be done with them is pretty interesting. Dynamic hair is great too. Just won't export so if you remain in Poser, its wonderful. Works on Vicky and all the other models. Cloth room might catch on. I haven't messed with it yet. Give it time. I suspect there will be more dynamic cloth items in the future. Setup room is the same as the one in P4/pro pack. New render engine allows for the same old P4 renderer or the new firefly. I like the firefly but it has its quirks that need sorting out from time to time. I'd say it depends on what you have to pay for the upgrade. The price came down a bit from what the pre release people paid. If you consider that the upgrade price is about the price of V3 with the fixins, then yeah, P5 is worth it. I do still use P4/PP unless I NEED a P5 tool. Often times I start a pz3 in P4 and when its at the stage where I need P5, then I switch. The only reason for that is because of the speed difference.

Just spring for the upgrade. You can still continue using Poser 4. One key thing for me is that Poser 5 has fixed the crosstalk problem, so I can have multiple Mike's with different morphs applied without having to jump through the hoops of the work around. Because I want the option to work with Vue D'Esprit Mover 4 and Lightwave, I continue to use P4 PP primarily to give me that option, but as I develop projects that don't require that functionality, I am using P5 more.

Get Ready to pull out you hair, there's a room for everything....I think I'm going bald.

If you do buy Poser5 don't start installing everything into the P5 runtime, leave Poser4 installed & put everything in there & just link to it from Poser5. I discovered after much experimenting that Poser5 is happier with only the poser5 default props/figures installed in it's runtime.

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